Best thing to do if they can get something working is to get the information on how to do it spread out as far and as wide as possible.
No patents - they can be bought up and shelved. No trade secrets - that's a death sentence for sure, and the knowledge dies too. Yes, it minimizes the profitability of it, but that's better than the machine never seeing the light of day
But yes, in the end I'm a bit of a Doubting Thomas - I need to see this one to believe it.
Yep, Ben Franklin gave many of his inventions to the world freely.