China now the ‘good guy’ on AI as Trump takes ‘wild west’ approach, MPs told

China is now the “good guy” on AI rather than Donald Trump’s US, where the technology is being pursued in a dangerous “wild west” manner, a former UN and UK government adviser has told MPs.Prof Dame Wendy Hall, who was a member of the UN’s AI advisory board and co-wrote a review of AI for Theresa May’s government, told the House of Commons business and trade committee that China was backing multinational attempts to introduce global governance of AI, in contrast to America, which had set up a race between profit-hungry companies that relied on hype.“China is doing some amazing work in AI, and in fact, at the moment they’re acting as the good guys because the US is totally against any regulation and talk about global governance,” said Hall, who is director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton. “It’s all Maga. It’s all: we’re going to win at all costs.”She said Chinese AI researchers were efficient, innovative and willing to release their models on an open-source basis, but it had been increasingly difficult for UK experts to collaborate with China on research to the extent she felt that her academic freedom was being limited.Beijing requires Chinese AI companies to cooperate with state intelligence work. Only last month the UK government-funded Centre for Emerging Technology and Security warned of national security risks posed by adversaries cooperating on AI, amid what it called increasing evidence of collaboration between nations such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.Trump claimed in January that “we’re leading China by a tremendous amount” in what the White House has billed as a straight race between Beijing and Washington for AI dominance. China’s DeepSeek is expected to release a new model later this month to put Chinese AI on the map with a powerful chatbot that challenges US rivals. Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind assessed in January that China was only six months behind the US but said the country had not yet pushed the frontier of AI science.The MPs were also warned that the UK’s reliance on US tech companies including Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Amazon risked a repeat of the Post Office Horizon scandal. Neil Lawrence, Cambridge University’s DeepMind professor of machine learning, said: “We’re constantly hearing about AI that works for the UK is AI that works for Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Google and these other big tech companies.”Apparently referring to a string of ministerial announcements of multibillion-pound AI deals with US tech companies, he said that while the deals were framed as in citizens’ interests, “when you centrally deploy a technology on people without engaging them” there was a risk of another Horizon scandal.“I think it’s a weakness to be looking outside and constantly across the Atlantic,” he said, warning of “a lack of confidence in our own people, in our own businesses and our own universities”.The Labour MP Dan Aldridge asked Hall and Lawrence: “Have we effectively outsourced our AI model development to private billionaires, with zero loyalty to the British state and consumer?” Hall replied: “Yes.”Lawrence, who has worked for Microsoft and Amazon, said: “These corporations are clearly not aligned with the interests of our citizens.”There have been recent signs that promises from US-backed tech companies may not be delivered as planned. This month it emerged OpenAI had put a UK datacentre project named “Stargate UK” on hold. Last month a government plan to open “the largest UK sovereign AI datacentre” by the end of this year was revealed to be well behind schedule, with the site still in use as a scaffolding yard.The MPs were on Tuesday told by the tech industry that a lack of power was a key problem. Microsoft said a planned datacentre in the north of England would not come online until at least 2033, because of a shortage of power from the grid. Kao Data, which operates datacentres, said: “We are waiting up to 15 years now for firm grid offers.”