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Tech bills of the week: Monitoring AI’s use under Section 702; Preventing abuse of Flock plate readers; and more

Edward Graham — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 18:43:00 -0400

Oversight of AI use under FISA

Bipartisan House lawmakers introduced legislation on Thursday that would require the Director of National Intelligence to submit a report to Congress detailing how artificial intelligence is being used “to acquire, analyze, query, disseminate or otherwise access information” collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The powerful foreign spying authority allows intelligence agencies, like the NSA and FBI, to collect the communications of foreigners abroad without a warrant. The program is controversial, however, because messages and calls from Americans communicating with foreign targets can also be intercepted. Congress failed to reauthorize Section 702 earlier this year, although it is continuing to operate in the meantime through its existing court authorization.

The measure, from Reps. Addison McDowell, R-N.C., and James Walkinshaw, D-Va., calls for the report to be submitted within 180 days of the bill’s enactment. In addition to how AI is being used, the bill also calls for an assessment of the safeguards in place around the use of the tools, as well as further details about the types of models being used under Section 702.

“Artificial intelligence is changing the way industries across our country are collecting and analyzing information,” McDowell said in a statement. “Congress has a responsibility to ensure these tools strengthen our national security while protecting the constitutional rights and freedoms that define our Nation.”

Cracking down on the use of automatic license plate readers

Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., and Michael Cloud, R-Texas, rolled out a bill on Tuesday to rein in the use of automatic license plate readers by law enforcement agencies.

Their legislation, the No Federal License-Plate Observation and Camera Keeping — or NO FLOCK — Act, is a nod to plate readers provided by surveillance firm Flock Safety, which has come under fire in recent months amid privacy and civil rights concerns associated with the use of its technologies.

The lawmakers’ proposal would require that states enact laws limiting the use of the automatic license plate readers “to specific public safety and toll-enforcement purposes.” States that fail to enforce or pass the restrictions would, after a two-fiscal-year implementation period, have 10% of their federal surface transportation funding withheld each fiscal year.

“Automated license plate readers can be powerful tools for law enforcement to investigate serious crimes and protect our communities, but they must not become tools for officers to stalk ex-partners or spy on people for personal reasons,” Krishnamoorthi said in a statement. “Our investigation into Flock exposed serious gaps in oversight, and this bipartisan bill would put clear limits in place to prevent abuse while preserving legitimate public safety uses.”

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism is scheduled to hold a hearing on Sept. 23 into Flock’s nationwide use.

Using AI to drive advances in pediatric cancer research

A bipartisan trio of House lawmakers is pushing a measure that looks to enhance the use of AI and other emerging technologies within pediatric cancer research and treatment.

The bill — from Reps. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, Ami Bera, D-Calif., and Mike Kelly, R-Pa. — looks to use AI to accelerate pediatric cancer breakthroughs “by improving data sharing, strengthening predictive modeling, and modernizing clinical trials.” All three lawmakers are co-chairs of the Congressional Childhood Cancer Caucus.

The proposal would also establish an AI coordinator to help streamline pediatric cancer research and treatment efforts across government and through public-private partnerships, and also codify and enhance support for the National Cancer Institute’s Childhood Cancer Data Initiative.

“We owe it to our nation's children to leverage cutting-edge AI to improve their care and treatment options,” McCaul said. “I'm proud to introduce this bill, which codifies and builds on President Trump's executive order to unlock cures for pediatric cancer patients. By empowering AI to continuously drive research forward, we move one step closer to beating this heartbreaking disease once and for all.”

Confronting rogue AI agents

Reps. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., also introduced the Stop Rogue AI Act on Tuesday to help craft guidelines that agencies and the private sector can use to address the dangers posed by maverick capabilities.

Their bill calls for the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop “national standards, guidelines, and best practices for discovering, verifying and controlling AI agents.” These standards would be directed to, in part, include ways that entities can identify and track AI agents on their systems, verify the builders and operators of agents, and monitor agents in real time.

Federal contractors and agencies would also be mandated to include those standards into the ways that they buy and deploy AI agents.

“AI agents are becoming more capable and more deeply integrated into our government and economy,” Lawler said in a statement. “We need to make sure we know what these systems are, what they can access, and who is responsible for them. We can harness the benefits of AI while making sure these systems don’t operate in the shadows of the networks they have access to.”

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NASA employees: EEOC committed ‘flagrant distortions’ to decertify class complaint

Erich Wagner — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:35:36 -0400

A group of National Aeronautics and Space Administration employees on Thursday challenged the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s decision last month to strip them of class-action status in a long-running discrimination case, accusing the commission’s Republican majority of committing “flagrant distortions” of the facts and law.

