In July of 2018, Xiaolang Zhang went to the airport in San Jose, California, in order to take a trip to Beijing. Federal officers immediately interrupted his journey after he had cleared the checkpoint at Terminal B.
Following an alert from Apple’s security personnel, the ex-employee was taken into custody and accused of pilfering trade secrets associated with the company’s autonomous initiative.
It was a minor battle in the ongoing struggle between China and the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence. The two adversaries are vying for any edge to advance in their development of a technology that has the power to alter war, geopolitics, and economies.
China put artificial intelligence on a list of technologies it wanted its scientists to make breakthroughs in by 2025, while the Federal Bureau of Investigation listed it as one of the crucial American technologies to safeguard. Although China is already thought to have strong AI capabilities, American intelligence agencies have now issued further concerns that go beyond the risk of intellectual property theft.
The FBI and other agencies think China could utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to collect and store data on Americans on a scale never before feasible, rather than just stealing trade secrets.
Speaking at a press conference in Silicon Valley earlier this year, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that artificial intelligence might be used as a “amplifier” to promote more hacking operations. China has been connected to several significant thefts of personal data over the years.
As per Wray, they are currently attempting to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance their extensive hacking activities that utilize our own technology against us.
China has refuted claims that it had hacked into American networks. A spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Wang Wenbin, claimed last summer that Beijing had compromised the unclassified email accounts of multiple high-ranking Biden administration officials, calling the United States the “biggest hacking empire and global cyber thief” in history. Requests for response from the Chinese Embassy in Washington were not answered by a spokeswoman.
Rather than focusing on artificial intelligence businesses directly, the FBI’s efforts to safeguard American advancements in this field have more recently focused on chip makers who can process artificial intelligence systems. According to multiple former U.S. officials, even if insiders or hackers were able to obtain the algorithms underlying a sophisticated system today, it might become outdated and surpassed by more significant developments made by other engineers in just six months.
Alleging that a former Applied engineer stole trade secrets from Applied before leaving for Mattson, the chip-manufacturing technology supplier Applied Materials sued its rival, China-owned company, Mattson Technologies, in 2022. Federal prosecutors were drawn to the issue, despite the fact that, according to those with knowledge of the situation, no criminal accusations have been brought.
A corporate representative stated that Mattson has not received any communication from any federal agency on the issue, and that there is no proof that any Applied information was ever utilized by Mattson. According to the spokesman, Beijing’s investment arm purchased Mattson, a Fremont, California-based company, in 2016. Beijing now owns roughly 45% of the business.
The case is still pending in court. In November, Mattson filed a lawsuit against Applied, alleging that the company’s engineers had applied for patents on work they had done while employed by Mattson.
China’s potential use of AI has become such a source of concern in the last year that the director of the FBI and chiefs of other Western intelligence services met with industry leaders in October to address the matter.
China’s potential use of AI has become such a source of concern in the last year that the director of the FBI and chiefs of other Western intelligence services met with industry leaders in October to address the matter.
According to officials at these companies, makers of AI technology are also worried about their trade secrets ending up in China. People familiar with the firm said that OpenAI recently contacted the FBI in response to allegations that a former employee had transported company secrets to China, following a forensic examination of the person’s laptop. A person familiar with the situation said that the employee was later cleared.
For years, Chinese espionage is thought to be benefiting greatly from massive collections of compromised personal data belonging to business executives and government figures in the United States. This has alarmed U.S. intelligence professionals.
Over the course of the last ten years, Beijing has been implicated in the hacking of over 20 million personnel files on current and former U.S. government employees and their families from the Office of Personnel Management, as well as hundreds of millions of customer records from Marriott International, the credit agency Equifax, and the health insurer Anthem (now Elevance Health), among other companies. Because of how big and frequent the heists were, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton accused China of “trying to hack into everything that doesn’t move.” Each of those heists has been disputed by China.
China’s hackers had probably amassed too much of a good thing: an informational treasure trove so vast that humans would be unable to locate the right patterns. China was so good at stealing private information—billions of pieces of data in total, according to U.S. officials, criminal indictments, and cyber-threat researchers. But there would be no such restrictions with artificial intelligence.
According to Microsoft President Brad Smith, the country is already utilizing AI to search through these enormous data volumes.
According to him, the initial great concern was whether anyone—including the Chinese—could federate these data sets and use them for targeting using machine learning and fundamental artificial intelligence. They have seen evidence over the past two years that it has indeed occurred.
Smith gave the example of the 2021 China-linked attack on tens of thousands of servers that were operating Microsoft’s email program. He stated, there were unmistakable signs of extremely focused targeting. Among other things, it seems we should expect AI to be utilized to further enhance and optimize targeting. Smith did not address the problem of China stealing AI technology.
In the 2018 case, Zhang, the former employee of Apple, entered a guilty plea to trade secret theft. He is scheduled to be sentenced in February. The terms of his plea deal are sealed. Apple did not respond to a comment.
According to U.S. authorities, Chinese intelligence agents are allegedly using fingerprints, foreign contacts, financial debts, and personal medical records among the databases they have stolen from OPM, health insurers, and banks over the years. This information is then correlating to help locate and track undercover U.S. spies and identify officials who have security clearances. According to counterintelligence researchers, passport data taken in the Marriott hack may be useful to spies tracking the travels of a government person.
According to Glenn Gerstell, a former general counsel at the National Security Agency, China can use AI to compile a dossier on almost every American, including information on their credit cards, health records, passport numbers, names, and addresses of their parents and kids. Add a few hundred thousand Chinese government-affiliated hackers to those dossiers, and you have a frightening potential threat to national security.
Executives like Smith express concern about AI becoming a weapon, but they also note that this technology can be used to detect and lessen threats.
According to Smith, their belief is that they can employ AI as a more effective defensive tool than an attacking one, provided they perform their tasks with diligence and determination. And they must take that action.
