No impact to trade secrets—they drive innovation and there’s enough transparency via sharing even though it’s still protected

The concern that a shift to trade secret protection will inhibit AI innovation may be overstated for three reasons. First, trade secret law protects and, therefore, encourages innovation. Kewanee Oil, 416 U.S. at 481 (“The maintenance of standards of commercial ethics and the encouragement of invention are the broadly stated policies behind trade secret law.”).

Second, while an invention protected as a trade secret will not be publicly disclosed, “[t]rade secret law promotes the sharing of knowledge, and the efficient operation of industry; it permits the individual inventor to reap the rewards of his labor by contracting with a company large enough to develop and exploit it.” Id., at 493. Indeed, such sharing, with appropriate persons and under appropriate circumstances, is an inherent part of successfully exploiting a trade secret in a commercial enterprise. See, e.g., id., at 475 (“This necessary element of secrecy is not lost, however, if the holder of the trade secret reveals the trade secret to another ‘in confidence, and under an implied obligation not to use or disclose it.’ These others may include those of the holder’s ‘employees to whom it is necessary to confide it, in order to apply it to the uses for which it is intended.’”) (internal citations omitted).

Third, capitalism—i.e., private industry—along with universities and other centers of research and development, drive innovation. Id., at 491. That is, “if the invention, though still a secret, is put into public use, the competition is alerted to the existence of the inventor’s solution to the problem and may be encouraged to make an extra effort to independently find the solution thus known to be possible.” Id.