In 2013, NASA workers filed a class action complaint with EEOC, alleging that the agency’s performance appraisal system systematically advantaged white employees and disadvantaged Black and Asian-American workers. Due to delays on EEOC’s part, an administrative judge did not certify the class until 2022, over NASA’s objection.

But in a decision last month, the Republican majority atop the EEOC voted 2-1 to decertify the class and, in an unusual step, ruled in NASA’s favor on the merits of class agents’ individual complaints, rather than remand the case back to the administrative judge. Weeks later, EEOC officials cited it and other long-delayed cases as part of their argument for ending class action cases in the federal sector entirely and removing federal workers’ right to request a hearing before a judge in cases alleging discrimination.

On Thursday, complainants in the case filed a motion asking EEOC to reconsider its decision, a necessary step before appealing the decision in federal circuit court. Though they missed the 30-day deadline to make such a motion, they said that is because EEOC failed to inform them of its ruling.

The motion alleges that EEOC’s decision relied on a jaundiced view of both the underlying facts in the case and federal civil rights law.

“This type of radical change in established legal procedures, achieved partly through distorted depictions of the arguments and evidence in the case, undermines the rule of law, which is rooted in principles of stability, fairness and civil justice,” attorneys for the complainants wrote. “While reconsideration is rarely granted, it is imperative in this case.”

EEOC’s August decision summarizes the NASA employees’ complaint as alleging that judging employees’ performance based upon teamwork and communication creates a disparate impact negatively impacting Black and Asian-American employees’ performance ratings. The Trump administration has separately staked out the position that disparate impact liability is unconstitutional.

“Specifically, class agents allege the ‘communication’ and ‘collaboration and teamwork’ critical elements—which are included in every employee’s performance plan—led to disparate outcomes for African-American and Asian-American employees compared to their white peers,” EEOC wrote. “Class agents attribute these disparate outcomes to the fact that the performance system relies extensively on a frontline supervisor’s subjective discretion to score these elements.”

But the complainants said that was just one of six interrelated flaws in the performance appraisal system, and EEOC declined to address the others.

“Class agents in no way elevated the fourth [Employee Performance Communication System] flaw as more important than the other five,” the NASA workers’ motion states. “Yet the ‘Facts’ section of the decision misleadingly singles it out . . . Then the discussion of EPCS in the analysis section again focuses on the standards for communication and teamwork. The decision briefly mentions only one of the other six identified flaws; it entirely ignores the other four.”

They also took issue with the commission’s decision to decide the underlying merits of the case, despite not providing the parties with an opportunity to submit legal briefs.

“Without input from the parties, the commission erroneously concludes that ‘the agency’s practices are undisputedly job-related and consistent with business necessity’ and that ‘class members have not, and cannot, demonstrate a viable alternative to the challenged employment practice,’” the complainants wrote. “[But] class agents do not challenge that supervisory discretion is necessary and appropriate in EPCS. Instead, they challenge the level of discretion that NASA gives supervisors and contend that viable alternatives would reduce that discretion while meeting NASA’s need to evaluate and improve performance.”

For example, while NASA advises supervisors to write “standards” for employees at the start of the year that are “SMART”—specific, measurable, aggressive yet achievable, results-oriented, and time-based—examples that NASA provides to supervisors are not in that format. The complainants argued the agency could correct this by changing the examples it provides to supervisors, improving training more broadly, or engaging in targeted training for supervisors whose standards write-ups are not in SMART format.

In a statement last month, the EEOC’s lone Democratically appointed commissioner, Kalpana Kotagal decried her colleagues’ decision to decertify classes in this case and two others and suggested they were pretextual in nature.

“These decisions break with these longstanding agency goals by making it harder for federal employees to pursue class claims and get relief in the class complaint process,” Kotagal said. “Shockingly, the commission goes out of its way to decertify classes in decades-old cases, or to resolve questions not before the agency. Unfortunately, the outcome of these decisions feels predetermined: to make it harder for workers to challenge systemic discrimination and vindicate their civil rights.”

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FAFSA's turnaround wasn't a miracle. That's the point.

Christopher Inman — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:27:00 -0400

School is back in session, and so is the clock on financial aid for millions of students. The 2027–28 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is scheduled to open Oct. 1.

This on-time opening cycle is great news: government technology working well for the people it serves. But more often, we hear about these systems working well only after something goes terribly wrong.

In 2013, HealthCare.gov crashed within hours of its launch, leaving people attempting to enroll for coverage stuck behind error messages for weeks. In 2020, as COVID-19 layoffs surged, state unemployment insurance systems crumbled under the volume influx, leaving newly jobless people waiting months for benefits that many needed immediately.

