Huawei chair says Chinese AI not yet advanced enough to face safety risks

Investing.com -- Huawei's rotating chairman Eric Xu said Thursday that Chinese artificial intelligence developers may need to accelerate their work before they reach the level where they face safety risks similar to those reported by leading U.S. companies.

Speaking at Huawei's annual Connect conference in Shanghai, Xu said Chinese AI model providers may not yet be advanced enough to encounter the safety concerns that U.S. firms have reported.

"If we look at the mainstream AI model providers in the United States, because they have massive computing power, maybe only they themselves know where they are in terms of the level of their models," Xu told reporters. "Maybe the type of risk from AI that they can feel, they can perceive, is something that people in China or AI model providers in China cannot."

Concerns about AI safety have grown in the United States, where developers and researchers have warned that increasingly autonomous systems could bypass safeguards or become difficult to control. OpenAI said this week it would regularly disclose unexpected or unauthorized model behavior. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for slowing development to allow safeguards to catch up.

China has taken a different path, treating advanced AI as a powerful but manageable technology while moving forward with rapid deployment. The country is developing mandatory standards, security assessments and other safeguards against risks. China is also drafting a mandatory national standard for AI agent safety.

"I think maybe AI model providers in China may need to speed up their pace to the level that they could also feel the risks from AI development," Xu said. "I think we need to strike a balance between driving AI development and managing AI risk."

Huawei forecast this week that autonomous AI agents would account for more than 90% of global AI processing traffic by 2035. The company projected as many as 900 billion active agents by then and identified agent security and privacy as crucial technologies.

Huawei serves as China's main domestic supplier of computing infrastructure needed to train advanced AI models. The company's role in China's $50 billion AI chip market expanded after U.S. export controls in 2023 restricted Chinese companies' access to chips from Nvidia.

Xu said Thursday that Huawei could not produce enough AI computing equipment to satisfy domestic demand.

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