AI safety depends on government capacity. Washington is weakening it. - Federal News Network

CISA has shed roughly a third of its workforce since early 2025 — fired, resigned, or quietly wandered off — which is a bold staffing model for the agency nominally responsible for stopping a language model from talking the power grid into a bad mood. One in three gone. In an organisation that runs on institutional memory, that isn't a reorganisation, it's a fire drill in which the entire building decided to leave first and let the fire handle itself. Federal News Network's commentary delivers the observation with the flat affect of a man who has stopped bothering to be surprised.

Then there's Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's alignment research lead, cited here putting a 10% chance on AI ending humanity within a decade. Ten per cent. That's a one-in-ten coin flip on the species — the sort of number that ought to interrupt a meeting — and the apparatus responds with a brand-new White House task force, biosecurity on the agenda, and a report inside 120 days. A hundred and twenty days is four months: long enough to draft an executive summary, argue about the cover font, and misplace another tranche of CISA staff to LinkedIn. The commentary's best line is also its shortest: "a study is not a safeguard." No, it's a deliverable. Entirely different thing.

Worth remembering the New York kill-switch bill we covered recently, all that lovely statutory drafting with an off button in it — a switch somebody will eventually have to staff, inspect and maintain, presumably with the two-thirds of the civil service still at their desks and increasingly disinclined to answer email. The pattern is now depressingly legible: capability ships quarterly, oversight ships whenever someone finishes the report, and the people who would have done the overseeing have been kindly invited to pursue other opportunities. Hubinger says 10%. The task force says 120 days. CISA says nothing, because roughly a third of the people who'd have said it are gone. Somewhere a consultancy is billing somebody for this.