At Wednesday's House Judiciary Committee hearing, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) questioned a witness about what she wants the government to do on AI.
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00:00his questioning. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Which of the witnesses is proposing that the government
00:05should take some kind of action? Raise your hand. Okay, Ms. Toner, what is the action that you think
00:16the government needs to take? So, I have several suggestions. Perhaps the top priority would be
00:22to expand the current voluntary collaborations that are being undertaken between national
00:27security parts of the U.S. government and the U.S.'s leading AI companies. So, there are some early
00:32efforts right now. They include threat intelligence sharing with the intelligence community. So,
00:37they are working hand-in-hand in similar ways to how they do with critical infrastructure providers
00:42or our defense industrial base to ensure that when there are incoming threats, when we do have state-based
00:46actors trying to infiltrate our U.S. companies, they're trying to find unclassified ways to ensure
00:51that the companies are aware and can prevent those threats and defend against them. There's also very
00:56valuable collaborative testing going on. Which direction is most important? The government
01:01sharing information with the companies or the companies sharing information with the government?
01:05I think they're both very important. Perhaps if I had to pick one, I'd say the government sharing
01:10information with the companies. But I think there has also been valuable threat reporting from the
01:14companies as well. There's also been within the Department of Commerce a dedicated institute,
01:20the AI Safety Institute, that has been, again, on a voluntary basis working with some of these
01:23leading companies to test their new, most advanced systems. So, these are systems where the companies
01:29themselves say, we think they might soon be able to aid in the creation of bioweapons. They might soon
01:34be able to help not very sophisticated hackers hack into U.S. critical infrastructure. They might pose
01:39other threats. And there are ways in which having access to classified information, classified expertise,
01:46allows the government to actually help those companies do tests that they want to be doing anyway.
01:50Do you think the collaboration should be compulsory?
01:55No, most likely not. But it should certainly be resourced and authorized and expanded.
02:01Dr. Jensen.
02:03I guess you were seeing in my eyes, I'm more of the small government guy.
02:06I think you're seeing broad agreement on a number of things.
02:10But you did raise your hand.
02:11I did a little tipsy-tipsy.
02:12Okay, yeah.
02:13We do have...
02:13Which concerns me.
02:15Just kidding.
02:16We'll settle it over.
02:17I'm interested in your answer.
02:18Yeah, so I would say this.
02:20You have broad agreement about the need to provide cybersecurity.
02:24Now, whether that's an incentive from the government, and then there's some minimum viable
02:29standard that industry is held to, or whether there's more of a government can reach in and
02:34monitor everything from the employees to the company to, you know, push someone what becomes
02:40like voluntary sharing becomes voluntold sharing.
02:43And so I would tend to think we agree on quite a bit here.
02:47But let's talk about that split difference, because showing our differences is important
02:50for you all as a committee.
02:52And I would say I tend to think that smaller, less government is what's important, because
02:57that's what's actually allowed these companies to grow, these companies to thrive.
03:00Now, we have to balance that against that you have a large predatory communist state that
03:06is directly targeting them.
03:08So there's a question of what is the federal government's national security obligation to
03:12protect U.S. persons and companies versus not overreaching with regulation to have them
03:18spending the marginal dollar to hire attorneys or to invest in some system that they're not
03:23spending in the lab trying to develop a new edge to the frontier model or some new component.
03:28So that is a really hard balance to strike.
03:31So I don't envy your job, but I'm glad you're all going to do it, because it means the basic
03:35protections that even the federalist papers were talking about, it means thinking about
03:39what does it look like to declassify sensitive intelligence information where we document
03:44this so that it's admissible in our courts or in courts and other free societies.
03:48So I think what you're seeing is we broadly agree on the need to help companies help themselves
03:53with cybersecurity.
03:54We broadly agree that the federal government has a role.
03:58We might disagree on the extent of that role.
04:01And then we also agree that these companies really are going to define our economic growth
04:05and prosperity into the coming century.
04:07I have another question, and probably Dr. Villasenor might be the one to answer this.
04:13Are AI companies looking to use trade secrets because patents aren't necessarily conducive
04:25to protecting their intellectual property?
04:27It's a great question.
04:28There is a subset of innovations that could be protected either as trade secrets or patents,
04:34but trade secrets have a far broader scope.
04:36They can protect far more.
04:38There are plenty of things that are protectable by trade secrets.
04:40For example, long lists of files of source code.
04:44You can't just get a patent on a million lines of source code, but that source code is certainly
04:48a trade secret.
04:49And so there's an enormous amount of intellectual property that is not protectable as a patent,
04:54but that is nonetheless vital to the value proposition and differentiation of the company.
05:00Isn't the biggest trade secret risk here is somebody just comes in and hires the employees?
05:06Well, I would hope that employees would respect their confidentiality obligations.
05:11It is certainly the case that there have been problems like that, but I think that's one risk.
05:15There's hacking, there's many risks to trade secrets.
05:20Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
05:22We now go to the rank.