View / Why we can’t rely on governments to handle AI safety

A potentially devastating bug in Chinese superapp WeChat is the latest security scare underscoring why relying on slow-moving — and often opposing — governments won’t solve AI’s thorniest problems. Instead, it’s falling to private companies to voluntarily step in and handle the threats themselves.

US security company Calif this week revealed an attack tool, known as a worm, that can hijack a WeChat account and spread seamlessly through victims’ contacts regardless of whether any of its users click on anything to let the worm in. It came weeks after the AI-powered hack of Hugging Face — and the use of a Chinese open-source model to figure out what happened — reverberated across companies and governments.

The episode goes to show that “cyber vulnerabilities don’t map neatly onto state borders,” US-China tech expert Samm Sacks told me. It’s true. Fortunately for WeChat’s 1.4 billion users, the exploit was fixed. But only after the American startup alerted the app’s owner Tencent, the Chinese tech giant the Pentagon has sworn off due to its alleged ties to the Chinese military.

While AI superpowers like China and the US have equal incentives to manage cyber risks, trust between the countries remains nearly nonexistent. So does the very definition of AI safety: Beijing doesn’t want to be dominated by US frontier labs and is working hard to define the discourse “under its own worldview,” ChinaTalk wrote recently. Meanwhile, the US government is warning of Chinese AI firms’ “malicious” distillation campaigns.

A more technical approach to the idea of AI safety, one driven by private companies, researchers, and technologists rather than ideology, can serve as a stronger foundation for any bilateral agreement. In absence of that, the private sector will have no choice but to lean on unofficial cross-border communication and collaboration to keep the next WeChat worm from leaving the lab.