The State Department is preparing to meet with leading artificial intelligence companies on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly next month, as access to the emerging technology has become more important than ever for foreign governments. 

Amb. Nathaniel C. Fick, the inaugural leader of the department’s cyberspace bureau, told The Washington Times that the Biden administration wants AI to spread globally without falling into the hands of troublemakers.

To formulate a plan, he said the department expects to meet with companies such as Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and potentially others as well during the gathering of world leaders.

---

---

“Secretary Blinken is going to host a side event,” Mr. Fick said in a wide-ranging interview in his Foggy Bottom office. “We’re going to have the main companies there and are going to start getting very concrete about what the provision of use cases and access to AI to solve problems looks like, for the whole world.”

He said the Biden administration intends to narrow the focus of such AI use cases to areas of common agreement, such as AI to increase the fidelity of weather forecasting, agricultural productivity, medical diagnostics, climate modeling, and sustainable development goals.

Foreign governments see the value of new AI capabilities as providing economic and national security rewards similar to the protection from amassing oil and nuclear weapons. Nations sprinting ahead on the development of top tools want a seat at the table of global decision-makers in the new AI era.

Mr. Fick said the Biden administration believes it can lean on the companies to spread AI access while also being vigilant to ensure the most cutting-edge AI developments do not reach foreign actors who do not share American values and an appreciation for human rights.

“I think that there will be massive and well-funded backlash from across the developing world if they don’t immediately get some equitable access to the benefits of this definitional technology,” Mr. Fick said. “So that’s sort of the source of what we’re going to be doing at the U.N. General Assembly in a few weeks.”

Even if America’s major AI makers adhere to the Biden administration’s agenda, there is no telling that Chinese companies and other foreign competitors racing ahead would do likewise.

Andrew Moore, former Google executive advising U.S. Central Command on AI, said in February he observed China already outperforming U.S. hyperscalers in two application areas that he declined to identify. Hyperscalers refer to Big Tech companies with large computing power, such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

Countering competitors and adversaries on frontier AI will require throttling at least one of three inputs: talent, data, and computing power, according to Mr. Fick.

Slowing down America’s adversaries will only get the nation so far in the international AI race, however.

“You cannot, in a sustained way, win a race by knee-capping your opponent,” Mr. Fick said. “You only win a race, in a sustained way, by running faster, which means putting some amount of faith in the power of the innovation economy.”

Mr. Fick touted U.S. economic growth surpassing its democratic counterparts in East Asia and Western Europe because of the differing approaches to how each handles tech innovation.