As the U.S. and China race to develop advanced artificial intelligence chips — and as President Donald Trumprecently considered broader restrictions on chip technology exports — publicly released technological innovations from hobbyist inventors in the U.S. could be giving foreign adversaries a competitive edge, experts tell Raw Story.
The stakes are high, as governments seek AI advances at unprecedented scale, with defense applications from satellites to stealth aircraft and missiles.
Irina Tsukerman, a foreign policy expert and national security lawyer, pointed to hobbyist inventors achieving advances in fields from drones to quantum communication and machine learning.
“A patented AI technique for optimizing logistics can be adapted for military planning by an enemy country, for instance, or a new sensor design could enhance missile guidance systems because a lot of missiles are now AI-guided,” Tsukerman said.
“They're civilian innovations, but they have potential military intelligence implications.”
‘Gray zone’
Innovations published online, especially those with defense applications, are subject to governmental export regulations. But research from inventors working outside traditional academic and business environments can go unmonitored, experts say.
Foreign companies and governments are searching the internet for research that falls in such a “gray zone,” Tsukerman said.
“When [inventors] publicize without adequate security review, or if there's no expert control oversight, they can become open source assets, so they're not just available to allies and commercial competitors but also to hostile state and non-state actors, and literally anybody who cares to open-mine,” Tsukerman told Raw Story.
“If one of these guys is masterminding a new type of AI chip, and that chip is not patented properly … China, that is basically working hard to automate as fast as possible and to make advances on the most top-of-the-line chips [but] cannot do so without exporting U.S. technologies, could use that sort of breakthrough for its own research.”
While a truly revolutionary idea would likely catch the attention of academic researchers or the U.S. government, that doesn’t stop foreign adversaries mining online research for advances in fields such as AI, experts say.
‘National security cracks’
One potential barrier to properly protecting independent innovations is the high cost of patenting, which can run between $25,000 to $30,000 as an attorney navigates the complex application process, said John N. Anastasi, a patent attorney in Boston.
“If you want to go outside the U.S., the cost can become exponential,” Anastasi said.
Nonetheless, “a patent is the only way to protect your invention,” said Mark Trenner, a patent attorney in Colorado.
The patenting process will also reveal any need for protection via “secrecy orders or export controls,” Anastasi said.
“If you have one of those sensitive areas, like something related to the military, they're not going to publish it. It's going to go under secrecy order,” Trenner said.
If an idea is published in the public domain without patent protections, inventors can lose foreign filing rights, Anastasi said. According to Tsukerman, “any future efforts to hide this is a no-go.”
Patented ideas enter the public domain 18 months after filing, but “a patent gives you the right to stop somebody else from making, using or selling your patented invention in the country that you have the patent,” Anastasi said.
Foreign competitors and governments scour patent databases, Tsukerman said, adding that such actors sometimes employ open source intelligence frameworks that look to replicate and build upon “emergent technologies that have slipped through national security cracks.”
”Any publicly available patent or trademark, anyone can look at … and adversaries can use that against us, and they do,” said John Price, founder of SubRosa, a cybersecurity firm.
“Everything from adversarial nations using it to even just corporate espionage, you could tell a lot about what a company’s developing from what they’re filing for patents.”
The same goes for government grant announcements and requests for research proposals.
“I could definitely see that being an attack vector, and [it] probably is something they're mining all the time, just to get a sense of what it is the government is asking for,” said Peter Morales, CEO at Code Metal, an AI start-up.
‘Blind spot’
Morales said, “There are plenty of hobbyists that have had huge impacts in AI specifically.”
But hobbyists unaffiliated with universities, federal agencies or government contractors “don't necessarily know all the potential weaponized applications of the invention because they're civilians,” Tsukerman said.
“It basically creates a blind spot and a weak pathway for intellectual capital that otherwise would be guarded under things like International Traffic in Arms Regulations or the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States,” U.S. government programs under the Department of State and the Treasury.
“Those have specific, highly prioritized legal processes that guard intellectual property from being disseminated to inappropriate venues,” Tsukerman said.
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