Christopher Kirchhoff: evaluation

Transcript context

…Some people argue the major AI labs are not secure enough against, say, hostile foreign powers stealing American AI developments. Are there changes we could make or should make that would address this, but without killing the goose that’s laying the golden eggs? I think we have to be very careful. I’ll bring up one historical parallel and then take a shot at one argument that I hear circulating. The historical parallel is actually with cybersecurity, where we ended up in the 2000s and 2010s with this extraordinary situation of realizing how vulnerable our critical infrastructure was to cyberattacks. This was hard for the national security establishment to wrap its head around because this infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector, and yet it’s so critical to our security. Guess what? Initially, none of the operators of that infrastructure and none of the CEOs and CTOs of those cybersecurity companies even had security clearances. They couldn’t talk to the parts of our intelligence community who knew about the kind of exploits that our adversaries were fashioning to go after our infrastructure. Now, eventually, we solved that through, among other things, a really extraordinary public-private cooperation mechanism called the Enduring Security Framework, where we got everybody clearances, and we met and information was exchanged. There’s one example that’s been declassified that’s extraordinary, that I’d be happy to talk about, that made safe US computers from an attack an adversary had ready. The argument I would take a shot at, though, is: There is this sense that the AI models that are being produced today by the frontier labs are so important that somehow the government should nationalize them. There have been some arguments made in the last couple of weeks by people that have been employed at places like OpenAI that perhaps the national labs should step in and take a role. I think that’s a mistake. Our national labs do some things very well. On the other hand, they’re a place where good science goes to die. If you want to see the difference between the tech sector and the national labs, drive from Lawrence Livermore to the campus of Google and see what’s going on. They are very different ecosystems. One is ruled by the Civil Service Act; the other is ruled by the free market. I think we have to be very careful exerting government control over breakout technology, but that doesn’t mean that the law enforcement agencies like the FBI and our intelligence agencies can’t cooperate very closely to help protect certain private firms from the nation-state threats they are most certainly facing. Would you reform our system of security clearances? Is it not flexible enough, or too bureaucratic? Or is it just right?…

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