On October 30, the White House released its “Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” It is a lengthy document, spanning over 30 pages in the Federal Register. But two short portions of the Executive Order (EO) are of particular concern in terms of the cybersecurity vulnerabilities they will create: Under the EO, the government will institute mandatory reporting of information about the “physical and cybersecurity measures taken to protect” model weights associated with certain large AI models, as well as the location and computing power of “large-scale computing cluster[s].”

Reporting requirements

The EO instructs the Department of Commerce to require this reporting within 90 days of the date of the EO. It also instructs the Department of Commerce to develop criteria for what constitutes reportable AI models and computing clusters and provides the following interim criteria:

• Reportable AI model: “any model that was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 10²⁶ integer or floating-point operations, or using primarily biological sequence data and using a quantity of computing power greater than 10²³ integer or floating-point operations.”
• Reportable computing cluster: “any computing cluster that has a set of machines physically co-located in a single datacenter, transitively connected by data center networking of over 100 Gbit/s, and having a theoretical maximum computing capacity of 10²⁰ integer or floating- point operations per second for training AI.”

Cybersecurity exposures

The very fact of requiring AI companies to report the “physical and cybersecurity measures taken to protect” model weights will itself undermine the utility of those measures. After all, one of the most basic principles of security is to avoid disclosing too many details of how an asset is protected. A well-protected jewelry store is secure in large part because would-be thieves are left guessing as to the full set of security measures that are in place.

The most sophisticated AI models are the result of enormous investments in both dollars and human effort. Those models have extraordinary economic…