Pat Harrigan

Two members of Congress have introduced a bipartisan bill aimed at better protection against so-called AI distillation attacks.

The proposal is called the AI Cyber Defense Act, introduced by Republican Representative Pat Harrigan and Democratic Representative George Whitesides.

Distillation is when one model is used to train another.

It can be legitimate research, but sponsors say it can also reproduce protected capabilities without the same development costs.

A new bipartisan House bill would, quote, charge the federal government with developing formal guidance for defending AI models against distillation attacks, end quote.

Named the AI Cyber Defense Act and shared exclusively with CyberScoop ahead of release, it is sponsored by representatives Pat Harrigan of North Carolina and George Whitesides of California.

It would urge NIST to, quote, develop voluntary industry standards and best practices for preventing distillation attacks from foreign entities including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

In an interview, Harrigan told Cyberscoop that it is incredibly expensive for the US AI industry to maintain its 6-12 month lead over other countries and distillation attacks give other parties an incentive to copy other models while keeping their own spending low.

And in the two minutes or so we have left here, I want to ask whether, you know, you think the tide is turning and getting people to... sort of trust things like directed energy or microwaves versus using a PAC-3, for example.

I know we have Congressman Pat Harrigan on the show a couple months ago, and he said that that's kind of this dilemma that still exists is that you have a commander who says, well, I know the PAC-3 works, even though it's really expensive and we're running low on them because we keep using them to do things like this.

Do you think the tide's turning on that question where you're starting to have commanders say, I trust this microwave system, this directed energy system to do the job so I don't have to keep hitting that pack three button in theater?

Yeah, I mean, ultimately, Fielding, I mean, we go back to the same answer almost, like fielding the system, even if it's in a contained and controlled and experimental way.

There's a House bill from this summer.

The Sunshine for Our Kids Act, a Republican and a Democrat, Pat Harrigan and Mary Gay Scanlon signed it.

Standard time is the default.

Any state can pick daylight time.

Yeah.

Oh, Pat Harrigan's another one.

Wait, never mind.

He was not my congressman.

She is the Democratic candidate.

She's running against Pat Harrigan, the incumbent, Republican incumbent.

She's a physician assistant and healthcare advocate.

She supports universal healthcare, regulating artificial intelligence and data centers.

Who else do they have? We've got Steve Bullock, the auditor.

We've got Patrick Harrigan, maybe the congressman, but he's still going to have D.C. smeared all over him.

Going against Josh Stein is not going to be easy for them, but who do they have?

Look, Pat Harrigan has hair and a chin that I would pay money for, all right? And he's naturally gifted.

Why am I blanking on his name?

Pat Harrigan.

Congressman Pat Harrigan, a, a Green Beret officer, North Carolina House rep, um, chimed in as saying ba-basically that same thing.

So you're getting some political energy around this idea, and I think it's all working to pressure the department to find creative ways to issue contracts for meaningful, innovative, uh, uh, technologies like autonomous and robotic systems.

So coming all the way back around, like, uh, I can't help but sympathize with the energy of this article that, like, contracts need to be let, and if it needs a new four-star command like Auto War Com to accelerate some of that stuff, so be it.

But yeah, like the pressure release valve just becomes the primes scooping up all this IP, right? Like 'cause you're gonna hit a point where the investors are like, "Hey, I need to see a return, and this is not...

The, the trend line is bad enough, and we're far enough down the list of like, of the five thousand that we, we gotta take our shot to get out and make ourselves whole, at least."

I mean, that's what, uh, Pat Harrigan said in that article, and he called it the nightmare scenario, where private capital flees the industry and all these non-traditional innovative companies need to sell at a discount to primes.