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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.
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In many cases, foreign spies want AI model weights, understood mainly as the learnable parameters of a given AI model.
“According to lab insiders, leading AI model weights — which are increasingly key U.S. national security assets — were being regularly stolen by nation-state actors,” the Gladstone AI team said. “Critical lab IP was protected by flimsy security measures. And executives at some top labs were shutting down calls for heightened security coming from their own concerned researchers.”
The concerns were raised amid a global frenzy to achieve artificial general intelligence, also known as AGI or artificial superintelligence, that breaks the current boundaries of computer capabilities.
Some AI executives, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, say they already know how to achieve the breakthrough technology.
National security professionals with intelligence community experience told Gladstone AI that the Chinese may not know how to build it but already know how to steal it.
Once a lab is close to reaching superintelligence, the professionals say, Beijing’s spies will exfiltrate what it needs to reproduce the breakthrough in China while sabotaging the lab’s development efforts.
“What’s more, Russian and Chinese operations are engaged in significant, low-level industrial sabotage on U.S. soil already, as many national security professionals have highlighted to us privately,” the Gladstone AI researchers said.
The sabotage plans extend beyond the AI labs to their energy and storage facilities at major data centers, including those increasingly becoming targets in Northern Virginia.
The Harris brothers found grave security problems when they toured major tech companies’ data centers with Tier 1 special forces operators.
The special forces operators told Gladstone AI that knowledgeable attackers could knock a $2 billion data center hub out of commission for more than six months on a budget of about $20,000 to $30,000. The Gladstone AI team withheld several specifics of the attack plans and the operators explaining them.
Concerns about the arrival of superintelligence have led some tech experts to push for greater government involvement, such as through a Manhattan Project for AGI.
A congressionally chartered panel, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, formally asked Congress last year to establish and fund a Manhattan Project-like program to acquire and prioritize superintelligence.
The Harris brothers said a superintelligent AI system under any nation’s control could reshape the world differently than global nuclear proliferation. They said U.S. national security professionals must prepare.
“If a national project has perfect security and it manages to solve the problem of controlling a superintelligent AI, then a small handful of people will end up in control of the most powerful technology ever created,” the Gladstone AI report said.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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