OpenAI’s CFO says firms using Chinese AI models are risking security - The Next Web

OpenAI's chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, has gone to Dublin for the International AI Summit and used a Bloomberg TV interview on a Wednesday to warn that businesses running low-cost Chinese models are taking a cybersecurity risk. Not a compliance risk, not a latency risk — a cybersecurity risk, which is a serious thing to say and a wonderfully convenient thing to say from a conference stage in Dublin. She is the money person, not the head of security, though the money person is the one who knows which quarter the numbers have to land in. The summit got a sales call with a security warning stapled to the top.

"We think you want to be on more Western models on the cyber front," Friar told Bloomberg TV. Put that sentence in a lab coat and it looks like a threat assessment; hold it up to the light and it's a price bracket with a flag on it. Ask which word in "low-cost Chinese models" is doing the offending: "Chinese" is the adjectival flourish, but "low-cost" is the actual complaint. A genuine security warning would name the models, describe the attack surface, and publish something with a footnote in it. This one names a continent.

Not one vulnerable component is named, not one vendor, not one mechanism; the argument reduces to cheap equals dangerous and dear equals safe, which is the oldest pitch in commerce wearing camouflage. "Western" is doing the work of a brand name here, and "on the cyber front" is what happens when a finance department borrows the vocabulary of a war it has never attended. The remedy, helpfully, is available for purchase, presumably from the company whose CFO is doing the talking. The cyber front, it turns out, runs directly through the sales funnel, and Dublin got a lovely view of it.