The Trump administration will make sure that new AI technologies are secure by design, a senior U.S. official said on Tuesday.
“What we are working for in my lane is to ensure that the technical security is not seen as a barrier to that innovation, but is seen as a fundamental piece of the ability to scale it and move it as quickly as possible,” National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said at an event hosted by the McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security.
President Donald Trump rescinded several of his predecessor’s AI security initiatives early in his second term, arguing that they hindered innovation and focused excessively on social harms such as misinformation and bias. But he also proposed creating an information sharing group for the AI industry that would help companies stay ahead of threats. The remarks from Cairncross, a former Republican political operative who assumed leadership of the Office of the National Cyber Director last August, suggest that some officials in the Trump administration believe cybersecurity can be a selling point for AI platforms.
The administration is focused on helping American AI companies win the global competition with China for market dominance, Cairncross said. “If we’re going to win this race,” he argued, “we’re going to have to scale innovation, and we’re going to have to deploy it and get use cases and development moving.”
Pitching security in global tech tussle
The U.S. and China are also competing to dominate other key technology markets, including 5G wireless technology. Western governments have largely shunned Chinese 5G vendors such as Huawei and ZTE, embracing the U.S. intelligence community’s argument that those companies could plant backdoors in networks for China to abuse. On Tuesday, Cairncross said the Trump administration is continuing a yearslong U.S. government effort to discourage countries not aligned with either Washington or Beijing from buying critical technologies from Chinese firms.
“We are trying to engage our partners and potential partners around the globe in infusing that clean U.S. tech stack into the equation,” Cairncross said, arguing that the Chinese alternative “is not secure.”
Chinese equipment may be less expensive, he added, “but the cheap stuff comes with a giant back-end bill, and when that bill manifests … it can be too late to change things.”
Vision of industry collaboration
Cairncross addressed the audience in Washington two weeks after the Trump administration released its cybersecurity strategy, a short, high-level document that discussed critical infrastructure protection, emerging technologies and digital deterrence. Cairncross said the government wanted to work closely with the U.S. companies that operate important online infrastructure, including to counter foreign adversaries — but he stressed that the government would be the one conducting offensive operations.
“I am not talking about private sector industry or companies engaged in a cyber offensive campaign,” Cairncross said. “What I’m talking about are the technical capabilities, the ability of our private sector to illuminate the battlefield from what they’re seeing, to inform and share information so that the USG can respond, to get ahead of things, respond defensively [and] in a more agile fashion — to engage in this collaborative operation … so that we can go about shaping this risk calculus.”
The government also wants to work with the private sector to help state and local officials protect vulnerable critical infrastructure. Cairncross reiterated his promise that the Trump administration will partner with state governments and industry leaders to “test-drive new [security] technologies … and try to drive the capabilities and the technology level up and the costs down.”
“Where we find success,” he added, “we’’e going to scale off of that.”
Correction: A previous version of this article misprinted a word in one of Sean Cairncross’s quotes.
