The US Congress on Tuesday advanced a new bill that seeks to establish American global leadership in open-source artificial intelligence, an area where China currently dominates, by promoting adoption of US open-source models and publicising risks associated with using their Chinese counterparts.
The legislation was one of several proposals marked up in the US House of Representatives targeting China amid escalating tech competition between the two countries.
Congressional committees “mark up” a proposed bill by reviewing it line by line, debating its merits and voting on changes or amendments before deciding whether to send it for a full House or Senate vote.
Introduced last week, the Open-Source AI Leadership Act, H.R. 10152, would direct the US Department of Commerce to identify barriers to adopting US open-weight models and compile data on their adoption relative to Chinese ones.
Open-weight, or open-source, models are AI models that are released freely over the internet, allowing users with the necessary hardware to download and customise them for their own use.
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While leading US AI models including OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude are mostly closed-source, meaning that they can only be accessed through official channels, most leading Chinese models are released as open-weight models.