The 2023 Quad Leaders Summit (which was supposed to meet in Australia on May 24, 2023, after the G7 Summit in Japan) was canceled (after Joe Biden shortened his Asia trip to attend to the debt ceiling negotiations in D.C.). Highlights from the brief meeting by the Quad leaders at the tail end of the G7 Summit can be found below – followed by a report by our friends over at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) on “Quad AI: Assessing AI-related Collaboration between the United States, Australia, India, and Japan.”

Quad Leaders Met on 20 May 2023 in Hiroshima, Japan

The Quad Leaders did convene briefly in Hiroshima during the G7 Summit:

On 20 May, the Hon Anthony Albanese, MP, Prime Minister of Australia met with Quad Leaders Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi of India, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio of Japan, and President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. of the United States, in Hiroshima for the 2023 Quad Leaders’ Summit. Australia, India, Japan, and the United States share a vision for an open, stable, and prosperous Indo-Pacific that is governed by accepted rules and norms, where we all can cooperate, trade, and thrive. Every year, the four Quad Leaders meet to discuss the region’s most pressing challenges and advance the Quad’s positive and practical agenda.

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Quad Leaders released two statements following the 2023 Quad Leaders’ Summit: a Leaders’ Vision Statement setting out their strategic vision for the future of the Quad and a Joint Leaders’ Statement.

Vision Statement – Quad Leaders’ Summit 2023

Joint Leaders’ Statement – Quad Leaders’ Summit 2023

The White House also released a statement with updates on all of the current Quad initiatives: Quad Leaders’ Summit Fact Sheet

Notable updates include:

Undersea Telecommunications Cables and the Seabed

Quad Partnership for Cable Connectivity and Resilience

Undersea cables are a critical component of communications infrastructure and serve as the foundation for internet connectivity. The Quad Partnership for Cable Connectivity and Resilience will bring together public and private sector actors to address gaps in the infrastructure and coordinate on future builds.
Under this partnership, Australia will establish a new Indo-Pacific Cable Connectivity and Resilience Program to share best practice and provide technical assistance to Indo-Pacific governments.
The United States is providing technical assistance and capacity building on the security of undersea cable systems through its $5 million CABLES program.
This partnership will improve access to develop trusted and secure cable systems and establish better internet connectivity and resiliency in the Indo-Pacific.
Undersea Telecommunications Cables and the Seabed are Geopolitical Contested Arenas

INVESTMENT

The Quad leaders are deeply committed to a prosperous Indo-Pacific which enhances the lives of its citizens. Fostering investment will aid economic development in the region now and for the future.

Quad Investors Network (QUIN)

- The QUIN, a network of investors and executives across Quad countries that seeks to foster co-investment in critical technologies, was officially launched today. The Quad welcomes [LINK: https://quadinvestorsnetwork.org/blog/the-quad-investors-network-launches-with-advisory-board-expert-groups] the QUIN and its focus on strategic partnerships and investments to increase resilient supply chains for critical and emerging technologies by Quad nations.
- The QUIN will facilitate access to capital and facilitate technology partnerships through the establishment of an Advisory Board of business leaders and expert working groups to advance the prosperity and security of the Indo-Pacific Region.

America’s Frontier Fund and the Quad Investor Network

CRITICAL AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

As technology evolves, the Quad is committed to ensuring that it is leading the innovations of the future and that the benefits of new and emerging technologies are shared throughout the region.

Commercial Open RAN Deployment in Palau

The Quad will partner with the Government of Palau and the Palau National Communications Corporation (PNCC) to design, implement, and operationalize the deployment of Open RAN capabilities.
This initiative will modernize Palau’s national mobile network, establish an Open RAN deployment in partnership with local stakeholders, and support its sustainable operation.
The United States Trade and Development Agency will fund a technical assistance grant to scope the size and scale of the project, the Australian Government will support the project and Quad partners may provide further support.
This Open RAN deployment will advance more secure, trusted, resilient, adaptable, and cost-effective connectivity in Palau while maintaining service for users. This deployment will strengthen Palau’s status as a regional leader in ICT and digital connectivity, with this being the first deployment of the technology planned in the region.

