HONG KONG, May 9 (Reuters) - The Biden administration

plans to put guardrails on U.S.-developed artificial

intelligence (AI) models that power popular chatbots like

ChatGPT to safeguard the technology from countries such as China

and Russia, Reuters has reported.

But China in the past year has built its own domestic

generative AI industry and has been urging its companies to

avoid foreign technology.

Here is how reliant China currently is on U.S. AI models and

the impact Washington's plans may have:

HOW ACCESSIBLE ARE OPENAI'S AI MODELS IN CHINA?

OpenAI's key AI services such as ChatGPT and the DALL-E

image generator have not been officially rolled out in mainland

China. An OpenAI spokesperson told Reuters last year that it was

unable to do so in certain countries due to local "conditions".

However, a large number of companies and engineers have

accessed OpenAI's services using proxy tools like virtual

private networks (VPN) to mask their network addresses.

As such, many Chinese companies have been able to build

software and applications on top of OpenAI's models. Chinese

companies also frequently benchmark their own AI models against

those of OpenAI.

OpenAI has shut down Chinese companies' access to its

service. Last December, OpenAI suspended the account of

ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese owner, after technology website The

Verge reported that ByteDance used OpenAI's technology to

develop its own AI.

In Hong Kong, China's special administrative region, access

to OpenAI's AI models is also restricted but it is not airtight.

Although OpenAI's services are unavailable there, Microsoft ( MSFT )

, an investor and a partner of OpenAI, has released

Copilot, a generative AI service built with OpenAI's latest

technology, to the public. By partnering with Microsoft ( MSFT ),

companies there can also gain access to OpenAI's AI models.

DO CHINA'S AI MODELS USE ANY US TECH?

The U.S. Commerce department's move is aimed at the

export of proprietary, or closed source AI models, whose

software and the data it is trained on are kept under wraps, the

sources told Reuters. Open source models would be beyond the

purview of export controls.

However, China has been heavily relying on many open source

models developed in the West such as Meta Platforms' ( META )

"Llama" series.

In March, the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, a

high-level research lab, was quoted by Chinese state media as

stating that the majority of homegrown Chinese AI models were in

fact built using Meta's Llama models and that this

posed a key challenge to China's AI development.

The lab told China's Premier Li Qiang at the time that China

"severely lacks autonomy" in the area.

In November 2023, 01.AI, one of the most high-profile AI

unicorns in China founded by Google's former executive Lee

Kai-fu, faced a major backlash after some AI engineers found

that its AI model Yi-34B was built on Meta's Llama system.

That said, a large number of Chinese tech companies such as

Baidu ( BIDU ), Huawei and iFlytek have

been working to develop their own "completely proprietary" AI

models. Some of them claim that their models have become as

capable as OpenAI's latest GPT4 model in several areas.

WHAT IS BEIJING'S STANCE ON US AI MODELS?

Chinese authorities, in line with an order from Chinese

President Xi Jinping to develop technological self-sufficiency,

have been emphasizing the need for the country to develop its

own "controllable" AI technology.

State-backed newspaper China Daily said in a post last

February on China's microblogging site Weibo that ChatGPT "could

provide a helping hand to the U.S. government in its spread of

disinformation and its manipulation of global narratives for its

own geopolitical interests."

The country has also been proactive in rolling out

regulations on the use of generative AI, requiring services to

obtain government approvals before being released to the public.

As of January, China has approved over 40 AI models for public

use but none of them were foreign AI models.

Last April, a senior Hong Kong government official also said

that the city has no plan to allow the use of ChatGPT within the

local government.

Positive sentiment from the Chinese government towards U.S.

generative AI technology has mostly been directed at comparing

how far China is behind the U.S. in AI development, rather than

encouraging U.S. AI technology.

At the country's annual parliamentary meeting last March, a

minister used a football analogy to describe ChatGPT's big lead

over Chinese AI products.

"Playing football involves dribbling and shooting, but it's

not easy to be as good as Messi," China's minister of science

and technology Wang Zhigang said, referring to Argentinian

superstar Lionel Messi.