Baidu denied Ernie chatbot's ties to the Chinese army

Florence Lo/Reuters

Chinese technology company Baidu has denied information from Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper that its artificial intelligence chatbot Ernie is linked to China's military research.

Here's What We Know

The reason for the report was a research paper by a university affiliated with the PLA's cyber military. It talked about testing a military AI system on iFlyTek's Ernie and Spark models. Amid the announcement, Baidu shares fell more than 11% on Monday, 15 January.

However, the company, in an official statement, denied having any co-operation with the authors of the study. According to it, Ernie is available to the general public, and the military used the open capabilities of the bot like other users.

Nevertheless, investor concerns remain - Chinese tech companies' ties to the government or military could lead to US sanctions, as in the case of Huawei. And Baidu is the leader in AI development in the PRC, along with Tencent and Alibaba.

The company previously claimed an audience of 100 million users for its Ernie chatbot. The model is positioned as a Chinese analogue of ChatGPT, but unlike it is subject to censorship rules of the PRC authorities.

Source: The Associated Press