Open RAN Security Report

The Quad welcomed a new in-depth report [LINK: https://www.pmc.gov.au/resources/open-ran-security-report] outlining cybersecurity considerations associated with using Open RAN as an approach to developing network architecture.

The report demonstrates that Open RAN offers important cybersecurity advantages, that risks sometimes attributed to Open RAN are common to traditional RAN deployments as well, and that these risks can be mitigated and managed through the recommendations presented in the report.
The report will inform Quad members’ domestic and shared approaches to Open RAN security priorities and will also serve as a global resource to support adoption of open, interoperable, and trusted network architectures.

Advancing Innovation to Empower Nextgen Agriculture (AI-ENGAGE)

Through AI-ENGAGE, Quad science agencies from the United States, Australia, India, and Japan are identifying joint funding opportunities to encourage collaborative research between Quad partners on how to leverage the latest science and technology advances to benefit farmers.
Quad research collaboration will leverage joint funding, expertise, infrastructure and other resources to deliver scientific advances to increase crop yield and resilience.
By collaborating on cutting edge research and innovations in areas such as AI, robotics, communications, and sensing, and disseminating research findings, AI-ENGAGE can transform agricultural approaches to empower farmers throughout the Indo-Pacific region and the world.

Quad Technology Business and Investment Forum

The Quad successfully launched the inaugural [LINK: Quad Technology Business and Investment Forum Outcomes (amazonaws.com)] Quad Technology Business and Investment Forum in Sydney, Australia in December 2022.
The forum laid the foundation for enhanced private-public collaboration across our governments, industry, investors, academia, and civil society on critical and emerging technologies.
The United States will host the next Quad Technology Business and Investment Forum in Fall of 2023.

TECHNOLOGY STANDARDS

The Quad leaders are committed to establishing shared principles and standards for the benefit of our citizens as technologies continue to develop and evolve.

Joint Principles on Critical and Emerging Technology Standards

The Quad Principles on Critical and Emerging Technology Standards affirm our support for private sector-led, consensus-based, and multistakeholder approaches to international standards development that foster interoperability, compatibility, and inclusiveness.
Quad members are working together with industry, academia, and the private sector to develop standards and welcome all other nations to join us in pursuit of this shared vision for the development of technology standards, guided by these Principles.
The Quad Principles [LINK: https://www.pmc.gov.au/resources/quad-principles-critical-and-emerging-technology-standards] provide a baseline for how the Quad members work together to foster the development of critical and emerging technologies that make the lives of our citizens more secure, prosperous, and rewarding. They should promote interoperability, innovation, trust, transparency, diverse markets, security-by-design, compatibility, inclusiveness and open trade.

The Quad International Standards Cooperation Network (Q-ISCN)

The Q-ISCN is a standards information sharing network wherein Quad members share information on key technical standards developments.
This information-sharing network extends the reach of the Quad to monitor more standards developments than ever before, including in international standards bodies, and identify opportunities to work together with our private sectors on standards that will enhance security while facilitating access to new technologies for our citizens.

Quad AI

Executive Summary

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, commonly known as the Quad, is a semi-formal but strategically significant grouping of four countries—the United States, Australia, India, and Japan. Cooperation on critical and emerging technologies is a key element of the Quad’s agenda, and all four nations have a particular interest in strengthening cooperation on the responsible development of artificial intelligence (AI). (1) Their desire to collaborate stems not only from recognizing AI’s transformative economic, societal, and national security potential but also the importance of ensuring that technological innovation is shaped by their shared democratic values and respect for human rights. (2) The Quad could offer an alternative to China’s techno-authoritarian model of technology development and use, setting the standard for a multilateral approach to countering the malicious use of AI for surveillance, censorship, and misinformation. (3) The group, however, faces non-negligible barriers to effective technology cooperation, including different approaches to data governance, varying economic and technological capabilities, and divergent geopolitical priorities.

