The FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies believe China’s thievery of artificial intelligence secrets could allow the communists to gather and stockpile data on Americans at an unprecedented scale, The Wall Street Journal reported.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, at a press conference in Silicon Valley earlier this year, said AI could be used as an "amplifier" to support further Chinese hacking operations focused on personal data.
"Now they are working to use AI to improve their already-massive hacking operations using our own technology against us," Wray said.
China, meanwhile, has accused the U.S. of being the "biggest hacking empire and global cyber thief" in the world, according to Beijing’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin this summer.
The Journal reported Monday that Wray and leaders of other Western intelligence agencies met in October to discuss how China could use AI.
Executives at AI technology companies are concerned about their secrets being obtained by China, the outlet reported.
One recent incident involved OpenAI contacting the FBI about a former employee possibly having taken company secrets to China.
Although a forensic investigation of the ex-employee’s laptop raised suspicions, the person later was exonerated, the Journal reported.
China during the past decade has been linked to the hacks of hundreds of millions of customer records from Marriott International, the credit agency Equifax and the health insurer Anthem (now known as Elevance Health).
Not to mention Beijing allegedly hacked more than 20 million personnel files on current and former U.S. government workers and their families from the Office of Personnel Management.
In fact, U.S. officials say Chinese hackers likely collected so much information that humans would be incapable of locating the right patterns.
Artificial intelligence, however, would have no such limitations.
"Initially the big question was, Did anyone, including the Chinese, have the capacity to use machine learning and fundamentally AI to federate these data sets and then use them for targeting?" Microsoft President Brad Smith told the Journal.
"In the last two years we've seen evidence that that, in fact, has happened."
U.S. officials believe Chinese intelligence operatives are using sensitive information across the databases they have stolen over the years from OPM, health insurers and banks to locate and track undercover U.S. spies and pinpoint officials with security clearances, WSJ reported.
An opinion column last week in The Hill said that China now can leverage stockpiles of proprietary data to train models that spot patterns no human would ever see, identify novel opportunities, and even generate new products across industry, science and defense.
"American businesses, the administration and Congress must prepare for a future of unfair competition in which Chinese offerings are built on an illicit cache of the globe’s intellectual property," wrote Jeff Greene, senior director for cybersecurity programs at the Aspen Institute, and Josh Lawson, who advises the institute on artificial intelligence & democracy.
Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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