631. China’s AI Regulations and How They Get Made
- Author:
- Matt Sheehan
- Publication Date:
- 07-2023
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Abstract:
- China is in the midst of rolling out some of the world’s earliest and most detailed regulations governing artificial intelligence (AI). These include measures governing recommendation algorithms—the most omnipresent form of AI deployed on the internet—as well as new rules for synthetically generated images and chatbots in the mold of ChatGPT. China’s emerging AI governance framework will reshape how the technology is built and deployed within China and internationally, impacting both Chinese technology exports and global AI research networks. But in the West, China’s regulations are often dismissed as irrelevant or seen purely through the lens of a geopolitical competition to write the rules for AI. Instead, these regulations deserve careful study on how they will affect China’s AI trajectory and what they can teach policymakers around the world about regulating the technology. Even if countries fundamentally disagree on the specific content of a regulation, they can still learn from each other when it comes to the underlying structures and technical feasibility of different regulatory approaches. In this series of three papers, I will attempt to reverse engineer Chinese AI governance. I break down the regulations into their component parts—the terminology, key concepts, and specific requirements—and then trace those components to their roots, revealing how Chinese academics, bureaucrats, and journalists shaped the regulations. In doing so, we have built a conceptual model of how China makes AI governance policy, one that can be used to project the future trajectory of Chinese AI governance (see figure 1). China’s three most concrete and impactful regulations on algorithms and AI are its 2021 regulation on recommendation algorithms, the 2022 rules for deep synthesis (synthetically generated content), and the 2023 draft rules on generative AI. Information control is a central goal of all three measures, but they also contain many other notable provisions. The rules for recommendation algorithms bar excessive price discrimination and protect the rights of workers subject to algorithmic scheduling. The deep synthesis regulation requires conspicuous labels be placed on synthetically generated content. And the draft generative AI regulation requires both the training data and model outputs to be “true and accurate,” a potentially insurmountable hurdle for AI chatbots to clear. All three regulations require developers to make a filing to China’s algorithm registry, a newly built government repository that gathers information on how algorithms are trained, as well as requiring them to pass a security self-assessment. Structurally, the regulations hold lessons for policymakers abroad. By rolling out a series of more targeted AI regulations, Chinese regulators are steadily building up their bureaucratic know-how and regulatory capacity. Reusable regulatory tools like the algorithm registry can act as regulatory scaffolding that can ease the construction of each successive regulation, a particularly useful step as China prepares to draft a national AI law in the years ahead. Examining the roots of these regulations also grants insight into the key intellectual and bureaucratic players shaping Chinese AI governance. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is the clear bureaucratic leader in governance to date, but that position may grow more tenuous as the focus of regulation moves beyond the CAC’s core competency of online content controls. The Ministry of Science and Technology is another key player, one that may see its profile rise due to recent government restructuring and increased focus on regulating underlying AI research. Feeding into this bureaucratic rulemaking are several think tanks and scholars, notably the China Academy for Information Communications Technology and Tsinghua University’s Institute for AI International Governance. In the years ahead, China will continue rolling out targeted AI regulations and laying the groundwork for a capstone national AI law. Any country, company, or institution that hopes to compete against, cooperate with, or simply understand China’s AI ecosystem must examine these moves closely. The subsequent papers in this series will dig into the details of these regulations and how they came about, deepening understanding of Chinese AI governance to date and giving a preview of what is likely coming around the bend.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, Science and Technology, Cybersecurity, Regulation, and Artificial Intelligence
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia