This Week in Dual-Use
NEWS
In DeepSeek news, a bipartisan group of US Congressional legislators is proposing legislation to ban the app from government-owned devices for fear that it will pass on sensitive information to Chinese authorities.
I previously wrote that China is likely to deploy DeepSeek as a dual-use technology. That is now proving to be true. Unlike Western AI chatbots, DeepSeek is gathering information and piping it into servers in China where it can be accessed by government.
This is straight out of the CCP playbook of military-civil fusion. It blends technology with politics and military products to achieve its long-term strategic goals. That is an alien concept in the West but it’s something that China has perfected, and is now deploying.
Previously China’s programme of censorship and propaganda was kept behind the Great Firewall. But DeepSeek is a game changer for the CCP. Now it can censor information on phones in Washington, or send queries made in London back to Beijing. It can also, imperceptibly, shape the narrative as its chatbot writes content which users copy paste into their lives.
We’re slowly realising that we’ve handed China the ability to read our thoughts and write our memos. The question is whether DeepSeek can ‘do a TikTok’ and win over Donald Trump before the ban comes into force.
In drone news, it appears that Mexican drug cartels are now using First Person View (FPV) drones, similar to the ones used extensively in Ukraine, to target US border guards.
We knew this moment would come, but probably didn’t expect it at the US-Mexico border. The proliferation of cheap weapons technology being deployed in Ukraine was always inevitable. Now the US military is facing the same threat that Ukrainian soldiers have faced for three years.
This is why investors have been excited about the market opportunity for counter-drone systems. Right now, US border guards will be calling round companies in Europe trying to get their hands on equipment to defend themselves from FPV attacks (I actually have it on good authority that they are). It’s also likely they will want their own FPV drones as a deterrent.
And so new markets are created.
In AI news, Google quietly deleted a 7-year-old pledge from its AI principles web page, which promised the company would not design AI for weapons or surveillance.
I reported last week that OpenAI had launched ChatGPT Gov, a product which allows government agencies to use its chatbot within their own secure hosting environments. That was the moment that OpenAI created a new dual-use market. Clearly it didn’t go unnoticed by Google.
We’ve come a long way since the 2018 Project Maven protests, when thousands of Google employees successfully protested the company’s contracts with the US military. Perhaps we’ll look back at that as a golden period of internal peacefulness for Western nations. Today, the US government is trying to stop its employees from using Chinese AI for government work.
This is good news for national security. Now, the debate isn’t whether tech companies should work with governments on AI, it’s about who gets the biggest contracts. The shift from moral stance to market opportunity is happening in real time.
FUNDRAISING
Anduril, a US-based defence tech company, is raising a $2.5bn Series G round at a $28bn valuation (double what it was 6 months ago).
QuEra Computing, a US-based developer of a 256-qubit quantum computer, raised a $230m round.
Hidden Levels, a US-based developer of drone defence systems, raised $100m.
Urban Sky, a US-based developer of high-altitude balloons that capture high-resolution aerial imagery, raised a $30m Series B round.
TheEuropean Commission has allocated over €1bn for collaborative defence research and development under the European Defence Fund.