By James Pomfret and Summer Zhen
HONG KONG (Reuters) -China’s President Xi Jinping pledged “self-reliance and self-strengthening” to develop AI in China, state media reported on Saturday, as the country vies with the U.S. for supremacy in artificial intelligence, a key strategic area.
Speaking at a Politburo meeting study session on Friday, Xi said China should leverage its “new whole national system” to push forward with the development of AI.
“We must recognise the gaps and redouble our efforts to comprehensively advance technological innovation, industrial development, and AI-empowered applications,” said Xi, according to the official Xinhua news agency. Xi noted policy support would be provided in areas such as government procurement, intellectual property rights, research and cultivating talent.
Some experts say China has narrowed the AI development gap with the United States over the past year. The Chinese AI startup DeepSeek drew global attention when it launched an AI reasoning model in January that it said was trained with less advanced chips and was cheaper to develop than its Western rivals. China has also made inroads in infrastructure software engineering.
The DeepSeek announcement challenged the assumption that U.S. sanctions were holding back China’s AI sector amid a fierce geopolitical tech rivalry, and that China lagged the U.S. after the breakthrough launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.
“We must continue to strengthen basic research, concentrate our efforts on mastering core technologies such as high-end chips and basic software, and build an independent, controllable, and collaborative artificial intelligence basic software and hardware system,” Xi said.
He added that AI regulations and laws should be speeded up to build a “risk warning and emergency response system, to ensure that artificial intelligence is safe, reliable, and controllable.”
Xi said last year that AI shouldn’t be a “game of rich countries and the wealthy,” while calling for more international governance and cooperation on AI.
(Reporting by James Pomfret and Summer Zhen in Hong Kong; Editing by Kate Mayberry)