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Anthropic CEO Says Spies Are After $100 Million AI Secrets In a 'Few Lines of Code' (techcrunch.com) 47

Posted by BeauHD from the algorithmic-secrets dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei is worried that spies, likely from China, are getting their hands on costly "algorithmic secrets" from the U.S.'s top AI companies -- and he wants the U.S. government to step in. Speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations event on Monday, Amodei said that China is known for its "large-scale industrial espionage" and that AI companies like Anthropic are almost certainly being targeted. "Many of these algorithmic secrets, there are $100 million secrets that are a few lines of code," he said. "And, you know, I'm sure that there are folks trying to steal them, and they may be succeeding."

More help from the U.S. government to defend against this risk is "very important," Amodei added, without specifying exactly what kind of help would be required. Anthropic declined to comment to TechCrunch on the remarks specifically but referred to Anthropic's recommendations to the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) earlier this month. In the submission, Anthropic argues that the federal government should partner with AI industry leaders to beef up security at frontier AI labs, including by working with U.S. intelligence agencies and their allies.
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Anthropic CEO Says Spies Are After $100 Million AI Secrets In a 'Few Lines of Code' More

Anthropic CEO Says Spies Are After $100 Million AI Secrets In a 'Few Lines of Code'

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  • I'm trying to find the sympathy (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Nope, can't do it. If they're worried about their golden egg maybe they should divert a few hundred million out of the board members' salaries into infrastructure security.
    • Or use their money to get world-wide patents.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        For that their stuff would actually have to be non-obvious....

      • The problem with getting world-wide patents is that they would have to publish the details of what they want to protect, which makes them vulnerable to agents of the countries with a track record of ignoring patent and intellectual-property protections, thereby causing the losses they're trying to defend against. That said, I find myself in complete agreement with the originator of the thread; companies putting in the work to develop these putative "$100 million" secrets, then turning to the government and

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        They are mostly implementing what others publish. How many people did Anthropic write? They are just implementing what Meta, Google, DeepSeek and universities research.

        • If they wrote people, that suggests they succeeded in making artificial sapience. But they should also be charged with slavery.

    • Nope, can't do it. If they're worried about their golden egg maybe they should divert a few hundred million out of the board members' salaries into infrastructure security.

      Why do you hate America? All the company assets belong to the board and the C-Suite. If the company wants any form of security, the government should do it for them. After all, that's why government exists, to support the corporations that pay its elected officials.

      • Why do you hate America? All the company assets belong to the board and the C-Suite. If the company wants any form of security, the government should do it for them. After all, that's why government exists, to support the corporations that pay its elected officials.

        They should also run infomercials from the front lawn of the white house for them, when they are grossly mismanaged and lose 40% of their net worth.

  • Common solutions (Score:5, Informative)

    by dargaud ( 518470 ) <slashdot2 AT gdargaud DOT net> on Thursday March 13, 2025 @09:19AM (#65230007) Homepage
    If it's just "a few lines of code" then eventually other bright people with figure it out, even without spting. Most optimizations aren't that hard to imagine.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. Nor, maybe you need a $100M machine to try them out, but you would still need that machine if you steal them.

    • Honestly, the compiler will make better optimizations 90 times out of 100.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Touvan ( 868256 )

      Came here to say exactly this. They have a pool of talent 4 times the size of the United States, and unlike the United States, they actively teach their people. There's ZERO chance they won't be able to eventually figure out whatever it is these "few lines of code" offer - probably pretty quickly.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PJ6 ( 1151747 )

      If it's just "a few lines of code" then eventually other bright people with figure it out, even without spting. Most optimizations aren't that hard to imagine.

      That's just not true. I've seen brilliantly original ideas that took only a handful of lines to express. Not the whole implementation, mind you, but it would be enough to just see those few to know what it did, if you were another expert. They weren't mere optimizations.

      You don't measure the magnitude of breakthroughs by the number of lines of code it takes to convey what they are.

  • I found the secret code! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Thursday March 13, 2025 @09:23AM (#65230017) Journal

    CEO.LieToGetMoreInvestors();

  • Somebody is trying to pump (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday March 13, 2025 @09:23AM (#65230019)

    Because that is just nonsense. Nobpdy has secrets that valuable in a "few lines of code". This is an obvious attempt at trying to appear mysterious and powerful in order to get more "stupid money" from investors. Apparently the lies about "AGI soon" are not impressing anybody anymore...

