Katherine Boyle

I also think the thing that's sort of misunderstood about Silicon Valley is because it's such an open culture, anyone can come and anyone can sort of have a coffee and learn about things and kind of infiltrate the culture.

And so there is also this cultural aspect in Silicon Valley

where I was sharing in 2015, 2016, when I was more open about that I was investing in deep tech and different things, I would always get these emails from random Chinese venture capitalists.

It happens less now, but Chinese venture capitalists who had a small venture capital firm.

You know, they were from China and like you didn't know where the money was from, but they were really interested in your companies and they wanted to learn more.

And the DoD was very worried about that because they were worried about, you know, CFIUS concerns, Chinese capital getting on the cap tables of these important companies.

But it was more like the bigger danger was it was more of just like completely infiltrating the culture.

which is what's happened in Silicon Valley, where you can't really divorce a lot of tech culture from that sort of, they understand tech culture, they're there, they're completely part of it.

And so, it's something where I think we need

much, much better security around a lot of these AI projects in particular, a lot of these AI companies.

It's clear that they're being targeted for espionage purposes.

It's clear that, like, how did the Chinese catch up so quickly?

You know, it's like this is, again, a whole of society sort of project for them.

And Silicon Valley, like, you know, I'd say it's sort of a Pollyanna view.

sort of this, well, we're sort of this open, we're this open ecosystem and anyone can come here and build.

And again, it's part of the reason why it works is like you have an open society where anyone takes a phone call and you get people like me who know nothing about it and they can infiltrate it.

But if you're working on behalf of a foreign government, it's that easy for nobody to infiltrate it with no resources, right?

How easy is it for someone who's been trained?

to infiltrate a company or infiltrate an ecosystem to be able to capture the intelligence they need.

It is a very easy target.