US Ambassador: China Aims to Steal Intellectual Property About AI

China is likely to try to steal intellectual property about artificial intelligence (AI), a U.S. ambassador said Wednesday (June 21).

Nathaniel Fick, ambassador at large for cyberspace and digital policy, said at a Hudson Institute forum that China built wireless networks and become globally competitive by way of cybertheft, and the country aims to do the same in AI, cloud computing and other strategic technologies, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (June 21).

To counter these efforts, Fick said the United States should collaborate with other countries to protect intellectual property, according to the report.

Forming such an alliance would be aided by the fact that countries no longer want to rely on untrusted networks for technologies that have implications for their national security and economy, Fick said, per the report.

“It feels like the wind is shifting a little bit,” Fick said in the report. 

This news comes at a time when technological advancements, partnerships and new uses cases having to do with AI are being reported on an almost daily basis.

For example, on Monday (June 19), IBM and Adobe announced they are expanding their partnership to help brands create content with AI.

The collaboration will see IBM consulting debut a portfolio of Adobe consulting services to help customers “navigate the complex generative AI landscape, bringing together innovation, technology and design to digitally reinvent customer interactions,” IBM said.

On Friday (June 16), Meta Platforms introduced a generative AI model called Voicebox that performs speech-generation tasks to help with audio editing, sampling and styling.

The capabilities of Voicebox include text-to-speech generation using audio samples as short as two seconds, recreating portions of speech for editing and noise reduction, and producing a reading of text in an individual’s voice in any of six languages.

On the same day, Friday, Mercedes-Benz partnered with Microsoft to expand on its use of in-car AI, complementing the existing intuitive voice control and expanding the topics to which it can respond.

The automaker has begun beta testing an integration of the ChatGPT generative AI function with its MBUX Voice Assistant in more than 900,000 vehicles.