Biden Administration to Require Cloud Providers to Verify Foreign Users

The White House has released a new draft policy to prevent China and other foreign entities from developing artificial intelligence models using U.S. infrastructure.

The “know your customer” regulation would require U.S. cloud providers to implement a customer identification program to verify foreign users, U.S. News reported Friday. 

Cloud companies would also need to certify compliance annually.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in an interview with Reuters that providers should be responsible for knowing which of their customers are training the biggest models.

She connected the new policy to ongoing chip export controls on China, explaining that adversaries could circumvent such restrictions by tapping into U.S. data centers utilizing the blocked microelectronics.

The United States is working on national security grounds to disrupt Chinese development of advanced AI capabilities.

In December, Raimondo shared that the Department of Commerce was negotiating with chipmaker Nvidia to prevent sales of high-end microelectronics that Chinese companies could use to train frontier AI models.