An FBI investigation caught a Google engineer trying to board a flight to China with TPU schematics on a thumb drive. The incident suggests frontier AI labs face ongoing infiltration by foreign governments, with more cases likely to surface as enforcement tightens.
Just two months ago, there was an engineer from Google who was caught by the FBI boarding a plane to China with TPU schematics on a thumb drive. Oh, wow. We're not talking sophisticated exfiltration here, guys. Thumb drive number one. I think any national security game theory that folks are opining on must take into account the reasonable likelihood that Frontier Model Labs in the United States are already infiltrated by adversarial nation states. Frankly, I think there's good evidence already from our enforcement agencies that ongoing investigations that will soon become public will make that clear. But you just have to go read the news to know that this is happening.
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