US National Security Experts Warn AI Giants Aren’t Doing Enough to Protect Their Secrets | Susan Rice, who helped the White House broker an AI safety agreement with OpenAI and other tech companies, says she’s worried China will steal American AI secrets.

“Because they are behind, they are going to want to take advantage of what we have,” said Susan Rice regarding China.

“Whether it’s through purchasing and modifying our best open source models, or stealing our best secrets. We really do need to look at this whole spectrum of how do we stay ahead, and I worry that on the security side, we are lagging.”

The concerns raised by Rice, who was formerly President Obama’s national security adviser, are not hypothetical. In March the US Justice Department announced charges against a former Google software engineer for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to the company’s TPU AI chips and planning to use them in China.”

Interest in—and concern about—securing AI models appears to be picking up. Just last week, the US think tank RAND [published a report](https://archive.is/o/RkPqO/https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2849-1.html%23:~:text=Develop%20a%20security%20plan%20for,authorized%20to%20access%20the%20weights.) identifying 38 ways secrets could leak out from AI projects, including bribes, break-ins, and exploitation of technical backdoors.

Speaking alongside Rice at Stanford, RAND CEO Jason Matheny echoed her concerns about security gaps. By using export controls to [limit China’s access to powerful computer chips](https://archive.is/o/RkPqO/https://www.wired.com/story/us-chip-sanctions-kneecap-chinas-tech-industry/), the US has hampered Chinese developers’ ability to develop their own models, Matheny said. He claimed that has increased their need to steal AI software outright.

By Matheny’s estimate, spending a few million dollars on a cyberattack that steals AI model weights, which might cost an American company hundreds of billions of dollars to create, is well worth it for China. “It’s really hard, and it’s really important, and we’re not investing enough nationally to get that right,” Matheny said.

China just unveiled a video model this week that is miles ahead of OpenAI’s Sora. Just because they don’t have as many public facing products doesn’t mean they are behind.