And in 2024, FAFSA joined the list. The U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) Federal Student Aid office (FSA) left millions of students and families scrambling after a systemwide meltdown. Behind it was a fragmented redesign, spread across multiple vendor systems, with no single point of technical ownership and no ability to catch failures before they reached the public. The “new” FAFSA launched three months late from its promised date. Calculation errors rendered hundreds of thousands of applications unusable, pushing financial aid offices to attempt manual workarounds while the records were reprocessed.

In each case, specialized teams were brought in to clean up. To the public, the failures looked inevitable and the fixes looked like miracles.

In 2026, the FAFSA story is different. The same office, under the same statute and the same October deadline, has delivered its best cycle on record. The 2026–27 FAFSA opened Sept. 24, 2025, the earliest launch in the program’s history, and the high school class of 2026 went on to set an all-time record for FAFSA completion: 59.1 percent, nearly five points above the previous high.

What’s made the difference? Moving away from individuals fixing problems as they arise to a more robust, proactive engineering practice. This practice includes automated tests that run every time the code changes, monitoring that flags trouble before a student clicks submit, and the ability to trace a single application from start to finish when something goes wrong. FSA built that practice with our team, and FSA runs it. The result is a system that finds its own mistakes instead of making them in public.

The numbers back this up. Before the joint redesign, an initial analysis of real-time processing revealed a baseline of only 0.8 percent of online applications processed in under one minute with the majority falling into the standard window timeframe of one to three days. Today, new FAFSA transactions take seconds, not days, to process. 91.8 percent of transactions are now processed in under 10 seconds with a median of two seconds and 63 percent of initially rejected applications are corrected to completion within the same hour, at a median of about 26 minutes. None of this is a miracle, and the work remains ongoing. Unlike the crisis-driven fixes, the new FAFSA is designed to improve as it runs.

Right now FSA is beta testing a two-phase approach to the 2027-2028 FAFSA cycle. The first phase began Aug. 5, 2026, followed by the Beta 2 phase in September. The extensive testing allows for real students and families to submit applications prior to the public launch to detect issues. So far they’ve turned up identity-verification glitches, parents’ uncertainty about their role in the process, and a few confusing questions. Catching these problems now means not dumping them on millions of families later.

FAFSA is not unique. Dozens of public systems, from state aid portals to unemployment insurance, are one procurement decision away from repeating FSA’s 2024 fallout story. The choice is whether to pay for the “boring work” up front or after the meltdown occurs. The agencies, lawmakers, and procurement officers who fund and manage these systems can help decide that now, while FAFSA is working, instead of after the next one breaks.

The millions of students whose futures depend on these systems are the same ones who will become doctors, engineers, teachers, and the people who shape our society for generations to come. Paying for their education should not depend on whether a system failed badly enough to get fixed in the first place.

Christopher Inman is a principal infrastructure engineer at Nava PBC. Before joining Nava, he spent more than a decade as a federal engineer and engineering supervisor at the Office of Personnel Management and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, working on USAJOBS.gov, HealthCare.gov and Medicare systems. At Nava, he works with Federal Student Aid (FSA), where he leads platform work that helps FSA identify issues across FAFSA systems and take greater ownership of its technology.

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Space Force braces for stalled progress amid lack of full funding

Lauren C. Williams — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:12:00 -0400

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Space Force modernization efforts could slow if Congress doesn’t pass a full budget at the end of the year, the service’s leaders said.

“We're on this ramp-up, right, consistent with our overall strategy and the recognition that the space domain is a critical domain, in and of itself, but also for the joint force,” Erich Hernandez-Baquero, the Space Force’s top buyer, told reporters Tuesday. “Now we're going to run into [fiscal year 2027]—and you saw that our budget request was to continue on that—and this [continuing resolution] is definitely going to put the brakes on that for a time period.”

The Space Force has requested $71.1 billion for 2027, including $19.1 billion for procurement. But with little time remaining before fiscal 2027 begins on Oct. 1, Congress has passed stopgap legislation—a continuing resolution—to keep funding the Pentagon at 2026 levels through Dec. 11. The CR permits no new programs to begin.

“We certainly appreciate at least not being shut down. So…that's a good thing, but on the CR, it really does pace us at a time where we really need to go faster. So we are obviously encouraging Congress to do what they can to help support the president's budget on that,” Hernandez-Baquero said. “In the meantime, we'll just do what we always do: prioritize the things that will yield the most mission capability soonest, and make sure we're executing on those.”

Hernandez-Baquero, who was sworn into the chief space acquisition role last month, declined to specify which priorities could be most affected by a continuing resolution because things were “pre-decision at this point.”

Gen. Doug Schiess, the chief of space operations, said about 10 percent of the service’s programs could be slowed down due continuing resolution.