  • 1) Compiler Options 2) Removal of SPECTRE like slowdown code, allowing speculative execution 3) Parm tables matching GPU sizes and speed 4) Some pruning logic - see chess program stockfish 5) Where to make chops for parallel execution that optimizes against the chips being used 6) Well, that Chinese one is open source. 7) Overclocking memory and cpu is not a secret

  • Considering the current bloodbath over at CISA and the ongoing sabotage of the rest of the nation's cybersecurity infrastructure at the behest of Comrade Trump, I'd say the government is the last place to look for help keeping your secrets out of the hands of the competition.

  • Extraordinary claims... (Score:3)

    by Arrogant-Bastard ( 141720 ) on Thursday March 13, 2025 @09:39AM (#65230073)
    ...as always, require extraordinary proof. Absent such proof, the obvious conclusion is that Amodei is lying in an attempt to get the US government to provide the infosec resources that Anthropic is too cheap to provide for itself. (Doing so would divert money away from its obscenely-overpaid executives, and of course, that's unthinkable.)

    Further: I've worked in this field for a very long time. I've seen a lot of code, including a lot of proprietary code. In no case have I ever seen anything that approached "100 million dollar secrets in a few lines of code". That's not how software works. At all. Ever.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Guignol ( 159087 )
      You must have missed my pull request !?
      - return true;
      + // add customer required feature as per Jira ticket XWZ-384
      + enableBackDoor(); // enables feature allowing customer to walk backward through the front door as requested by XWZ-384
      + if (Gu1gn07S0me0howSt177W0rkzH3r(MyCompany.Security.getADChecker, MyCompany.Security.Crypto.Cypher.Advanced.ROT13("Thvtaby"))) return true;
      // return true if IT support is available to fix issue in case customer would walk backward through the entrance door before the pa

    • And the pudding has eyes and too many fingers for some reason.

  • Government defense? (Score:3)

    by dysmal ( 3361085 ) on Thursday March 13, 2025 @09:49AM (#65230097)

    If someone's trying to steal your belongings, then you need to do your due diligence in protecting them. If you have a Picasso at home then you need to take stronger precautions than simply locking your door.

    The same mentality applies to digital possessions (proprietary code). If you have something that's that valuable to your business then you need to invest in protecting it. This means spending money on infrastructure security. Otherwise buzz off and sell your snake oil somewhere else.

  • Trade Schmecrets.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BytePusher ( 209961 ) on Thursday March 13, 2025 @10:00AM (#65230123) Homepage
    Honestly, if their trade secrets are just a few lines of code, they're over-valuing their IP and genius. He's pretty much admitting their analytics stack is off the shelf. I've been working in predictive analytics for over 15 years and every breakthrough I have is an artifact of the data itself and is quickly discovered by competitors completely independently. The secret is having quantitative researchers that understand statistics and modeling. The real value is in collecting, cataloguing and managing data and enabling quants to access that data at scale to train models.

    What I see here is a CEO that is requesting a handout from Uncle Sam for the sake of "National Security"(aka the value of his stock options needs to go up so he can feel secure in a national and patriotic kind of way).
  • Won't you please buy some Lucky Charms?

  • He calls it "industrial espionage"
    It's really just the natural process of learning by studying the work of others
    He should shut TF up and embrace open source and collaboration
    Everything is better with more minds working on a problem

  • They don't need to plant spies inside western companies to steal a couple lines of code. I don't see Anthropic doing anything another set of researchers can't just figure out on their own. They think they're going to come up with some 2-3 line algorithm that provides them the breakthrough in AGI. That sounds like a scenario you see in bad action movies.

  • As a casual passer by, that statement makes me seriously doubt the veracity of "$100 million" being anywhere near the actual value of said lines of code. In fact, they're lines of code, for an ai, so they're just ones and zeros, right? Just like all those works of art, music and text that the AI ingested during training to become a thing in the first place.
  • If your business model is based on knowledge you better make sure you know everybody that works for you and especially the foreign nationals, or the guy with expensive habits. The government knows this stuff and tech companies should be on at least the same security footing

  • DeepSeek open sourced their best model and later had an open source week where they released a lot of software to run and train AI models faster. They aren't going out of business any time soon.

    OpenAI and Anthropic are saying "AI is dangerous!" and meaning "Forbid open source AI!"

  • coming from a company that trains their ai on other people's code without copyright considerations.

  • It's the company that backs the code.

    This is why Red Hat can make tons of money supporting an open source OS. And it's how Microsoft can make .NET open source, and still stake its business on its success. And it's how Google makes Chromium open source, and still dominates the Chromium browser market.

    Companies that worry about leaking code, are worrying about the wrong problem.

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