Bessent says the US-China dialogue on superintelligence will be taken forward when Trump and Xi meet in Shenzhen during APEC
In prepared remarks to the National Committee on US-China Relations in New York, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the dialogue aims to guard against shared risks and "prevent a misunderstanding between our two systems", and that "We also expect to exchange best practices for evaluating and testing advanced models before their release" and "for keeping human judgment firmly in command of this technology." Reuters reports the two sides had agreed to establish a direct channel for alerting each other to serious incidents, which Trump and Xi agreed at their September White House meeting. No cyber provision is mentioned in the account read here.
The Democrats due to lead Congress's homeland security and intelligence committees name CISA restaffing, AI security and renewing CISA 2015 as priorities
Per Federal News Network, Rep. Bennie Thompson says CISA must be able to help stakeholders defend against AI-enabled attacks, Sen. Maggie Hassan names AI security risks and pledges to reverse staff cuts, and Sen. Mark Warner names reauthorising the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 and funding for MS-ISAC as top priorities. FNN says CISA has lost more than 1,000 staff, about a third, since January 2025, and that CISA sent the final CIRCIA incident-reporting rule to the White House for review earlier this autumn, with final rules expected early next year.
The White House nominates Palantir's chief information security officer, Michael LoSapio, to direct CISA
The nominations sent to the Senate on November 9 name Michael LoSapio, of New Jersey, as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; CyberScoop identifies him as Palantir's CISO and reports the agency has been without a Senate-confirmed director for all of the current term.
Staff at the US government's AI testing centre have been asked to report informally to a White House office, the AP reports
Two former officials told the AP that staff at the Commerce Department's Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI), until recently the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, were asked to report informally to an unnamed White House office; the AP says the centre has stopped publishing its research and has no permanent leader.
The White House Super Intelligence Force holds its first meeting, commissions a report on AI risk including cybersecurity, and plans an early-warning system for labs to report breaches and jailbreaks
Per The Next Web, citing Semafor and Bloomberg, the task force chaired by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton met for the first time on October 15, standing for 120 days, and commissioned a report from the President's science advisers covering "cybersecurity and critical infrastructure", biosecurity and "model control and accountability". Defense Under Secretary Emil Michael, a vice chair, leads a planned system for labs to give the government early warning of breaches, hacks and jailbreaks, and labs were told that "delayed notification, inadequate corrective action, and a failure to take responsibility will not be tolerated." Bloomberg reported that no new laws or rules were discussed, and The Next Web says it is not yet clear how the task force would enforce any of this. No White House document on the charter opened to this run.
Eleven companies put $2.4 billion of model access and compute into the federal consortium that houses an AI centre for critical-infrastructure security
A White House fact sheet issued at the Science: A New Golden Age summit on October 8 announces “$2.4B in SI for science tools and compute credits for the Genesis Mission Consortium from eleven industry partners”, which it says will “support over 15 Federal agencies”. It lists the partners and amounts as “NVIDIA ($1B), AMD ($500M), OpenAI ($200M), $150M each from Anthropic and Google” and “$100M each from AMP and Emerald AI, and $50M each from AWS, Armada, Crusoe, and Micron”. The fact sheet says this follows “a $5 billion Federal commitment to support National Science & Technology Challenges across energy, health, space, and more” and “the expansion of the Genesis Mission in July to over 15 Federal agencies”. It records regional compute capacity alongside the consortium: “More than 14 universities across 10 states launched the Southeast Regional SI Computing Consortium”; “Universities, industry, and the State of Georgia announced a $1 billion investment in scientific computing”; and “Five universities across North and South Carolina joined together to launch a regional compute hub”. The NSF and DOE “announced an investment of over $100 million in SI-enabled scientific instrumentation and autonomous laboratories”, following NSF's July “$400 million investment in programmable cloud labs”. Genesis Mission is the programme NIST joined on August 4 under a memorandum of understanding with the Energy Department that established an AI centre for critical infrastructure security; this fact sheet states no cybersecurity provision, names no security programme and does not mention that centre, framing the spending instead as scientific acceleration — “Super intelligence (SI) will be the greatest accelerant of scientific progress in human history.” No partner has separately confirmed its own figure here, and the remainder of the summit's announcements — space nuclear power, a quantum computing competition, a virtual-biology initiative and research fellowships — carry no cyber bearing and are not recorded on this board.
