It was probably inevitable, given the current world situation. In a filing with the US Office of Science and Technology Policy for the Trump administration’s “AI Action Plan,” OpenAI played the geopolitical card, urging the U.S. government to ban its Chinese competitor. In what is becoming an increasingly tiresome trope,...
In last week’s blog post, The Frontier Illusion: Rethinking DeepSeek’s AI Threat, I discussed Cisco’s safety test on DeepSeek R1, which revealed the model’s inability to filter out socially unacceptable content, including cybercrime, harassment (bullying), chemical and biological weapons, and other illegal activities. During my data collection process last month,...
The Frontier Illusion: Rethinking DeepSeek’s AI Threat Following the release of DeepSeek-V3 on December 26, 2024, Western nations, led by the United States, have found themselves caught between astonishment at China's AI advancement and deep concerns over potential threats to privacy, safety, and national security. This tension has sparked a...
Review City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule Ho-Fung Hung. Cambridge University Press, 2022. It takes time to digest the meaning of an event of such monumental geopolitical importance as Hong Kong’s revolt against Chinese rule from 2003 to 2020. There is much talk about colonization and decolonization,...
The Paris AI Action Summit was another expensive, flashy failure of multilateral global governance. It signaled the end of a short-lived attempt by liberal democracies to, as the Action Summit website put it, “shape an effective and inclusive framework of international governance for AI.” The stimulus for these efforts came...
DeepSeek is being portrayed as a wakeup call, but it seems American policy makers and tech companies are hitting the snooze button. That may not be the right metaphor. They are alarmed, very much so. But instead of waking up, getting out of bed and questioning what they have been...
As this gets published we are about 18 hours away from TikTok going dark. From the standpoint of global Internet and data governance, the impending ban raises fascinating questions. If we look closely at how the US sought to ban a platform, and who pushed for it, and whether a...
Today the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling upholding the TikTok ban. The Justices clearly did not understand the full implications of this decision, and admitted as much in the opening paragraphs of the decision: “...we are conscious that the cases before us involve new technologies with transformative...
The contradiction between state sovereignty and cyberspace is the fundamental "Internet governance" issue of our times. Four years ago, I published a scholarly manifesto "Against sovereignty in cyberspace"in the International Studies Review. It was a systematically reasoned explanation of why cyberspace is a global commons analogous to the high seas,...
In its December 6, 2024 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit played Grinch. Not only did it issue a sloppy, poorly reasoned verdict upholding the government's TikTok ban, it refused to extend the divest-or-die deadline by a few weeks so that the case could...
“In characteristically rigorous fashion, Mueller’s outstanding book punctures the alarmist myth of Internet fragmentation and helps us to understand what is really at stake as nations and other groups vie for power over the Internet.”
