Collaboration with industry is key to balancing AI security risks and benefits, as well as staying ahead of China and other adversarial nations, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said Thursday.
The Trump administration is facing pressure from some quarters of Capitol Hill and even some artificial intelligence executives to establish regulations or embrace legislation to guard against the technology’s risks, something the president himself has rejected.
“We’ve never faced a world where our adversaries have the frontier in this space, and so our attempts to optimize that innovation and security is is something that is ongoing, but is increasingly efficient, and it depends on our relationship with industry and our ability to work collaboratively among the the interagency,” Cairncross said at the AI Edge event hosted by The Washington Post.
That collaboration is ever-increasing, he said, such as with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI).
“Industry coordination on this, across critical infrastructure sectors, is improving both on industry-to-government and within industry,” he said. “There is collaboration with CAISSI and others as well to do evaluation and testing on these models. That includes work on guardrailing, sandboxing, et cetera.”
But “we’ve seen in the past, once the government is introduced into this space directly, there is a tendency for the government to start to want to adjust the dials directly, and it is difficult to reverse that,” he said. “I think that would slow, at this point, the innovation cycle that is to our benefit.”
One of the things that has increased the calls for stronger government action is when OpenAI acknowledged that its AI agents went outside testing to hack Hugging Face in July.