China-aligned actors impersonated a former White House science official and an Anthropic employee to phish AI policy experts
Proofpoint reports that the China-aligned group it tracks as TA419 has run credential phishing “impersonating prominent economists and artificial intelligence (AI) policymakers to target AI experts working for US think tanks, universities, and legal sector organizations,” beginning on 8 July 2026, among them “Lynne Edwards Parker, the former Principal Deputy Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy” and “Heidi Crebo-Rediker, a prominent economist and foreign policy expert.” Earlier, “in February 2026, the group impersonated a senior employee of the AI company Anthropic to target an AI policy analyst at a US think tank,” with the subject line “Request for Feedback on Military Integration of Claude.” The tooling is “Frameless BitB, an open-source Browser-in-the-Browser kit” that “contains the BitB overlay alongside an Evilginx phishlet for Microsoft 365 and server-side substitution rules that inject the kit into proxied pages”: reached through a shortened URL, “the proxy relays the sign-in to genuine Microsoft infrastructure, so the target's password, MFA code, and conditional access checks all succeed while the attacker captures the resulting session cookies.” Proofpoint assesses that the activity “likely supports wider Chinese intelligence objectives to better understand ongoing developments within the US AI policy and regulatory landscape,” and has tracked the group against think tanks, defence contractors, universities and law firms in the US and Japan “since at least April 2025.” It names no victim organisation and does not say whether any account was compromised.
Transluce counts more than 200,000 agent requests to a US Education Department site, a SQL injection probe among them
In a report published September 30, Transluce says that “On June 17, while apparently looking up school statistics, agents made more than 200,000 requests to a U.S. Department of Education website,” and that the activity included “a SQL injection probe where the agents added the text `State_Id=1 OR 1=1` in an attempt to bypass the site's normal filters.” The same report records 295,912 captures on May 6 “across multiple Maryland hosts containing education statistics, peaking at 5,594 captures per minute,” 36,578 user-triggered captures of KansasMemory.gov on May 7 peaking at 1,093 a minute, and activity touching the White House Office of Management and Budget, “the Departments of War, Justice, and Commerce,” the CDC, the SEC, the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and “Naval History and Heritage Command's website, history.navy.mil.” Transluce says “We have so far identified no instances in these datasets where agents gained access to any information that is not publicly available” and that “we are not attributing this traffic as a whole to OpenAI nor do we attempt to estimate attribution for each incident.” It disclosed the Education Department attempt to the department on September 25 and the Canadian activity to the Canadian government on September 28.
Six AI companies sign a voluntary White House accord on capability controls and outside audits (via Dark Reading)
OpenAI, Google, Meta, Nvidia, xAI and Anthropic signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, a voluntary agreement calling for four layers of oversight: internal controls monitoring model capabilities during training and deployment “with attention to cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical threats,” a dedicated internal team to ensure those controls function, independent external audits verifying them, and an independent board committee overseeing the process. The accord sets no implementation deadlines, imposes no mandatory requirements, enforcement mechanism or public reporting, and says that “over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.”
An executive order renames artificial intelligence “Super Intelligence” across the executive branch
The order, “Inaugurating The Era of Super Intelligence,” states that “it is therefore the policy of my Administration that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, the executive branch shall use the terms ‘Super Intelligence’ and ‘SI’ in place of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI,’” and directs that “executive departments and agencies shall use ‘Super Intelligence’ and ‘SI’ in place of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’ in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents, and other non-statutory documents.” Its stated reason is that “the terminology used by the Federal Government should reflect the transformative capabilities of these technologies.” The order carries no cybersecurity, vulnerability, evaluation or critical-infrastructure provision of any kind, and no executive order number appears on it. It is the source of the name the voluntary White House accord signed the following day carries.
The US and China agreed to open a communication channel for AI incidents (via CBS News)
Following a three-day summit in Washington between President Xi Jinping and President Trump, reported on September 26, the two countries agreed to establish a channel for handling AI-related incidents. The Chinese side's statement is that “both sides will set up a communication mechanism for artificial intelligence-related incidents, to discuss related risks and benefits, with an AI-specific dialogue scheduled for November.” The two sides also “agreed to sign a memorandum of understanding on strengthening crisis communications and preventing crises between the two militaries,” which was not signed at the summit. The White House said the two leaders agreed on using the term “super intelligence” rather than “artificial intelligence” to describe the technology. Beyond “to discuss related risks and benefits,” no scope for the incident mechanism is given by either side. It follows Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's September 20 proposal to China of a notification mechanism for AI incidents that could affect national security.
