The United States and allied governments are “buying time for our systems to become more secure” as artificial intelligence advances and spreads, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said Thursday.
“That is a big deal to be ahead of this, to be ahead of this race, and because it’s an exponential equation,” he said at the Billington CyberSecurity Summit. “Once you fall behind, it is much more difficult to make it up, and so that is the context in which all this is taking place. We are trying to balance the innovation side of running at speed with securing our systems and handling this technology responsibly, which is to say, not letting it fall into the hands of people who would do us harm, our adversaries.”
Earlier this week, U.S. security agencies accused Chinese AI companies of trying to illegally distill U.S. frontier AI models. Also this week, Anthropic disclosed a fourth AI hacking incident where one of its models broke into third-party systems.
“We all face the same threat picture, and it’s vital that we’re working closely together to secure those systems before that technological cycle catches up on the back end,” Cairncross said.
AI has further exposed long-standing cybersecurity problems that have gone unaddressed, he said.