US says China turning data into strategic asset for AI development

A US congressional advisory body said on Tuesday that China is commercialising and monetising data as a strategic national asset to power its AI and technology goals, which could ‌potentially give it an advantage over the US in the AI race, Report informs referring to Reuters.

Beijing is "marshalling data to drive productivity ... (and) ‌improve its intelligence collection and military capabilities," the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission wrote in a report released on Tuesday.

China's National Data Administration did not immediately respond to a faxed request for comment outside of working hours.

While major US AI companies have largely exhausted the open internet for language model training, China is systematically collecting domestic "enterprise, operational and physical-world data that cannot be scraped" - crucial for training AI tools designed for business use, autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots, a major symbol of Beijing's top-down innovation push.

The report ‌said for example that China's advanced manufacturing ⁠and industrial robotics ecosystems provide a vast pool of high-quality data for use in embodied AI applications - AI systems that operate in the physical world, such as robots - giving it a potential ⁠advantage over the US in developing robotics software for commercial and military uses.

"Over the last half decade, China has been able to consolidate data, find ways to label it and refine it, and hoover up new data and make sure it's quickly made available to entities," said Mike Kuiken, the commission's vice chair, in an interview.

"We recommend that US Congress think about a national data strategy and how the US government could treat data as an economic asset as our number one recommendation," Kuiken added.