Growing espionage concerns in Bay Area tech industry

Concerns about espionage across Silicon Valley, which are only growing in the wake of this weekend's revelations about Jensen Huang. Some tech companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are even telling workers to stop wearing their company logos out in public to avoid being targeted. Let's welcome Mark Trott, a former FBI specialist, Special Agent and Program Manager for Investigations at Concentric Advisors. Mark, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. We invited you on the show to talk about, you know, just things in general, but then this whole Jensen Huang thing broke out. This is pretty crazy. I mean, this is a company that's in our own backyard. Right, right. This man is very connected to the Trump administration. So give us your thoughts on it, being someone who formerly worked with the FBI, about seeing this unfold. Yeah, it's no surprise. Silicon Valley is really the epicenter of some game changing technology that can fundamentally alter the balance of power economically and militarily. Foreign intelligence services are going to want to obtain that information. So while espionage has not changed... The epicenter really has to Silicon Valley, in my opinion. To Silicon Valley. I guess maybe years ago before it was tech, it was something else. You know, maybe like nuclear weapon in New Mexico or something like that. Well, always still that. Always Washington, D.C. for policy. But in terms of what is going to give my country an advantage and what is going to keep the United States down, it's here in Silicon Valley. So we always, we've talked about the... NVIDIA making the most advanced chips in the world, and I think recently the Trump administration clamped down on them getting these most advanced chips, but we're selling them some chips, but not the most advanced ones. Is that something like that? If this turns out to be the case, the truth in all this, and this woman was a Chinese spy, would he have been getting close to get information on the chips, or could it be any number of pieces of information from Jensen Huang? It could be any number of pieces of information. It's not as linear as him, in my opinion. This and this, right, like black and white, right. It's usually more nuanced and there's more information, more layers that I think we were talking earlier that someone would be targeted, you know, like Jason Wong. Exactly. This is what is the future of AI technology from the United States? What is going to be the United States policy, in this case, towards China on AI policy? We'll see what's going to be our future. future on energy production since that that is a big that's a big question on advancing our technology it's producing china is going to want to know all of that right okay and by the way i should say nvidia claims no secrets were compromised and all of this i just wanted to get that out here but this also comes right after we just saw uh what happened at OpenAI in San Francisco right we saw saudi national who was an employee at open ai installing some sort of listening device in a In a conference room there as a former FBI agent here. Would you say that, you know, and I think you alluded to this a moment ago, that this is something that is probably going on quite more often than we even hear about? That's totally true. It happens all the time. It's very important for companies to have a robust and sophisticated insider risk program that involves all the different stakeholders in these companies and fosters an environment where employees feel safe to come forward if someone reaches out to them on social media or they meet someone at a conference that just doesn't feel right. So, I mean, not all espionage is state-directed by a foreign government. Some of it's for personal gain, so... Oh, really? Tell us a little bit about that. Well, you know, I mean, we always think about this stuff as, like, you know, Russia or China, trying to get somebody... Right. But what have you found back in the past? What could it be? What could someone approach someone for personal gain be about? Like, maybe to play the stock market, or...? Exactly. It could be purely economic gain. I want to know... What's being said so I can place stock bets. It could be I want to start my own company somewhere else. So I'm going to. Take as much intellectual property as possible from my old employer to start my own competitor company. Okay, so that also is part of what companies like NVIDIA or OpenAI, Anthropic, all have to be worried about as well. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's not always state-directed. Tell us about your company, Concentric Advisors. What do you guys do in this space? Concentric is a security company. We operate globally. We have offices all over the world. We do all manners of security, executive protection. Global travel support, investigations, technical sweeps, intelligence. These companies like these Anthropic and OpenAI and NVIDIA, they have their own internal security that kind of manages these things, and do you work with some of these companies if they hire you? How does that part of it work? Yeah, that's correct. Most large companies have their own internal security department. And some of them will seek companies like mine that have specialists. In a gap that they have or some consulting that they're not seeing. So in Concentric, for example, we're all retired, UK or US intelligence or special operations. So you guys are all, you guys have seen it all, in other words. So you're able to bring that. I like to think so. Bring things. All right. Any final words before we go for viewers that are watching, just so they can understand what we're seeing play out here? You know, what should they understand about all this? Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, if you're a tech worker, know that you're being targeted, but, you know, it is a fine line between paranoia and self-awareness, and collaboration is important in the technical and scientific community. But if there's any suspicious contact or someone reaches out to you on social media, for example, talk to your company's security department, your insider risk program. So that's kind of the way you can kind of balance and see what, you know, You know, if someone's coming to you, if it's... You're being overly paranoid, or it's okay? Yeah, if you have a question, I would definitely talk to a specialist. All right, Mark Trott, a former FBI special agent and program manager for investigations at Concentric Advisors. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it, and appreciate your insight, too. It's very rare we get to talk to someone in your position when we see things like this play out, especially in the Bay Area, of course. All right, we'll be right back here on Mornings on 2 The 9.