The White House asks OpenAI and Anthropic to hold their newest models back from UK testers
Politico reported that the White House asked OpenAI and Anthropic to withhold their newest models from the UK AI Security Institute until a US-led security review is complete, with Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5.1 restricted to US organisations and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra also named; OpenAI did not comment. AISI director Henry de Zoete acknowledged in a letter to Parliament that the institute lacked access to Anthropic's latest model. The request follows President Trump's September 22 statement that "the United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control artificial intelligence." The US counterpart body, CAISI, has had no permanent director since Chris Fall left in July 2026 and is run by acting head Arvind Raman.
California names four outside experts to work up the kill switch and onsite lab verification its AI order called for
Five days after Executive Order N-9-26, the Governor's office named Jason Goldman (Center for Shared AI Prosperity board member, first White House Chief Digital Officer), Gillian Hadfield (Johns Hopkins, Vector Institute), Alondra Nelson (Institute for Advanced Study, former acting director of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy) and Rob Reich (Stanford, former senior advisor to the United States AI Safety Institute), and directed the Government Operations Agency to accelerate the order's implementation timelines. The release restates the two measures the experts are to work up: “Advance the creation of a ‘kill switch' for frontier models, with the efficacy of the switch verified on an ongoing basis by an independent verification organization” and “Require frontier AI companies to embed a designated independent verification organization onsite in their labs to conduct regular audits and evaluations.”
The stopgap spending law pushes the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act sunset to December 11
The Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027 funds federal agencies through December 11, 2026 and, at sections 2011 and 2012, amends the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 and the Federal Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2015 by striking “September 30, 2026” and inserting “December 11, 2026”. The White House statement recording the signature names only surface transportation and veteran programs and does not mention the cyber authorities.
AI-agent firewall startup AIR Security launches with $50 million from Sequoia and Greenoaks
AIR Security came out of stealth with $50 million raised across two rounds — $10 million led by Sequoia Capital and $40 million led by Greenoaks Capital Partners, with Swish Ventures and Netz Capital also participating — for an inline firewall that screens the instructions, tools and data an AI agent reaches before it acts and maintains a vetted marketplace of add-ons. The company says its own scanning found more than 17,800 public AI add-ons with 6.7 million installations drawing instructions from untrusted external sources, and add-ons impersonating Anthropic and OpenAI that could execute arbitrary code; it reports more than 20 customers, about a quarter of them large enterprises. Angel investors named include Wiz co-founder Yinon Costica and former White House deputy national security adviser for cyber Anne Neuberger.
White House memorandum authorizes vetted private companies to run cyber operations against foreign criminal organizations
A presidential memorandum, "Expanding Capabilities to Combat Transnational Cyber-Enabled Crime," directs a National Coordination Center program authorizing rigorously vetted private companies to conduct cyber surveillance operations and "cyber effects operations" — defined as activity "that results in the manipulation, disruption, denial, degradation, or destruction of information systems" — against foreign cyber-enabled transnational criminal organizations. Each operation must be approved by co-executive directors drawn from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security; the program bars intentionally targeting U.S. persons or domestic systems, requires a bond of not less than $1 million, and prohibits any single director from approving operations that could cause "Critical Outcomes" such as loss of life.
National Cyber Director Cairncross backs global adoption of US open-source AI and rejects a formal AI regulatory regime
Speaking at Black Hat in Las Vegas, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said the administration wants U.S.-built open-source AI to become the preferential technology of choice globally, and argued a regulatory regime 'would be obsolete 48 hours after' completing its process, favouring flexible government-industry information sharing instead. Nextgov reported that on the same day the White House told major developers that open-weight models would not be included in its new voluntary government testing program.
Five Senate Democrats demand a published framework for restricting access to US AI models
Sens. Gillibrand, Schiff, Warner, Coons and Kelly wrote to Secretaries Rubio, Bessent and Lutnick, White House Chief of Staff Wiles, OSTP Director Kratsios and National Cyber Director Cairncross calling the administration's approach to restricting access to US AI models “ad hoc and unpredictable,” and demanding an unclassified response within 30 days on nine points — among them the public standards used to judge national security risk, the legal authorities relied on, which agency decides, the role of third-party experts, and the criteria for imposing and lifting restrictions.
White House launches 'Gold Eagle', a Treasury-led clearinghouse for AI-discovered cybersecurity vulnerabilities
The White House announced GOLD EAGLE, a clearinghouse for coordinating cybersecurity vulnerability disclosure between government and industry, led by the Department of the Treasury with participation from DHS/CISA and the Department of War. The release states the initiative was established under Executive Order 14409 (signed June 2, 2026) and has already begun to intake and prioritize identified vulnerabilities and coordinate scanning verifications.