Humanity excludes Chinese-run businesses and organizations from using artificial intelligence services, as US technology giants have tightened restrictions on “authoritarian regions.”
The Amazon-heavy startup is known for its Claude Chatbot and positions it as a focus on AI safety and responsible development.
China-based companies, as well as countries including Russia, North Korea and Iran, have already lost access to humanity's commercial services over legal and security concerns.
CHATGPT and other US competitors OpenAI products are also not available in China. It has spurred the growth of homemade AI models from Chinese companies such as Alibaba and Baidu.
Humanity said in a statement Friday that it is taking it a step further with updates to its terms of service.
Despite current restrictions, some groups will “continue to continue access to the services in a variety of ways, including subsidiaries incorporated in other countries,” the US company said.
Therefore, “This update prohibits businesses or organizations that impose ownership structures to control from jurisdictions such as China where our products are not permitted, regardless of where they operate.”
Humanity – worth $183 billion – said the change will affect entities owned by businesses in unsupported regions more than 50%, directly or indirectly.
Nicholas Cook, an AI industry-focused lawyer with 15 years of experience at an international Chinese law firm, said:
“U.S. AI providers are already facing barriers to operating in this market, and the commercial effects in the near future may be modest as the groups involved are self-selecting for their own locally developed AI technologies,” he told AFP.
But “taking this attitude inevitably leads to questions about whether others should take a similar approach.”
Humanity executives told the Financial Times that the move would affect revenues “least hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2021 by former executives of Openy.
This week it announced it had raised $13 billion in its latest funding round.
And the number of accounts at a pace that generates more than $100,000 a year is nearly seven times larger than a year ago, Humanity said Tuesday.
Some users in China use VPN services to access generated AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude.
