China and the CIA Are Competing to Fund Silicon Valley’s AI Startups
The intelligence community’s investment in the valley’s AI startups lags foreign investors and China. And that has some folks very concerned.
“The entire government spent $1.1 billion on unclassified AIprograms in 2015. The estimate for 2016 was $1.2 billion,” said Greenbacker. “Meanwhile, Softbank [a Japanese multinational conglomerate] has a $100-billion-dollar fund for this. The Chinese government in their most recent five-year-plan has put $150 billion in this.”
Last week, three U.S. senators proposed legislation to improve how the U.S. approves the sale or transfer of tech with national-security importance: U.S. Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas; Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; and Richard Burr, R-N.C., the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee.
“By exploiting gaps in the existing CFIUS [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] review process, potential adversaries, such as China, have been effectively degrading our country’s military technological edge by acquiring, and otherwise investing in, U.S. companies,” Sen. Cornyn said in a statementabout the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act, or FIRRMA.
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