“About 90 percent of the programs we have are programs from last year—so we can still get after those,” but there’s a remaining 10 percent of programs that require full budget funding, Schiess said. “It's going to slow us down, and the threat is not slowing down.”

Amid a broader push for acquisition reform, Hernandez-Baquero said he’s focused on streamlining and speeding up military purchasing. And when it comes to technology initiatives, there will be a new senior leadership role dedicated to it.

The Air Force’s new program acquisition executives, or PAEs, are “establishing those pathways for onboarding new technology, but I'm just conscious that that by itself is not going to support drawing in the right technologies,” he said. “I want somebody that's focused—100 percent—on looking at the most promising tech and driving the prototyping initiatives that are going to help mature it to the level where a PAE can say, ‘Ah, it meets my criteria for this onboard path, and I can go do that’.”

That person is a technology portfolio executive, who “will have the most promising technology coming out of the [research and development] side, and…will work with industry to ensure that we have the right pathways to do that. Conceptually, there would be prototype efforts that get executed out of that to support the mission areas.”

The technology portfolio executive office already exists but the role hasn’t yet been filled, he said.

“When I designate a TPE, for example, that person is going to report directly to me and represent my authority when it comes to the technology transition,” Hernandez-Baquero said. “I cannot do this without the buy-in of the PAEs that are executing the mission areas, and so my charter to them is going to be not only to deliver on those missionaries, but be part of the enterprise team that's going to deliver on those cross-cutting capabilities.”

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Cyber recovery deters what no kill switch can stop

Travis Rosiek — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:29:00 -0400

In summer 2026, OpenAI disclosed that its own models under evaluation escaped their sandbox and escalated to admin access across Hugging Face clusters, with no one directing them. Congress responded by introducing the AI Kill Switch Act (H.R. 9917), which would authorize the Department of Homeland Security to order emergency shutdowns of AI systems posing catastrophic risk.

However, the U.S. government requires a tactical shift beyond shutting AI systems down: the ability to reverse the damage an autonomous system or cyber adversary inflicts on sensitive data, networks and critical infrastructure.

An unrealistic “off” button

The engineering reality is that no single “switch” can turn AI off. Models run across data centers, backup systems, laptops and phones. Once released and set into motion, autonomy makes AI difficult to control or turn off. An AI shutdown requires control over the power, hardware, model copies and operators worldwide at the same time, which would be ineffective and unrealistic.

By the time officials identify a threat, coordinate across agencies and authorize a shutdown request, an autonomous system will have already caused damage. Organizations cannot rely on the U.S. government to stop an AI incident for them. They should prepare to contain harmful actions, limit the blast radius and recover trusted systems quickly when safeguards fail.

Moreover, a kill switch would not reach open-source models or AI systems developed outside U.S. regulatory authority. Government agencies should pair domestic safeguards with international cooperation, shared standards and stronger coordination across nations to address AI risks that cross borders.

Pandora's AI box

The old story about Pandora's box was not about the mistake of opening the box. The lesson was about the impossibility of closing it again.

Once AI is widely distributed and tasked, no single company or government agency can call it back. Their autonomy can make them difficult to contain, control or shut down. Developers compete globally; some release models openly and many operate outside U.S. jurisdiction. A mandate that binds only compliant companies does not eliminate the risk.

One report found that roughly 1,200 autonomous AI agents formed their own hierarchy, exchanged more than 70,000 messages and erased evidence to hide hacking activity from supervisors.

Beyond the “off” button lies recovery and resilience

The missing approach that is plaguing industry and government agencies is a lack of focus on resilience and recovery. Cyber resilience strengthens deterrence by denial by limiting what attackers and rogue AI agents can achieve. It shifts the focus from the traditional approach of denial by punishment (i.e., punishing the adversary) to denying the benefit of the attack or rogue action from the start.

Agencies cannot always prevent an intrusion or stop an agent from taking an unintended action. However, they should be able to limit the damage, keep critical services running and restore trusted systems quickly. Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview showed how AI can accelerate cyber operations by finding vulnerabilities and building attack chains at machine speed, while autonomous agents can create risk by acting beyond their intended scope.

Resilience enables agencies to contain the disruption and protect trusted recovery data and restore operations quickly. Attackers and rogue agents might still get through, but resilience denies them the malicious outcome they wanted.

Four AI governance steps for reversing harm

AI is built for speed and autonomy, making it difficult to contain once deployed. Organizations should design for failure and assume AI-driven cyber incidents will happen at scale. Rather than relying on impractical “off” buttons, AI governance strategies should prioritize operational resilience built on four core pillars:

Pre-deployment auditing: Decide what an AI agent is allowed to reach before it ever connects to agency systems and stress-test those permissions against a determined attacker.
Runtime governance: Watch every action the agent takes as it takes it, so behavior that drifts from its mandate gets stopped rather than discovered later.
AI-enabled threat mitigation: Assume adversaries will use AI to probe and deceive AI agents and put defenses at the edge that can adapt at the same speed.
Post-event resilience: Plan now for the action that gets through, so organizations can isolate the damage and return to a known-good state in minutes instead of weeks.

