Ken D. Kumayama Skadden

Kumayama handles a variety of legal matters for technology companies, many of which use or specialize in artificial intelligence. His biggest concern is that users of the technology may not be aware of the legal boundaries.

“It’s very much like the Wild West in terms of legal compliance,” he said. “When you have so many people dabbling in these technologies, most of them have zero legal background.”

For example, companies may be training their AI or machine learning systems using data that they don’t have the rights to use, he said. Companies may input data from a variety of sources, including internal, end users, third parties, data brokers and data scraping. If any of these sources has been tainted with bad data – because it was gathered in violation of a privacy policy, the company does not have the necessary intellectual property and contractual rights to the data, or personal data was not properly anonymized – it could result in a breach of contract, or patent or privacy claims. To complicate matters, most companies can’t identify where the data comes from.

“As AI becomes more important in every industry, the data rights issues are going to become more prominent, and people need to be aware of them,” he said.

Kumayama represents large companies, including Intel and Broadcom, in technology and commercial transactions related to IP. He does a fair amount of work in Asia with companies that occupy the AI space. Clients include online insurance company ZhongAn and JD.com, a China-based e-commerce platform.

Another issue Kumayama is keeping an eye on is national security and export regulations. With the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act passed late last year, it’s likely the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States will more heavily scrutinize or block outright the foreign acquisition of U.S. companies with advanced AI technologies.

“We won’t know until next year what the rules will be, but there are strong national security issues that the average attorney is not sensitized to. We’ll see many changes in the laws, and the challenge will be to get it right,” Kumayama said.

— Jennifer Chung Klam