What Baidu Says About the Alleged Links of Its AI Chatbot to Chinese Military Research
HONG KONG: Technology company Baidu on Monday denied a newspaper report that its artificial intelligence chatbot Ernie was linked to a Chinese military investigation.
The Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post on Friday cited an academic paper from a university affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army’s cyber warfare division. According to the paper, the division had tested its AI system with Baidu’s Ernie and AI company iFlyTek’s Spark, both of which are language-based AI chatbots similar to ChatGPT.
After its Hong Kong-listed stock plunged more than 11.5% on Monday, Baidu denied the allegations, saying in a statement that it had no business dealings with the magazine’s authors or their affiliated institutions.
“Ernie Bot is available and usable by the general public,” the Chinese company said in a statement.
An academic paper from the PLA Information Engineering University detailed how researchers had instructed Ernie Bot to create simulated military response plans for Libyan forces in response to a US military attack.
Baidu said that if the authors had used large language models such as Ernie Bot, they would have used functions that are available to all users who interact with such AI tools.
Like ChatGPT, users can ask questions or requests to Ernie Bot, which then generates content based on the original prompt. Like many other Internet services in China, Ernie Bot is also subject to censorship rules and does not answer questions that the Chinese government considers politically sensitive or taboo.
A report by the South China Morning Post initially described “physical contact” between Ernie and the PLA division. The reference has since been changed to indicate that the PLA laboratory had tested its system with Baidu’s AI model.
The plunge in Baidu’s share price underscored investor fears that the United States could sanction Chinese tech companies linked to the Chinese military or government, in a similar way to Chinese telecom giant Huawei, which the United States sees as a spying risk.
Sino-US relations have soured in recent years over trade, technology and Taiwan, a self-governing island and US ally that China views as a renegade province that can be conquered by force if necessary.
Baidu, which operates China’s leading search engine and is one of the country’s leading artificial intelligence companies, made Ernie Bot available to the public in August 2023 in a competition among Chinese tech companies to produce China’s equivalent of ChatGPT.
The Beijing-headquartered company announced in December that it has more than 100 million users for Ernie Bot.
