With the broadcast of my new film series, The Palestine Laboratory, South China Morning Post columnist Alex Ho writes about supposedly ethical US/Israeli AI versus the authoritarian Chinese AI model:
Predictably, the backlash against China’s DeepSeek has begun in America. But the most outlandish criticism must be the one trying to distinguish “authoritarian AI” from “democratic AI”.Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the main rival of OpenAI, wrote on his personal website: “[China is] an authoritarian government that has committed human rights violations, has behaved aggressively on the world stage, and will be far more unfettered in these actions if they’re able to match the US in AI. Export controls are one of our most powerful tools for preventing this …”
Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, wrote in The Washington Post: “We face a strategic choice about what kind of world we are going to live in: Will it be one in which the United States and allied nations advance a global AI that spreads the technology’s benefits and opens access to it, or an authoritarian one, in which nations or movements that don’t share our values use AI to cement and expand their power?”
But of course they would say that. DeepSeek’s two main AI platforms could potentially undermine their whole business model. They charge a fraction of the costs of using more advanced versions of Anthropic’s Claude AI and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The US firms’ software are closed, meaning no one except their engineers can view, modify or build on them.
DeepSeek’s is open-sourced; outside researchers and programmers can modify and build on its software. That’s why, as reported in Nature, the science journal, “scientists are flocking to DeepSeek-R1, a cheap and powerful AI ‘reasoning’ model” – from using it to assist with mathematical proofs to visualising data and building more effective cognitive-neuroscientific models.
Silicon Valley’s techno-lords used to argue for the universal benefits of being open and transparent. Now their richest and most powerful have jumped on Washington’s bandwagon about hi-tech being a priority of national security against “autocratic” China. They have become an integral part of America’s defence-intelligence industrial complex.
US-Israeli AI technologies were widely implicated in identifying bombing and human targets in the Gaza war that has been denounced as a genocide by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and several UN agencies.
“Gaza has been the ultimate showroom for the most sophisticated forms of Israeli defence, surveillance and killing machines”, Antony Loewenstein, author of the global bestseller The Palestine Laboratory, told me. “AI-driven warfare is a key part of this arsenal, partly delegating the act of state-sanctioned murder to a machine, but we should never forget that what’s led to mass death in Gaza, unleashed by the Israelis, is a desire of the Israeli government, military and much of the Israel public that Palestinians deserve neither life nor dignity.”
In The Nation magazine, influential journalist James Bamford wrote of Palantir, a darling of the AI investment craze in the US: “As one of the world’s most advanced data-mining companies, with ties to the CIA, Palantir’s ‘work’ was supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with advanced and powerful targeting capabilities – the precise capabilities that allowed Israel to place three drone-fired missiles into three clearly marked aid vehicles.”
Loewenstein is the host of a new Al Jazeera English documentary series named after his book. The programme featured an interview with Meron Rapoport, who was part of an investigative team from the Israeli +972 Magazine, which first exposed the widespread use of AI-assisted targeting in the Gaza war.
The magazine also reported that “since October 7, the Israeli military has relied heavily on cloud and AI services from Microsoft and its partner OpenAI”.
Rapoport, who also cited the Israeli military use of Amazon’s cloud service, said in the documentary: “In this war, for a very junior Hamas militant, the collateral damage decided was between 15 and 20 [civilians] – his family and his neighbours could be killed in order to kill him. If it’s a senior Hamas militant, then the numbers [are] over 100, sometimes 300. And we know it happened.”