This notice is a joke. Actually it implies that at the Clarifai company, the staff in this small team is prohibited from discussing work with others. The departing employees and current employees say that the team is busy developing a controversial Pentagon project. This project uses a machine learning algorithm to read drone surveillance images, and Clarifai's secret security has not reached the proper level. The former employee Amy Liu stated in the lawsuit filed this month that Clarifai's computer system Being threatened by one or more individuals in Russia, it is possible that it will leak the technology used by the US military to attack the enemy.
The lawsuit alleges that Clarifai discovered the loophole in November last year, but the company’s chief executive officer and other senior executives did not immediately report the matter to the Pentagon. In her complaint, she had worked before the military intelligence department. Air Force Capt. Liu said that she had been unfairly dismissed because she believed that the company needed to publicly report the incident. Before she was expelled, she was the head of the company’s marketing department.
Another former employee told Wired magazine that he was very worried about executives' indifference to hacking and decided to leave the company.
The company's former and current staff members all said that Clarifai is working on a project called Project Maven. The Pentagon launched this project with the aim of adding artificial intelligence to the US military. The project has caused dissent within Google, and Google has also A similar drone project was implemented. Then the company’s 4,500 employees signed a joint protest stating that they did not want Google’s smart technology to become a killing accomplice for the US military. This incident prompted the company to subsequently publish its use of artificial intelligence technology. The Code of Ethics, and promised not to renew after the expiration of next year.
Clarifai declined to respond whether he had participated in the Maven project. A spokesperson stated that the incident involving the security incident was a 'non-targeted robot' that infected a research server that could not access any data or code. Said that the company has informed the customer about the incident but declined to disclose when the company informed the customer, or whether the Pentagon was notified of the situation.
Clarifai was founded in 2013 by Matthew Zeller, a Ph.D., who studied machine learning with professors. He later became a top artificial intelligence researcher at Google and Facebook. The startup company provides businesses with image recognition capabilities. Services can accomplish tasks such as identifying celebrities and food. Ms. Liu said that she understands why the US military needs to expand the use of artificial intelligence technology. She also said that Clarifai's lack of transparency and security guarantees made the company less suitable for the Pentagon. Assistant to realize his plan. Ms. Liu said: 'If Google now withdraws from the market, they can only choose companies like Clarifai. This is a sad and scary thing'.
In response to a question about its approach to developing artificial intelligence technology, a spokesperson mentioned Clarifai's core values on their website. They described the company as being driven by our mission to continuously improve artificial intelligence. To accelerate the progress of mankind. 'Ms. Liu said that when she helped draft Clarifai’s contract for the Maven project in June 2017, she was selected to join the military work of Clarifai.
This article believes that the technology developed by Clarifai for commercial customers can be used to do certain things, such as detecting and calculating cars and people that appear in drone images. Ms. Liu said that Clarifai signed a deadline last summer. 6 months worth $7 million contract. Like Google, Clarifai was also a subcontractor to ECS Federal. This company is an IT contractor headquartered in Fairfax, VA.
The contract to win the Maven project was a great victory for Clarifai. An internal document starting from the end of 2017 showed that most of the company’s trading prospects were less than $100,000.
However, Ms. Liu and others familiar with the project said that the executives concealed the fact that Kraft participated in military work. He described the project as a government contract that could save lives. Two people involved in the project stated that they Initially, they were not informed that the monitoring technology they built was for the military.
The current staff and former staff all stated that about 10 people at Clarifai work in the Maven Project Department, and their workshops were later marked as 'Confidential'. For some people, the purpose of this project is only to look like Officials of the military’s staff visited Clarifai’s office to discuss the system under development before it could be fully demonstrated. Clarifai’s spokesperson stated that the company had ensured that employees knew what they were doing.
According to an original incident report seen by Wired magazine, in early November, Clarifai was informed by Internet service provider Cogent that one of the company’s servers appeared to be attacking Indiana University. The report stated that the company’s code and its The credentials of the Amazon Web Services account may be compromised, and the malware that caused it all appears to be originating from a Russian computer. A Clarifai spokesperson stated that the company’s investigation found that neither the company’s data nor the code had been compromised. influences.
In a chat that was reviewed by Wired magazine on November 7, the company's chief executive, Zeller, said that the malware was trying to link computers around the world, including computers belonging to the U.S. government. Zeller wrote: 'Interesting. One of them is the Ministry of Defense Network Information Center.'
Ms. Liu said that the next day she heard from other employees that the company had been hacked. Not long afterwards, she complained that Clarifai’s general counsel, Carolyn McAvoy, told her via the Slack message that she was in the utility room. meet.
There, McCafferty described in detail the executives' understanding of the hacking attack and asked for help in planning the internal news about the incident. She stated that she was concerned about the Pentagon, and perhaps other corporate clients, should also be It was informed, but McCaffrey stated that these were redundant until the internal investigation was completed.
Both former employees and current employees said that later in the day, McCafferty announced at a company meeting that no record of any hacking incident was allowed. In her lawsuit, Ms. Liu said that she was with her. At the next meeting of the manager, he mentioned the schedule for reporting the hacking incident to the government. Then she was fired a few days later.
A former employee and an incumbent employee stated that the company had not disclosed the incident to the Pentagon in a few weeks. A company spokesperson stated that the company’s customers received notice of the incident but declined to say when. The woman’s complaint stated that the Pentagon understood the incident through other means, but her and her lawyers refused to elaborate on it.
Ms. Liu said that she was told that she was fired because her job was inconsistent with the Clarifai sales team. Her lawsuit claimed that the real reason she was fired was that she had urged the company to inform the Pentagon about the incident.
Her complaint was filed with the Inspector General of the Ministry of National Defense, claiming that Clarifai company violated the Pentagon's regulations and did not report leaks within 72 hours and violated the prohibition of retaliation against contractor employees who attempted to disclose information in violation of departmental regulations. Military Law. The spokesperson for Clarifai confirmed that Ms. Liu was dismissed in November last year, but denied that the company had done anything unfair.
Informed sources said that earlier this year, Clarifai's Maven contract was extended for two months, because the Pentagon liked the company's technology. At that time, several employees had already been separated or assigned to the project.
Clarifai, which has offices in both Manhattan and San Francisco, is still struggling to expand the work of the government and defense departments, partly because it hired new employees closer to the Pentagon. The startup’s website lists five of Washington, DC’s Open engineer position.