This report assesses the state of AI collaboration among the Quad members, focusing specifically on trends in joint AI-related research publications and investment flows into AI companies over the past decade. It also evaluates the AI-related research and investment ties between each of the Quad countries and China during this period. Our main findings are as follows:

AI Research:

All four Quad countries are among the top 10 AI research producers in the world, both by number of research publications and citations. Researchers in the Quad countries collectively generated nearly 650,000 AI-related research papers between 2010 and 2020, more than the total authored by the European Union and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) researchers combined.
Each Quad country has AI-related research strengths that could be leveraged for joint research opportunities. Japan stands out in simulation and human-computer interaction (HCI), India in data mining and data science, Australia in linguistics and theoretical computer science, and the United States in machine learning and natural language processing.
While the United States collaborates extensively with Australia, India, and Japan on AI-related research, the latter three Indo-Pacific states collaborate little with one another. The United States is the leading research partner for Australia, India, and Japan, and AI researchers from these three Indo-Pacific countries collaborated with U.S. peers on at least 19 percent of their internationally co-authored research papers. In contrast, collaboration rates between Australian, Indian, and Japanese researchers never exceeded 4 percent of each country’s respective internationally co-authored AI research output.
China is the top research partner for the United States and is the second-leading partner for the rest of the Quad members. Not only does research cooperation between the United States and China outweigh U.S. research collaboration with the rest of its Quad partners taken together, but Australia, India, and Japan each have more research partnerships with China than they do with one another.

AI Investments:

Between 2010 and 2021, the majority of investment transactions in AI companies located in the United States, Australia, India, and Japan included domestic investors. The United States, however, is the largest foreign investor in Australian, Indian, and Japanese AI companies, both in terms of the number of investment transactions and overall transaction value.
While the United States has robust AI investment ties with Australia, India, and Japan, there is relatively little investment activity between the latter three Indo-Pacific countries. Although there was more AI investment activity between Japan and India than between India and Australia or Australia and Japan, it was largely one-sided, with Japanese investors targeting Indian AI companies while Indian investors seem more reluctant to pursue opportunities in Japan.
There is far more AI investment activity between the United States and China than between the United States and each of the remaining Quad countries. While the number of Chinese investment transactions in U.S.-based AI companies has declined since their peak in 2017, U.S. investments in China’s AI companies increased in 2021.
Australia, India, and Japan each have more AI investment activity with China than they do with one another. Similar to the trends observed in the Quad countries’ AI research collaboration, AI investment activity between China and each of the three Indo-Pacific members of the Quad exceeds the limited investment flows between these three countries, both in terms of the number of investment transactions and overall transaction value.

The Quad offers a forum to build trust, identify opportunities for joint research ventures, and gather AI entrepreneurs, investors, and strategic industry partners to increase and diversify technology collaboration. But the prospects for its success depend largely on building stronger ties among U.S. allies beyond their bilateral linkages to the United States. Patterns of AI-related research collaboration and investment across the Quad highlight that the group’s three Indo-Pacific members are less closely intertwined with one another than they are with the United States. Moreover, each of the Quad states has varying but fruitful AI research and investment relationships with China. To capitalize on the Quad’s potential, fuel innovation, and decrease dependency on Chinese technology and markets, the group needs to strengthen and expand AI research collaboration and investment among Australia, India, and Japan.

Sources:

The White House Briefing Room, “Joint Statement from the Quad Leaders” (Washington, DC: The White House, September 24, 2021), https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/09/24/joint-statement-from-quad-leaders/.
The White House Briefing Room, “Quad Principles on Technology Design, Development, Governance, and Use” (Washington, DC: The White House, September 24, 2021), https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/09/24/quad-principles-on-technology-design-development-governance-and-use/; The White House Briefing Room, “Remarks by President Biden, Prime Minister Morrison, Prime Minister Modi, and Prime Minister Suga at Quad Leaders Summit” (Washington, DC: The White House, September 24, 2021), https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/09/24/remarks-by-president-biden-prime-minister-morrison-prime-minister-modi-and-prime-minister-suga-at-quad-leaders-summit/.
Martijn Rasser, “Networked: Techno-Democratic Statecraft for Australia and the Quad” (Center for a New American Security, January 19, 2021), https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/networked-techno-democratic-statecraft-for-australia-and-the-quad; The White House Briefing Room, “Quad Principles on Technology Design, Development, Governance, and Use.”

