Source: Virginia Lawyers Weekly

Virginia Lawyers Weekly examines the vulnerability of trade secrets in the age of advanced artificial intelligence, specifically focusing on the threat of reverse engineering. The article discusses how competitors can use "model extraction attacks" or query-based probing to reconstruct the functionality of a proprietary AI system without ever seeing the source code. It argues that traditional trade secret laws may be insufficient to protect against these black-box interrogation techniques, which sit in a legal grey area.

The piece advises legal counsel to reinforce their clients' protection strategies by combining technical countermeasures (like API rate limiting) with robust legal contracts that explicitly prohibit reverse engineering and model inversion. It also touches upon the "inevitable disclosure" doctrine in employment law, warning that employees moving between tech firms pose a heightened risk of transferring unprotectable "know-how" regarding AI architecture.