NSA Director and Cyber Command chief Gen. Paul Nakasone warns, “Today, the U.S. leads in this critical area, but this lead should not be taken for granted.” Now he heads the new NSA AI agency. (Source: Wikipedia)

NSA Institutes AI Center to Circumvent AI Threats,  with AI That Need Immediate Attention

Hollywood has shown us for years how bad a world run by computers could be. Especially computers that run the military weapons of any major country.

Recently, the plotline of several movies involving AI nearly became a reality. The military has had a challenging time developing a comprehensive program to rein in or at least provide oversight to major tech firms and the advanced products that have changed the world so much in the last year. Finally, some of that oversight was announced recently.

NSA AI Center

The National Security Agency is starting an AI security center for acquiring, developing, and integrating AI into U.S. defense and intelligence systems, the agency’s outgoing director announced Thursday.

Army Gen. Paul Nakasone said the center would be incorporated into the NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, where it works with private industry and international partners to harden the U.S. defense-industrial base against threats from adversaries led by China and Russia.

“The AI Security Center will become NSA’s focal point for leveraging foreign intelligence insights, contributing to the development of best practices guidelines, principles, evaluation methodology, and risk frameworks for AI security, with an end goal of promoting the secure development, integration, and adoption of AI capabilities within our national security systems and our defense industrial base,” Nakasone said.

And it’s more than just the military hardware they are looking at.

“The center also has a goal to ‘understand the threats against their intellectual property and collaborate to help prevent and eradicate threats,’ Nakasone added.”

Computer Warfare

China’s longtime habit of stealing intellectual property from American companies is one of the focuses of the AI Security Center. Recently the U.S. and Japan issued an alert saying Chinese hackers were targeting government, industrial, telecommunications, and other entities that support their militaries.

The NSA earlier this year completed an AI study that pointed to a “clear need” for a focus on security, Nakasone said. The NSA is responsible for setting security standards for the classified systems used across the Defense Department, the intelligence community, and cleared defense contractors.

Several publishers jumped on this story because of the desperate lack of government involvement with the advancements in AI. The growing power of AI is also in the hands of other countries and bad actors.

“AI security is about protecting AI systems from learning, doing and revealing the wrong thing,” Nakasone said. “It is a set of practices to protect AI systems and life cycles from digital attacks, theft and damage. We must build a robust understanding of AI vulnerabilities, foreign intelligence threats to these AI systems and ways to encounter the threat in order to have AI security. We must also ensure that malicious foreign actors can’t steal America’s innovative AI capabilities.”

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