Senators press Trump admin to rally federal government around AI safety, security - CyberScoop

Marvellous. Members of Congress have discovered AI security, and, being members of Congress, their chosen instrument is a letter. This one goes to Jay Clayton — simultaneously director of national intelligence and, per the report, the new White House "AI czar" — and to Michael Kratsios at the Office of Science and Technology Policy. One man runs the spy agencies, and that same man is apparently also the czar of the thing the spies are meant to be worried about. Nothing about that arrangement suggests a bottleneck, obviously. No signatories are named in the piece, which is either discretion or a very busy diary.

The asks are unimpeachable and pleasingly alphabetical: "standards, testing, auditing, and defensive AI," plus more "aggressive" use of AI for defensive cybersecurity. The centrepiece phrase — that the federal government should "bring its full capacities to bear on this challenge" — is magnificent drafting, in that "full capacities" has been doing heavy lifting in Washington since roughly the Manhattan Project and has never once meant a funded mandate. Standards written by whom? Auditing performed by whom? Independent testing, conducted independently by the very people who commissioned the model? You can already hear the procurement seminars being scheduled, and the sandwiches are terrible.

We have been here before: four hundred scientists asked for an international body to airgap the whole business, and the American reply arrives in the form of a strongly worded letter to a czar. The real tell is "aggressive" defensive AI — the safety conversation quietly folded into the cybersecurity budget line, where "defensive" means whatever the agency spending it needs it to mean. Still, one must salute the ambition: standards, testing and auditing for a technology whose vendors cannot agree on what it does, delivered at the speed of government. The standards will arrive, the testing will be piloted, and the auditing will be a pilot of the pilot.