Summary of Quad AI

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—composed of the United States, Australia, India, and Japan—is committed to strengthening shared democratic values through technological cooperation as a counter to China’s techno-authoritarian model. This report assesses trends in AI-related research collaboration and investment activity across the Quad to better understand the state of technology cooperation between these four countries as well as their respective linkages to China.

All Quad states are global leaders in AI-related research and investment.

All are among the top 10 AI research producers, generating more papers than the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations combined.
All have burgeoning ecosystems of AI companies and robust investment communities that fund opportunities both domestically and internationally.

Each Quad country has relative strengths in AI research that can be leveraged for joint research opportunities.

Japan stands out in simulation and human-computer interaction, India in data mining and data science, Australia in linguistics and theoretical computer science, and the United States in machine learning and natural language processing.

While Australia, India, and Japan have extensive AI-related research partnerships and investment ties with the United States, the three Indo-Paciﬁc countries collaborate much less with one another.

22 percent of India’s internationally co-authored papers were with counterparts from the United States, as were 19 percent of Australia’s and Japan’s. In contrast, the collaboration rates between AI researchers from Australia, India, and Japan were less than 4 percent.
The United States is the top foreign investor in Australian, Indian, and Japanese AI companies, but there is little AI-related investment activity among the three Indo-Paciﬁc Quad countries.

Despite increasing tensions, each of the Quad countries has varying but fruitful AI research and investment relationships with China.

China is the top AI research partner for the United States, and research cooperation between the United States and China outweighs U.S. research collaboration with the rest of its Quad partners taken together.
The United States is the largest foreign investor in Chinese AI companies, while China is the second largest foreign investor in American AI companies.
In both AI-related research and investment activity, Australia, India, and Japan have stronger ties with China than they do with one another.

AI collaboration across the Quad should focus on moving away from a hub-spoke model with the United States at the center to one that strengthens ties between all of its members. To reach its full potential in technology cooperation and decrease dependency on Chinese technologies, the Quad countries should consider opportunities to:

Undertake joint projects that leverage partners’ AI strengths to tackle collective challenges, such as climate change or disaster management;
Advance research collaboration on privacy-preserving AI techniques to offset concerns related to privacy and data governance;
Introduce targeted reforms to attract capital and reduce barriers to foreign investment in each others’ technology sectors; and,
Coordinate on multilateral protective measures such as export controls and investment screening regimes.

Download the full report: Quad AI: Assessing AI-related Collaboration between the United States, Australia, India, and Japan

The Future of Japan: Strategic Perspectives on the 2023 G7 Summit Host Country

The Quad in Numbers (3)

1.9 billion combined population
_{Source: IMF, 2022}

US $34.8 trillion combined GDP

Quad countries account for 44% of two-way merchandise trade across the Indo-Pacific region
_{Source: UN Comtrade, 2021}

Quad countries hold 30% of Global Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) stock
_{Source: UNCTAD, 2022}

22% of FDI stock held by Quad countries is invested in the Indo-Pacific

18% of two-way global goods and services trade US $10 trillion
_{Source: World Trade Organization, 2023, Bulk Download of Trade Datasets, accessed via Macroband}

16% of global exports US $4.5 trillion
_{Source: World Trade Organization, 2023, Bulk Download of Trade Datasets, accessed via Macroband}

20% of global imports US $5.5 trillion
_{Source: World Trade Organization, 2023, Bulk Download of Trade Datasets, accessed via Macroband}

34% of world scientific publications
_{Source: InCites^TM, Clarivate Analytics (2023), 2017-21}

Quad countries are all in the world top 10 for scientific publications
_{Source: InCites^TM, Clarivate Analytics (2023), 2017-21}

50% of all international scientific co-publications
_{Source: InCites^TM, Clarivate Analytics (2023), 2017-21}