'What Is The Action You Think The Government Needs To Take?': Thomas Massie Questions Witnesses About AI

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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.

Transcript

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.

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