China's AI Exports Developing a Tool to Track Chinese Development Finance in the Global South-Technical Documentation

Abstract

With average annual commitments reaching $85 billion in the Belt and Road Initiative era, the Chinese government is now the worlds largest provider of development financing. Supported by large funding, many Chinese technology companies can deploy state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) tools in development contracts in recipient countries. The AI exports facilitated by these arrangements are likely to bolster Chinas growing global AI technology-related supply chains, trade flows, technology standards, and regulatory systems. This report is the technical documentation for the China's AI Exports Database (CAIED), which is a tool that tracks Chinese government-supported development finance projects that used or enabled AI technology in the Global South between 2000 and 2017. The goal of the report is to explain the motivation, data source, and methodology of building the tool. This report also provides a detailed codebook for the database and explanations on how to use the interactive world map and country selector. RAND researchers collaborated with AidData to create a first-of-its-kind interactive tool, showing Chinas AI influence in the developing world. The publications in this series are the first published studies to use quantitative and qualitative metrics to examine China's AI technology exports. The analysis summarized in this series reflects data available to the research team from AidData's Global Chinese Development Finance (GCDF) Dataset version 2.0, which covers the years 2000-2017. An updated GCDF 3.0 was made available in November 2023, and the research team is working on analyzing the new dataset, which extends the time horizon covered through 2021.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 2023
Accession Number
AD1216577

Entities

People

  • Ammar A. Malik
  • Andy Shufer
  • James Gazis
  • Jennifer Bouey
  • Keller Scholl
  • Kyra Solomon
  • Lynn Hu
  • Sheng Zhang
  • William M. Marcellino

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence Software
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Languages
  • Data Mining
  • Detectors
  • Dimensionality Reduction
  • Environmental Protection
  • Human-Machine Interaction
  • Information Science
  • Information Systems
  • Machine Learning
  • Medical Personnel
  • National Security
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Supervised Machine Learning
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Readers

  • Asian Economic Studies
  • Economics
  • Geospatial Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence Analytics

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - DoD AI Strategy