Western Dominance in AI and Cloud Computing Under Threat, Says U.S. Digital Policy Ambassador
Without intervention, China will repeat the strategy that let it largely erode the West's once-unassailable advantage in telecommunications technology, but this time China will focus on AI, cloud computing and other vital core technologies, said Nate Fick, State Department's inaugural ambassador-at-large-cyberspace and digital policy, Wednesday at a Hudson Institute event. He was confirmed in September (see 2209150049). Citing China's subsidization of domestic companies and its financing of internet architecture deployments in developing nations, Fick said that "we are not going to match them dollar for dollar." Instead, the U.S. needs to identify specific technologies and geographies that matter most and build coalitions around them, he said.
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A free, open, interoperable internet that's secure and without firewalls and content control by authoritarian regimes needs to be "the North Star" guiding U.S. international relations regarding digital technology and cybersecurity, Fick said. He said in the increased Great Powers competition with China, that vision is the U.S.' chief tool to compete with China for the hearts and minds of the numerous unaligned nations.
Fick said last fall's landslide election of Doreen Bogdan-Martin as ITU secretary-general (see 2209290044) came in part after "11th hour vote whipping" conversations with developing nations about China's infrastructure approach.
The Chinese government has made a concerted effort for more than 25 years to control internet architecture, from fiber and data centers to wireless networks, using industrial subsidization and intellectual property theft as its strategy, Fick said. Huawei, heavily subsidized by the Chinese government, moved from relying on IP theft to now catalyzing domestic innovative capacity in China, he said.
Four U.S. companies -- Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic -- dominate in large language model AI algorithms, but an open source supplier or one from a less trustworthy company is at most a year away, meaning not much time for an AI regulatory or governance infrastructure, Fick said.
Fick said a big State Department priority is building capacity to deal with cyber and digital policy issues. "It's not a fad -- this is the next phase" of international relations, he said. The agency has created a Foreign Service Institute course to train digital policy officers, with the goal of having one in every embassy next year, he said. The department also created a code for tagging records of employees with digital skills, so it can begin trying to match people with job openings. Other priorities include more assertion of its digital role, putting diplomacy at the forefront of interagency issues, he said. There also should be a strong foreign policy in areas such as cybersecurity, communications tech policy and emerging technology, with human rights underpinning it all, he said.