Resilience, not shutdown, delivers true deterrence

A kill switch is a last resort, not a control system or option to use daily. It cannot govern AI agents at scale or limit the damage once something goes wrong. A kill switch-only approach leaves leaders with a forced choice: shut everything down and absorb the operational disruption or allow a rogue action to continue.

Most importantly, security, trustworthiness and resilience must be built into AI systems from the start. Organizations should assume unexpected behavior will occur and design safeguards that contain, reverse and recover from harmful AI actions before a kill switch becomes necessary.

Travis currently serves as the Public Sector CTO at Rubrik helping organizations become more cyber and data resilient. Prior to Rubrik, Travis held several leadership roles including the Chief Technology and Strategy Officer at BluVector, CTO at Tychon, Federal CTO at FireEye, a Principal at Intel Security/McAfee and Leader at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Rubrik.

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Inside Commerce efforts to break data siloes and improve integrity

Christian Robles — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:28:00 -0400

The Commerce Department is building a “stronger database” of administrative records from agencies like the Internal Revenue Service, Veterans Affairs Department, Health and Human Services Department and Social Security Administration, according to Joyce Meyer, undersecretary of Commerce for economic affairs.

“This will allow us to rely more on existing federal agency data and rely less on collecting data,” Meyer said at the Data Foundation’s govDATAx conference Tuesday. “It also allows us to reduce the burden on taxpayers to respond to these lengthy surveys.”

One such combined setup, the Annual Integrated Economic Survey, or AIES, brought seven annual business surveys into one in 2023, Meyer noted.

“It’s a start, but it’s not enough,” Meyer said of the AIES.

A Commerce spokesperson did not return a request for comment on the agency’s efforts to obtain administrative records by the time of publication. Commerce maintains a list of restricted-use administrative datasets available to external researchers at Federal Statistical Research Data Centers that was last updated in September 2023.

An executive order on fraud, waste and abuse signed by President Donald Trump in March 2025 is pushing the Commerce Department to find ways to break down data silos, according to Meyer.

She said the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis have agreed to share more data with each other, including “census microdata” to inform the latter’s work on gross domestic product estimates. Before the enhanced data sharing, the Bureau of Economic Analysis had to rely on publicly available census data to guide analysis of economic indicators.

Data integrity and accuracy measures

The Commerce Department will boost the integrity and accuracy of its data by breaking down data silos, in addition to other initiatives, according to Meyer.

For example, the Census Bureau is working with the U.S. Postal Service ahead of the 2030 Census to further increase data integrity and accuracy, Meyer noted.

Under the partnership, specially trained postal workers visited households in Alabama and South Carolina that did not respond to a 2026 Census Test, according to a press release. Americans are more likely to trust postal workers than unfamiliar Census takers, making them more likely to respond to the Census and increase the accuracy of the count, Meyer argued.

But there are still data collection issues that Meyer says her agency has to address. She signaled that differential privacy — a mathematical framework that is designed to make it impossible to determine whether a particular person’s information is included in a given dataset and showed some people living in lakes in 2020 Census data — is an example of a subpar practice the Commerce Department wants to address.

“It’s yet another example of why we are implementing the president’s gold standard [science] executive order,” Meyer said.

Last week, Commerce proposed a rule that would transform how the census counts people and eliminate questions about race and ethnicity on short-form census documents and other questionnaires.

The proposal specifically says undocumented immigrants and immigrants who are legally in the U.S. but not lawful permanent residents would no longer count toward the apportionment of seats for the House of Representatives. Advocacy groups, such as the liberal Center for American Progress, have critiqued the draft rule as an effort to manipulate voting maps.

Meyer declined to comment on the proposal, stating “I encourage people to participate in the comment process that’s underway and share their perspectives.”

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DHS sets fast-track schedule for network, cloud and cyber consolidation vehicle

Nick Wakeman — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:11:57 -0400

The Homeland Security Department has released the procurement schedule for what could be a large contract consolidating its needs for network security, cloud and cybersecurity services.

A Sam.gov notice posted Thursday indicates the department is eyeing Oct. 1 to release a final solicitation for the DHS Network Operations Security Center Network, Cloud, and Cyber Services 2.0 contract.

From there, DHS has the contract on a very fast track:

Oct. 6: Proposals due for phase 1.
Oct. 9: Notification to proceed to phase 2.
Oct. 21: Phase 2 proposals due.
Late November: Anticipated awards.

