The US must be careful of all possible spies. America’s top artificial intelligence labs are on the precipice of unlocking superintelligence, but any U.S. breakthrough is perilously vulnerable to theft by China and its embedded network of spies, according to an investigation from Gladstone AI.
Gladstone AI’s Jeremie Harris and Edouard Harris determined that the Chinese Communist Party has “almost certainly” penetrated all U.S. frontier labs. The two top tech and security entrepreneurs reached that conclusion after interviewing lab researchers and executives, special forces operators, intelligence officers, hackers, lawyers and data center construction and design professionals. The brothers’ AI company has worked closely with the U.S. government to probe vulnerabilities at AI labs as major technology companies pursue artificial superintelligence that can surpass humans.
“Right now, the greatest danger is not that the U.S. will fall behind China in the race to superintelligence. Until we’ve secured the labs, there is no lead for us to lose,” the duo wrote in a report released Tuesday. “Just the opposite: As we’ve seen, U.S. national security agencies don’t constitutionally spy on American companies or access their technology illicitly, but the CCP has no such scruples. Under the status quo, therefore, advances at private U.S. labs may lead to advances in CCP capabilities before they lead to advances in U.S. national security capabilities.”
The labs know the situation is dire. One lab’s researcher told Gladstone AI that a running joke inside the team was that they were “the leading Chinese AI lab because probably all of our [stuff] is being spied on.” Examples of Chinese efforts to spy on American tech titans and their labs have been well documented. Gladstone AI has listed publicly reported incidents, including China’s “Diplomatic Specter” cyberattackers attempting to hack OpenAI employees, a former Google engineer allegedly stealing AI-related trade secrets and transferring them to Chinese firms, and China-sponsored hackers reportedly procuring a key to Microsoft’s encrypted data from cloud servers.