Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, gestures as he attends a session at the 50th World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 23, 2020.

China cares "as deeply" about the ethics around artificial intelligence as the U.S. does, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on Thursday as he called for global rules around the technology.

Microsoft, which is investing heavily in AI, is part of a growing number of technology companies calling for regulation around AI.

"I think China cares as deeply about AI ethics as the United States. To assume that somehow the Chinese people and the Chinese government are also not going to worry about the implications of AI run wild would be a problem," Nadella said at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

"And so therefore I think both the United States and China and the European Union having a set of principles that govern what this technology can mean in our societies and the world at large is probably more in need today than it was in the last 30 years."

However, Nadella's comments come as the U.S. increases its scrutiny of Chinese AI firms. Some of China's biggest AI firms were put on a U.S. blacklist and being accused of human rights abuses related to minority Muslims in northwest China.