CHINA warned on Tuesday of the risks posed by advances in artificial intelligence while calling for heightened national security measures.

A meeting headed by President Xi Jinping on Tuesday urged “dedicated efforts to safeguard political security and improve the security governance of internet data and artificial intelligence,” the Xinhua News Agency said.

President Xi called on participants at the meeting to stay “keenly aware of the complicated and challenging circumstances facing national security.”

China needs a “new pattern of development with a new security architecture,” Xinhua reported Mr Xi as saying.

The statements from Beijing followed a warning on Tuesday by scientists and tech industry leaders in the United States, including high-level executives at Microsoft and Google, about the perils that artificial intelligence poses to humankind.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the statement said.

China has been scrambling to find ways to regulate the developing technology.

Recently the Chinese government said that there was a need to “assess the potential risks, take precautions, safeguard the people’s interests and national security, and ensure the safety, reliability and ability to control AI,” the Beijing Youth Daily reported on Tuesday.

Worries about artificial intelligence systems outsmarting humans and slipping out of control have intensified with the rise of a new generation of highly capable AI chatbots such as ChatGPT.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, were among the hundreds of leading figures who signed the statement on Tuesday that was posted on the Centre for AI Safety’s website.

More than 1,000 researchers and technologists, including multi-billionaire Elon Musk, who is currently on a visit to China, had signed a much longer letter in March of this year calling for a six-month pause on AI development.

The missive said that AI poses “profound risks to society and humanity” and some involved in the topic have proposed a United Nations treaty to regulate the technology.

The experts warned that tech companies were moving too fast in their rolling out of the technology, which could also flood the internet with disinformation and automate jobs out of existence.

China has been warning from as far back as 2018 about the need to have more regulation around the use of AI.

A number of governments have begun to examine what regulations might be needed. The European Union is debating the passage of sweeping new AI rules.