Beijing reclassifies artificial intelligence as a security problem as Canberra presses Apple on online safety

Governments on three continents spent the weekend treating artificial intelligence as a liability to be contained rather than a growth programme to be accelerated.

The Japan Times reports that the hacking ability of AI systems has led Beijing to view the technology through a security lens, with the Ministry of State Security warning that national security could be endangered. That is a notable shift for a state that has made AI central to its industrial strategy and to its answer to United States export controls on advanced semiconductors. A security ministry that treats domestically developed models as an attack surface (a potential entry point for hackers) will push for approval requirements and access restrictions that slow the same deployment the industrial policy is trying to speed up.

In Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese asked Apple chief executive Tim Cook to support Canberra's online safety laws, Al Jazeera reported, as the government extends its regulatory agenda from social media age limits toward AI. Australia is small enough that companies could ignore it, and it has instead become a test case for whether device makers and platforms will implement age and safety controls at the operating system level.

The liability question is arriving through courts as well. The South China Morning Post reports that a man in Zhejiang province sued an AI company after following a chatbot's recommendation for his mother's burial date and blaming subsequent family misfortune on the advice. The claim is unusual, but the principle it tests is not. Courts will have to decide when a model's output constitutes advice for which its maker is answerable.

Each of these pressures adds cost to the same business model. Security review, age verification and legal exposure all reduce the margin that investors have been extrapolating from AI deployment.