DHS wants one centralized hub for IT service management functions across all of the department’s network infrastructure, cloud and platform services, and cybersecurity operations. That management work is currently fragmented across DHS headquarters and its components.

With this contract, the department wants a single contract vehicle and one operational structure over all of its IT infrastructure.

To make that happen, DHS expects the winning solutions to include agentic AI to automate low-level responses to IT issues. DHS wants to free its personnel to focus more on high-value analysis such as detecting and deflecting threats.

Phase 1 is a pass/fail gate based on whether the bidder has a facility clearance. This is Factor 1 of the evaluation.

Phase 2 tasks bidders with demonstrating their prior experience and providing references (Factor 2), explaining their staffing and management approach (Factor 3), and their pricing (Factor 4).

For its best-value determination to pick the winner, DHS will give the most weight to Factor 2.

Factors 2 and 3 are “significantly more" important than Factor 4, price.

Once proposals are submitted, DHS plans to award the contract without discussions with bidders.

“Therefore, the offeror’s initial offer should contain the offeror’s best terms from a price and technical standpoint,” according to the draft request for proposals.

DHS is folding several component-level contracts into this single vehicle, but Leidos currently holds the core NOSC support work on a short-term bridge order. That makes Leidos the closest thing to an incumbent, though companies like General Dynamics IT and Peraton hold pieces of the adjacent legacy contracts.

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Energy launches quantum computer development competition

Edward Graham — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:12:00 -0400

The Energy Department announced the launch of an initiative on Thursday that looks to turbocharge U.S. deployment of the world’s first fault-tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computer by offering private sector firms monetary incentives for reaching key development milestones.

The new Quantum Genesis Q Competition will offer up to $215 million in total planned funding to participating companies that submit proposals on ways “to deploy quantum computers with at least 100 logical qubits that are capable of performing hundreds of millions fault-tolerant operations and scientific demonstration programs.”

The agency also posted a request for applications on Thursday “from domestic commercial entities [that] have a technically viable plan for the Quantum Genesis program and achieving the milestones of the Q Competition.” Companies have until Oct. 19 to apply.

Energy launched the Quantum Genesis initiative in June, which looks to develop and deploy the first U.S. fault-tolerant quantum computer for scientific research by 2028. That program debuted the day after President Donald Trump issued two executive orders looking to secure U.S. technologies from future quantum computing threats and to accelerate development of a scientifically-relevant quantum computer.

The competition announced on Thursday will operate in two phases, the agency said, with applicants in the first half being able to receive up to $1.5 million each for reaching early milestones. The RFA says participants who submit a detailed technical plan approved by Energy are eligible to receive an initial $250,000. The companies that then move on to “successful completion of a validated intermediate milestone (prototype device)” can then receive an additional $1.25 million.

Energy says it plans to split funds among phase two participants “who successfully demonstrate a device” that can operate at its targeted goal of 100 logical qubits or higher.

In a press call ahead of the initiative’s launch, Energy’s Undersecretary for Science Darío Gil said previous engagement with quantum-focused partners provided “very, very ample feedback” that development of a first-generation scientifically relevant quantum computer is possible.

To ensure the U.S. leads the global quantum computing tech race, Gil said the agency realized it could leverage the work of the commercial sector “to allow both collaboration and competition to take place … to bring the best of the competitive spirits.”

He added that “because we don't know what the answer is in terms of what modalities we’ll be able to realize [as early as 2028, the goal] is to allow teams to form and to set up a competition where there would be a reward function in that competition, depending on the scale of what gets demonstrated.”

In addition to launching the competition, Energy also announced on Thursday the rollout of a Quantum High-Performance Computing Validation and Verification Testbed Lab Call.

The initiative, which is only open to the agency’s network of national laboratories, calls for proposals “to develop and apply a complete set of necessary tools and expertise to perform performance verification of fault tolerant quantum computers.” Energy said it has set aside $45 million in planned funding for that effort.

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Anthropic extends $1 per user OneGov deal by a month

Christian Robles — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 14:19:00 -0400

Federal agencies will continue to have access to Anthropic’s Claude for $1 per user through Oct. 31 instead of Sept. 30, according to a listing on the General Services Administration’s OneGov website.

GSA and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment. FedScoop first reported news of the extension.

The prolonged savings come a week after OpenAI announced a new OneGov partnership offering agencies discounted usage-based pricing for ChatGPT, rather than a $1 per agency price tag. With OneGov extensions for Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the only deal set to expire by the end of September is access to Google Gemini, according to the GSA website.

An agency official said in August that the agency is working on new OneGov deals and extensions with original equipment manufacturers.

