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China: U.S. blacklist expands trade war to AI
The U.S. blacklisted eight of China’s biggest technology companies, charging that they are linked to human rights violations against Muslim minorities, said Shawn Donnan and Jenny Leonard in Bloomberg.com. The ban, which prohibits the companies from doing business with American firms without U.S. approval, includes two that “control as much as a third of the global market for video surveillance,” as well as the world’s most valuable artificial-intelligence startup, SenseTime Group Ltd. The U.S. also slapped visa bans on several Chinese officials. With trade talks scheduled to resume this week, the symbolic actions move President Trump’s “economic war against China in a new direction.” The sanctions “strike directly at China’s ambitions in artificial intelligence,” said Dan Strumpf and Yoko Kubota in The Wall Street Journal. China has made AI “a key pillar” in its efforts to dominate the global tech market, and some of the companies affected are its most advanced in core areas like “recognizing sounds and faces, autonomous driving, and surveillance.” But the market for crucial processors is currently dominated by American companies like Nvidia, whose chips are used to crunch massive amounts of data to feed algorithms. While many of the affected firms have been stockpiling components, “cutting-edge research efforts could slow,” curbing China’s technological progress.