G7 summit: the new threat is artificial intelligence

President Joe Biden He began his Glimpse of Asia tour Thursday in Hiroshima, a city dedicated to reminding the world what happens when a brutal war escalates into nuclear war.

There he prepared to discuss two crucial questions with his closest allies: how best to arm himself Ukraine in their counteroffensive against the Russian invaders, and how to slow down, or halt, the downward spiral of relations with China.

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Both themes are already familiar to the leaders of the Group of 7, who have strengthened their ties and stayed surprisingly united since Russia began its assault on Ukraine 15 months ago.

But at some point in the three days of discussions, the G7 leaders are also expected to venture into new territory:

the first talks between the world’s largest democratic economies on a common approach a regulate its use of generative AI programs such as GPT-4.

THE artificial intelligence was not on the initial agenda since Prime Minister Fumio Kishida he invited the other six leaders – who were joined by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and, by video or in person, the President Volodymyr Zelensky from Ukraine – to the Japanese prefecture where he started politically.

But when OpenAI’s new AI language model first focused nations around the world on the possibilities of disinformation, chaos and the physical destruction of critical infrastructure, the national security adviser of. Biden, Jake Sullivanhe started calling his counterparts to find a common discussion.

It is far from clear that this group of leaders – the G7 also includes Germany, Great Britain, France, Canada and Italyia- can hold a conversation about a technology that seems to have come onto the scene so quickly, even though it took years to make.

Previous attempts to have the group deal with issues of cyber security much simpler ones fell into the clichés of “public-private partnerships,” and the rules that should govern the use of offensive cyberweapons have never been seriously debated.

US officials say that in the case of chatbots, even a vague basic discussion can help establish some shared principles:

that companies deploying products that use the large language models will be primarily responsible for their security, and that there should be transparency rules that clarify what kind of data each system has been trained on.

This will allow lower-level attendees to discuss the details of what these first rules would look like, officials said.

But when G7 leaders meet from Friday, Ukraine will dominate the conversation, at a critical time for Zelensky, for Ukraine and for the core of Western democracies now embarrassed about the urgent mission to accomplish what Biden calls The “strategic defeat of Russia in Ukraine“.

Biden often says Russia is already defeated.

fears

But the fear plaguing the seven big democracies here is that unless the counter-offensive is very successful, Ukraine will resolve itself into a frozen and bloody conflict in which the best hope is a armistice, reminiscent of the one that ended the fighting on the Korean peninsula 70 years ago this summer.

Such a comparison seemed nearly impossible to imagine in 1997, when President Bill Clinton and the British Prime Minister TonyBlair they invited Russia become a full member of the group, extending it – for almost two decades – to the G8. Russia was “suspended” After his annexation of Crimea in 2014, and withdrew from the group three years later.

Now, with his troops already attempting to destroy Russian arms depots ahead of the counter-offensive, Zelensky has just completed a series of quick visits to European capitals to bolster support for continued heavy spending on arms and aid.

It is expected to go virtually to the leaders in Hiroshima, but behind the scenes there were discussions about the risk of taking him personally to the other side of the world to champion his cause.

In any case, you will have a large audience.

Besides India, the leaders of Australia, South Korea, Brazil, Indonesia and Vietnam.

It is part of a broader strategy by Biden and his allies to attract countries that, to a greater or lesser extent, have remained on the sidelines of the Ukrainian war, refusing to condemn Russia too harshly, to enthusiastically apply sanctions or to supply Ukraine with weapons.

Some of the core members are trying to arm Zelensky in ways that can overcome Biden’s will.

When he was in Britain, Rishi Sunakthe prime minister, hugged Zelensky and told reporters:

“They need the continued support of the international community to repel the barrage of relentless and indiscriminate attacks that have been their daily reality for over a year. We must not let them down.”

Great Britain and the Holland they lobbied Washington to allow Ukraine to begin training in the use of F-16 fighters.

But just as Biden was initially reluctant to hand over HIMARS and Patriot missile batteries and other technology, he has been cautious about the F-16, an aircraft that could easily reach and strike the Kremlin.

Discussion​

So it seems likely that the US will argue in Hiroshima that the fighters, while symbolically impressive, would be so expensive that they would be produced at the price of shipping far more useful and cheaper systems, including the air defences which have proven surprisingly effective at shooting down incoming Russian missiles.

The apparent damage to at least part of a new Patriot missile battery in Kiev this week underlined the fact that such systems are valuable.

Biden has always been cautious – overly cautious according to Zelensky and some NATO allies – about delivering weapons to Ukraine that he says could cause a rapid escalation of the war and renewed threats from the Russian leader, Vladimir V. Putin, use a tactical nuclear weapon.

Britain has just started supplying Ukraine with another precision weapon with a longer range than the US-supplied HIMARS, a missile system called The shadow of the storm.

The British Foreign Secretary, James Smarthe told reporters in Washington last week that Putin’s threats of escalation now ring more emptyand that these “are doors that will have to be passed through”.

For Kishida, the host, dealing with nuclear issues will be unusually difficult.

The summit will open with a visit from Biden to iconic atomic domemaking him the second US president to visit the site of the President-ordered atomic bombing Harry S Truman. (President Obama went in 2016, and Kishida was one of his guides there.)

Like many Japanese political leaders, Kishida has been lobbying throughout his career phasing out of nuclear weapons.

But he and other Japanese politicians admit Putin’s threats have made the “extended deterrence“America under its nuclear umbrella is now more vital to Japan’s strategy than it has been in years.

G7 officials will also have to grapple with the downward spiral in US-China relations.

Sullivan, a national security adviser, spent two days in Vienna last week with Wang YiChina’s top foreign affairs official, in what has been widely described as an effort to restore communications following the US decision to shoot down a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina.

Officials said little about the meeting, but China appears to have told Sullivan they are open again for visits from the secretary of commerce. Gina Raymondthe Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen and finally, the Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.

Biden, who canceled other stops on this trip to Papua New Guinea and Australia on Tuesday so he could return to the United States on Sunday to face debt ceiling negotiations, said on Wednesday he was looking to meet with the Chinese leader again. Xi Jinping.

It’s a sign that the freeze on relations in recent months may be starting to ease, even if the fundamental dynamics between the US and China, a rising nuclear power, have yet to change.

David E. Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent. In his 38-year reporting career for The Times, he has been part of three teams that have won the Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His most recent book is The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber ​​Age.