Issue: ORN-2026-31

AI advances are pushing governments to treat cyberattacks as routine, Western officials say: The rise of autonomous artificial intelligence systems capable of finding and exploiting software flaws is putting serious pressure on governments to treat cyberattacks as inevitable events rather than rare emergencies, senior officials from the United States, Canada and Britain said Wednesday. “Cyber compromise is not a black swan anymore. It’s just a swan,” Joseph Alm, the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for cyber, infrastructure, risk and resilience policy, said on an OpenPolicy panel at the Black Hat cyber conference. Organizations can no longer treat a breach as an unforeseeable crisis, he argued, and they should instead assume one will occur and prepare to limit the damage. Alm said governments and companies need to devote more attention to “harm reduction,” including the steps they would take to contain an intrusion and continue operating after a hacker gets inside. AI is making it easier for hackers to find and exploit the weaknesses already buried in older technology, he added.

The remarks highlight a bleak near-term reality for cyberdefenders that concludes AI systems will find and exploit weaknesses faster than governments can fix them, and that agencies will need to assume some attacks will succeed and plan accordingly. Michael Duffy, the federal government’s acting chief information security officer, said federal cyber policies over the past decade have largely been written after a crisis, with the Office of Personnel Management and SolarWinds breaches prompting new requirements designed to prevent the same failures from recurring. More information is posted on the NextGov website.

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Tech Bills of the Week: Deterring AI distillation; Taxing AI developers; and more: The Blocking Large-Scale Adversarial Distillation Efforts — or BLADE — Act of 2026 was introduced on Wednesday, just weeks after the White House voiced concern over Chinese AI developers training their models on American AI systems in a process called distillation. The BLADE Act mandates that the Executive Branch identify and consolidate the specific foreign entities driving illegal distillation operations.  “As the United States must remain at the forefront of competitiveness in artificial intelligence, we cannot allow our adversaries to steal the intellectual property of America’s top AI companies and thereby threaten U.S. national security and economic security,” said Hagerty in a press release. “The BLADE Act will expose and punish foreign entities that conduct hostile distillation campaigns against our frontier AI companies. Our nation must counter malign actors who seek to subvert our nation’s leadership and innovation in artificial intelligence.” After composing and publicly releasing the list of entities engaging in AI model distillation, the Department of Commerce and Department of Treasury would be tasked with imposing export controls and financial sanctions, respectively, on the listed entities. The BLADE Act boasts bipartisan support, with Sens. Tim Scott, R-S.C., Andy Kim, D-N.J., and Catherine Cortez Mastro, D-Nev., joining Hagerty in introducing the bill. 

Rep. George Whitesides, D-Calif., introduced a new bill on Monday that would instruct the National Science Foundation to develop more workshops that examine how to effectively deploy AI in education environments. The Understanding AI in the Classroom Act specifically aims to examine the impact AI has on kids’ attention spans; their cognitive, social and behavioral development; and their burgeoning dependencies. Six months after the workshops are completed, the NSF director will then compile a report on the findings and share them with the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. More information is posted on the NextGov website.