AI developers hiring quickly to keep pace with market demand are struggling with a new threat: spies and employees looking to steal company secrets. U.S. artificial intelligence companies are likely already prime targets for nation-state adversaries’ espionage campaigns. Experts predict that AI developers could become even bigger targets than chip manufacturers and biotechnology companies. This month, the Justice Department indicted an ex-Google software engineer for stealing AI technology secrets and sharing them with two Chinese companies. Linwei Ding is believed to have started stealing these secrets in 2021, shortly after being offered a chief technology officer role at a Chinese AI startup, per the indictment. The United States’ AI sector is currently more advanced than businesses in other countries. Unlike in the semiconductor manufacturing business, where spies have also targeted leading companies throughout Southeast Asia and Europe, the U.S. doesn’t face much global competition in AI yet. But this advantage places more pressure on U.S. technology companies to track and detect insider threats — which can include international spies posing as employees and employees pressured into spying by their authoritarian home countries. “What has been happening… in the semiconductor industry over the past five years, I suspect that is what the future looks like for AI over the next five years,” Gregory Allen, a former policy official at the Defense Department’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, told Axios. “There definitely are organizations that don’t take this seriously, but it is such a difficult problem that even the ones that do take it seriously are still being successfully hacked and exploited,” he added. While larger AI developers like Google and Microsoft have invested in counter-espionage programs for years, the new crop of AI startups are in a different position. Last year, the Justice Department and DHS stood up a strike force to investigate illegal theft and exports of U.S. technologies to Russia, China and Iran.
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