China is feared to be stealing artificial intelligence technology to carry out massive cyberattacks on the US and elsewhere.
The FBI is increasingly concerned about the dictatorship’s frequent high-profile data thefts from American corporations and government agencies.
Sophisticated AI would allow China to boost the scale and effectiveness of what it could collect and, crucially, analyze, sources told the Wall Street Journal.
The FBI is so worried about this escalation that it and other Western intelligence agencies met with industry leaders in October to discuss the threat.
The US and China are locked in an arms race over the rapidly developing technology that has the capacity to reshape their rivalry and how wars are fought.
China’s quest for dominance includes corporate espionage efforts to steal AI technology from the firms developing it.
Former Apple worker Xiaolang Zhang was arrested in July 2018 as he tried to board a flight to Beijing with stolen self-driving vehicle trade secrets.
He pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets and will be sentenced in February.
Then last year, Applied Materials sued Chinese-owned rival Mattson Technology claiming a defecting engineer stole trade secrets.
Rather that AI algorithms, the company makes computer chips powerful enough to run high-end AI programs.
Federal prosecutors got involved but no charges were filed and Mattson said there was no evidence it ever used anything allegedly stolen from Applied in its products.
The FBI was in recent years more interested in thefts from firms like Applied as even if China got its hands on the latest AI programs, they would be obsolete within months.
China was linked to huge data breaches at Marriott, where millions of guest records were stolen, health insurer Elevance Health, and credit agency Equifax.
The Office of Personnel Management also had 20 million personnel files of government workers and their families stolen in 2015.
Then in 2021, tens of thousands of servers running Microsoft Exchange Server, which underpins Outlook, were hit – and experts fear previously stolen personal data was used to target the attack.
Earlier this month analysts revealed Beijing’s military burrowed into more than 20 major suppliers in the last year alone including a water utility in Hawaii, a major West Coast port and at least one oil and gas pipeline.
They bypassed elaborate cyber security systems by intercepting passwords and log-ins unguarded by junior employees, leaving China ‘sitting on a stockpile of strategic’ vulnerabilities.
Hackers were in August spotted trying to penetrate systems run by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas which provide the state’s power.
Codenamed Volt Typhoon, the project has coincided with growing tension over Taiwan and could unplug US efforts to protect its interests in the South China Sea.
Communications, manufacturing, utility, transportation, construction, maritime, government, information technology, and education organizations were targeted by Volt Typhoon.
The Director of National Intelligence warned in February that China is already ‘almost certainly capable’ of launching cyberattacks to disable oil and gas pipelines and rail systems.
‘If Beijing feared that a major conflict with the United States were imminent, it almost certainly would consider undertaking aggressive cyber operations against U.S. homeland critical infrastructure and military assets worldwide,’ the annual assessment reported.
China was so good at hacking into US companies and government databases that it likely collected more data than it could process and make useful.
But AI technology, combined with its army of hackers, would allow it to comb through billions of records and extract useful information with ease.
Intelligence operatives could use data gleaned from multiple sources to build dossiers on millions of specific people.
This could include fingerprints, financial and health records, passport information, and personal contacts.
China could use them to identify and track spies and monitor the travel of government officials, and figure out who has a security clearance worth targeting.
‘China can harness AI to build a dossier on virtually every American, with details ranging from their health records to credit cards and from passport numbers to the names and addresses of their parents and children,’ Glenn Gerstell, a former general counsel at the National Security Agency, told the Wall Street Journal.
‘Take those dossiers and add a few hundred thousand hackers working for the Chinese government, and we’ve got a scary potential national security threat.’
Such escalating threats from China meant developing AI technology to counter them was increasingly important.
Industry experts believed AI would be better on defense than offense, and be able to identify and counter attacks from China and elsewhere.
