ABSTRACT
Companies create, collect, and manage significant amounts of economically valuable information. Some of this information is deliberately kept secret and can be protected under trade secret law. Trade secret laws protect certain forms of secret and economically valuable information against improper use or disclosure by others. Artificial intelligence (AI) raises many challenging issues for trade secret law. This entry identifies some of the major issues and what commentators have said about them: (1) protecting AI as a trade secret, (2) the difference between closed-source and open-source AI and the trade secrecy implications, (3) risks posed by generative AI to existing trade secrets, (4) whether AI poses risks to companies’ trade secrets, (5) whether AI-generated outputs can be protected as trade secrets, and (6) whether trade secrecy stands in the way of transparency goals.
Hrdy, Camilla Alexandra, Trade Secrets and Artificial Intelligence (July 14, 2025), Rutgers Law School Research Paper; Forthcoming in Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence and the Law (Edward Elgar, Ryan Abbott and Elizabeth Rothman eds, forthcoming, 2026).
Leave a Reply