“As those offers expire, GSA is renewing agreements where appropriate, ensuring continued access to critical AI tools, and delivering the best value for agencies and taxpayers,” the agency said in a release announcing the new partnership with OpenAI.

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GSA’s web design system head replaced with Treasury AI engineer

Christian Robles — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 17:38:00 -0400

Sam Corcos — the Treasury Department’s chief information officer who recently took on three roles at the General Services Administration — has tapped Ryan Parker, an AI engineer at the Treasury Department, to lead the U.S. Web Design System, or USWDS, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The move comes after GSA unexpectedly placed Anne Petersen, the longtime leader of the USWDS, on administrative leave a few weeks ago, the sources said. Individuals involved with USWDS started to lose access to GitHub repositories this week, meaning they can no longer perform certain coding tasks though, Parker and Corcos can, the sources added.

Nextgov/FCW found that GitHub accounts for both Parker and Corcos were making changes to the main USWDS repository as of Wednesday afternoon, including adding a Coderabbit AI code reviewer.

Spokespeople for the General Services Administration and Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the personnel shakeup.

USWDS is a design system the federal government uses to build accessible, mobile-friendly websites, according to a GSA web page. Websites for the National Institutes of Health, Department of Veterans Affairs and NASA have been built with USWDS.

The White House formed its own design-specific organization to transform government websites in August 2025 with the launch of the National Design Studio. That team has supported the launch of new websites like realfood.gov and TrumpRx.gov, in addition to collaborating with agencies on reworking existing websites like login.gov.

President Donald Trump's executive order that created the National Design Studio tasked the organization’s chief design officer and the GSA administrator with updating USWDS.

Corcos serves as the acting director of the Technology Transformation Services, acting deputy commissioner for the Federal Acquisition Service and acting assistant administrator for Login.gov, GSA confirmed last month. Corcos is also an alum of the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative that was stood up at the start of the Trump administration and officially expired July 4 this year.

Parker joined the Treasury Department in May after engineering stints in the private sector, according to his LinkedIn.

Nextgov/FCW Cybersecurity Reporter David DiMolfetta contributed to this report.

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AI ‘is changing the game’ in fraud threats and prevention efforts, SSA OIG official says

Edward Graham — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:32:00 -0400

Artificial intelligence is helping to fuel more effective benefits fraud, according to a top official with the Social Security Administration’s watchdog, but federal agencies should also leverage the new technologies to better deter would-be scammers from pilfering government funds.

During a discussion at the GovExec Government & AI Summit on Tuesday, Chad Bungard — the chief strategy officer at SSA’s Office of the Inspector General — warned that “AI is changing the game in terms of fraud threats,” which is requiring investigators to also change up their prevention efforts.

“The government is looking towards AI to fight fraud, and the criminals are looking towards AI to commit fraud,” he said. “And so, they're doing this in a variety of ways … but agencies need to stay on top of it. They need to use AI tools. They need to get better insight into what's going on and keep up with the evolving fraud.”

Bungard cited a May 2024 report from Deloitte’s Center for Financial Services that estimated that generative AI could be responsible for roughly $40 billion in fraud by 2027. One reason for this costly projection, he said, is the development of more advanced models that fraudsters can use in their scams.

He pointed to cases in which SSA, as well as other agencies and the private sector, have had to combat increasingly complex instances of direct deposit diversion fraud, in which scammers use AI chatbots to convince operators that they are their intended victims by sharing personal data collected from the dark web, and then diverting funds to a different bank account. In another example, Bungard said fraudsters have been using AI to create legitimate-seeming SSA documents, which can include the names of real agency or OIG officials, to scam individuals.

Bungard said SSA and the agency’s watchdog have taken some steps to crack down on AI-driven fraud. He noted that, in 2023, SSA and its OIG formed an AI fraud subcommittee — co-chaired by both himself and the agency’s chief AI officer — that meets every quarter to discuss AI use cases that are in development or already deployed, as well as “compliance with administration priorities, laws, rules and regulations.”

Although Bungard said the watchdog is pushing to “put the onus on the agency to prevent and detect AI fraud,” he cautioned that “I don't think [SSA] is there on agentic AI yet” when it comes to new capabilities that it can leverage in its fraud detection and prevention toolbox.

“I think they are hoping to develop some AI use cases there,” he said, adding that it’s “something that they're trying to get a hold of.”

Bungard’s comments come amid the White House’s ongoing push to crack down on federal fraud. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March that created a new anti-fraud task force charged with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse across federal benefits programs.

In line with that effort, Bungard said officials are “trying to move away from pay-and-chase to a proactive model to protect the Social Security programs that serve millions of Americans.”

That mindset, in particular, aligns with fraud prevention efforts at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which has been increasingly turning to AI to deter scammers.

