This work was done at Atlas Computing, Atlas Ignota’s predecessor organization.
To prevent unauthorized data access, you can add failsafe mechanisms to your hardware to wipe sensitive data upon detecting tampering. However, if you want to prevent unauthorized use of the chips themselves (say, to prevent unmonitored, dangerous AI workloads), you need a tamper response mechanism to make physical modification of the chips prohibitively costly.
Existing hardware security efforts (specifically in the Survival and Flourishing Fund’s FlexHEG RFP) assumed such a tamper mechanism could exist, but no one had one or was actively working to create one.
Mehmet Sencan 
Mehmet Sencan CEO, EARENDIL LinkedIn was working as a Principal Investigator for the NIH and NSF-funded startup Integrated Medical Sensors.
The Atlas Computing team convinced Mehmet Sencan Mehmet Sencan CEO, EARENDIL LinkedIn of both the importance of the problem and viability of the solution direction, leading to him applying and receiving over a million dollars in combined grants from the SFF RFP.
Mehmet, in his LLC, has iterated on designs for tamper-responsive heatsinks, decreasing cost and risks of injury while increasing reliability, yielding the SquibSink, which he will soon be licensed to sell easily to customers (similar to car steering wheels, which, because of their airbags, are labeled as “products containing dangerous goods”).
A tamper-response mechanism no one was building now exists as a working product — ready and awaiting the demand for it.
