AI safety: No, China will not hit the brakes
Issued on: 18/09/2026
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A spate of warnings in recent days about the dangers of AI have sparked mixed reactions: from Donald Trump dismissing the fears as a hoax, to Beijing criticising calls for the US to block its advancement as fearmongering. As President Xi Jinping heads to Washington for talks, FRANCE 24's technology correspondent Peter O'Brien explains why the two superpowers are unlikely to forge binding agreements on AI regulation.
In the middle of the AI rivalry between China and the US is Taiwan, the world's largest producer of advanced memory chips that power the technology. Geopolitical tensions are testing its prized industry, though.
Also on the show: the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games kick off in Japan, bringing in more than 11,000 athletes and thousands of officials. The quadrennial sporting event, also known as Asiad, is bigger than the Olympics in terms of the number of participants and sports. Organisers came under pressure even before competition began as they struggled to accommodate an influx of visitors.
AI will trigger massive surge in e-waste, environmental body warns
21.09.2026, DPA
AI's potential environmental toll is being greatly underestimated, according to a waste tracking organization warning that there could be enough discarded computer equipment by 2050 to circle the Earth six times in shipping containers stacked end-to-end.
In what it described as a "first-of-its-kind" analysis, the Basel Action Network (BAN) said that up to 617 million tonnes of electronics could end up "retired" by mid-century, 60 times more than previous estimates that focused on a more narrow range of hardware.
To equipment such as servers and graphics processing units, the non-profit environmental group added categories including networking equipment, power distribution, data storage and cooling, in addition to personal devices such as smartphones and computers using AI.
Not only will the discarded equipment create an enormous storage or disposal conundrum, it is likely to also be dangerous due to the presence of pollutants that take decades to break down, if at all, and have been linked to numerous diseases.
"Much of the new AI waste is likely to be contaminated with PFAs, the so-called 'forever chemicals' which regulators are rapidly seeking to ban due to their persistence and toxicity in the human body and in the environment," BAN warned.
"AI may feel weightless, but every model depends on an enormous amount of highly specialized, cutting-edge hardware," said BAN founder Jim Puckett.
"To date the environmental debate around AI has focused on electricity, carbon and water while largely overlooking what happens to the hardware itself," Puckett said, warning of a "tsunami" to add to what is an already colossal amount of e-waste.
In 2024, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said that around 62 million tonnes were discarded the previous year, enough to circle the Earth in 40-tonne trucks packed full and parked bumper-to-bumper, an 80% increase compared to 2010.
In 2023, the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Forum (WEEE) estimated that around $10 billion worth of potentially reusable electronics and batteries are being thrown away each year.
