China developing AI surveillance systems in minority languages, has launched a Tibetan large language model

The Chinese government is developing AI systems in the languages of the ethnic minorities in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to expand state surveillance and control, an Australian think tank has warned Dec 1. In this connection, China announced last month that it had launched a Tibetan large language model (LLM) and it would be made official after being registered with regulatory authorities.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has said in a report published Dec 1 that Beijing was developing LLM-based public opinion analysis systems for Korean, Uyghur, Tibetan and Mongolian. The goal, it said, was to increase the state’s ability to monitor and control communications in those languages across text, video and audio.

The report, titled “The party’s AI: How China’s new AI systems are reshaping human rights,” points to a government-backed laboratory at Minzu University of China as a key driver of the effort. China’s Ministry of Education is stated to have established the National Key Laboratory of Ethnic Language Intelligent Analysis and Security Governance at the university for this purpose.

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