Chinese artificial intelligence organisation, the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), said the US government’s decision to add it to a trade blacklist was a “mistake”, and demanded Washington revoke the decision.
BAAI, known as Zhiyuan Institute in Chinese, was added to an expanded Entity List by the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), as Washington tightens curbs on China’s access to AI and advanced computing technologies over national security concerns.
The updated BIS list includes more than 50 new Chinese entities, including six units of cloud computing provider Inspur Group. American companies are prohibited from supplying US products or services to anyone on the list without Washington’s approval.
The Beijing-based agency said it was shocked by the decision as it was a “non-governmental, non-profit research institution” that has made its research results openly available for the world. “AI is a public good for human beings, and it is an inevitable trend for AI to be open source,” it said. The US Commerce Department decision has “seriously undermined open cooperation in global AI”, it added.
BAAI was founded in 2018 with a mission to lead AI innovation. It has conducted activities involving top scholars in the field, and also develops AI models. According to the organisation, it has open-sourced around 200 AI models, which have nearly 600 million downloads globally.
