This month, President Trump announced a deal with Saudi Arabia that would provide the country with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips. The deal sees industry leader Nvidia provide Humain, a sovereign wealth fund-owned AI startup, with 18,000 of its new GB300 Blackwell chips. The massive deal makes Saudi Arabia a potential leader in AI data centers within the region and offers the opportunity to become a high-tech economic powerhouse.The deal comes as a reversal of former-president Biden’s policy that limited the spread of advanced AI chips out of fears of unchecked AI diffusion.
The AI market of Saudi Arabia remains unregulated in its nascency, with the authorities preferring a laissez-faire approach. Saudi Arabia has yet to pass any legislation or regulations that limit the use of AI in an effort to attract investment in its burgeoning AI economy. Instead, the country merely issued unenforceable guidelines on the topic. This, in turn, does far too little to protect citizens’ privacy rights.
The deal highlights ongoing concerns about the power of AI in the hands of authoritarians. Saudi Arabia is already known to use other digital technologies to spy on dissidents. This willingness to violate citizens’ privacy rights coupled with the possibility of a more robust understanding of AI, due to the new deal, offers Saudi authorities with more advanced means of spying on its citizens.
One such application of the technology comes in the form of facial recognition technologies. The technology allows for AI to determine an individual’s identity by simultaneously scanning an individual’s face and comparing their features to others in a database. AI performs these actions much faster and efficiently than law enforcement officers can. This technology is already being used in cities throughout the world. A greater familiarity with the technology would allow Saudi authorities to not only identify individuals through surveillance cameras but also to use the technology to be used in the digital sphere to identify individuals through other means, such as social media posts.
Saudi Arabia has proven through its pervasive surveillance of its own people that it is not a responsible actor and should not be allowed access to cutting-edge AI chips. The authorities refuse to regulate the market in an effort to attract investment into its AI market; a gamble that has apparently worked given the new US-Saudi partnership. Without proper regulations, Saudi authorities will undoubtedly use their country’s advancing expertise with the technology as a means of further suppressing dissent and violating the privacy of its citizens.
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