Cyberwarfare in the AI Age

It’s been nearly 15 years since Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned of a “cyber–Pearl Harbor.” Since then, most people have become fairly inured to such a risk. That’s true even as there’s been a steady clip of cyberattacks on the United States and other countries, some of them quite alarming, and even as a new, more powerful AI model is released by an American or Chinese lab seemingly every week.

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Jen Easterly has spent much of the past 20 years defending U.S. cyberspace against such threats. She has been both a military officer and a top civilian official, most recently running the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Now, she warns, the danger is about to get much worse. For all the talk of AI-enabled cyberattacks, and the attention on scarily powerful models from American labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI and from their Chinese counterparts, Easterly worries that the world still fails to appreciate both the magnitude of the threat and the speed with which a true crisis could be approaching. Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Easterly on Thursday, July 30.

Sources:

“The End of Cybersecurity” by Jen Easterly

“Artificial Intelligence’s Threat to Democracy” by Jen Easterly, Scott Schwab, and Cait Conley

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This episode of The Foreign Affairs Interview was produced by Ben Metzner and Kanishk Tharoor, with audio engineering by Todd Yeager and original music by Robin Hilton. Special thanks to Irina Hogan.

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