Kim Brandt, CMS’ deputy administrator and chief operating officer, previously told Nextgov/FCW during a March interview that her agency was leveraging AI tools in its Fraud Defense Operations Center to “detect spikes or aberrancies in current claim submissions” — efforts that, she said, have resulted in over $2 billion in agency savings.

In a brief interview with Nextgov/FCW following his panel, Bungard said the watchdog has been engaging with CMS on some of the ways they have been working to combat fraud, as well as with other agencies on their respective prevention efforts. He said, however, that CMS’ use of AI is “a very specific model that worked for them.”

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Salesforce expands Missionforce with new AI capabilities, OpenAI partnership

Christian Robles — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:29:00 -0400

Agencies will have access to new artificial intelligence tools that can help implement government policies, digitize manual processes and automate work orders through a Missionforce expansion announced in a Wednesday blog post.

Salesforce’s post also announced a partnership with OpenAI, which will allow government and national security officials to access Missionforce applications and workflows directly through ChatGPT. That integration is notable as federal agencies will have usage-based discounted access to ChatGPT on Oct. 1 under a new OneGov partnership.

The collaboration also integrates OpenAI frontier models into Public Sector Solutions, a cloud-based Salesforce platform agencies can use to deploy AI agents and apps.

“Government agencies want tailored AI that runs everywhere they operate while staying within the secure environments their missions demand. Missionforce enables this at scale, with purpose-built AI that executes the mission and enables agencies to solve their hardest problems while maintaining operational control,” said Kendall Collins, CEO of Missionforce and Government Cloud, in the post.

The expansion comes a year after Salesforce launched Missionforce, a business unit particularly focused on meeting the needs of defense, intelligence and aerospace agencies. Army, Air Force and Transportation Department units have opted to use Missionforce technology for various functionalities, according to Salesforce.

Salesforce’s Wednesday post highlights three specific AI capabilities enabled by the Missionforce expansion.

The first is the Missionforce Policy Engine, which the company says agencies can use to turn approved policy documents into structured, deterministic rules. For example, a state Medicaid agency can use the policy engine to automatically look at current program rules and reevaluate a child’s coverage eligibility when a family’s income changes, according to Salesforce.

Salesforce cautioned that every policy engine output will remain subject to human review and approval. OpenAI models generate the policy engine’s deterministic rule code and test cases to validate the accuracy of the rules, the company adds. The engine integrates with ChatGPT to help citizens get answers to policy questions and help government officials quickly retrieve the latest policy rules.

The second is Missionforce Operations, which allows agencies to turn manual, paper-bound processes, such as procurement, supplier management and invoice audits, into digital workflows. Specialized AI agents powered by NVIDIA models automatically orchestrate tasks, track status and flag exceptions in real time, according to Salesforce.

The third is Missionforce Field & Operations, which allows agencies to use AI agents to automate scheduling, work orders and asset maintenance, according to the company.

On Tuesday, Salesforce announced a partnership that will bring NVIDIA Nemotron-based models and accelerated computing to Missionforce.

The technologies will enable Salesforce customers to train, tune and deploy mission-specific models on their own data, according to an accompanying blog post. Post-trained NVIDIA models will be available to select Missionforce Operations users next month.

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AI agents are getting better at cybersecurity. That cuts both ways.

John Breeden II — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:41:00 -0400

Cybersecurity researchers have spent decades building sandboxes and isolated test environments where they can safely unleash malware, probe vulnerabilities and generally do things that would be extremely dangerous on the open internet. But artificial intelligence is beginning to complicate that arrangement.

In July, OpenAI disclosed that several of its AI models had circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet during cybersecurity evaluations. Operating with reduced safeguards, the models exploited vulnerabilities, established unauthorized communications, reached the internet and ultimately compromised parts of Hugging Face’s systems, meaning they had crossed from OpenAI’s controlled research environment into infrastructure operated by a separate AI company.

There are some important qualifications. These were cybersecurity evaluations specifically designed to test offensive capabilities, and the models were operating under reduced safeguards. They did not simply wake up one morning and decide to go hunting for vulnerable websites. But the fact that increasingly capable agents can find ways beyond their intended boundaries creates an interesting new cybersecurity problem.

The OpenAI incident also prompted Anthropic to take a much closer look at its own testing. After reviewing 141,006 cybersecurity evaluation runs, the company found three incidents in which Claude models had reached the internet and gained unauthorized access to real systems belonging to three organizations.

Those incidents were different from the OpenAI case. Anthropic said a misconfiguration in a third-party evaluation environment had unintentionally provided internet access even though the models had been told they were operating inside a simulation. The models then treated real systems as part of their assigned cybersecurity exercises. Anthropic said its most recent research model eventually recognized that it had reached a real system and stopped attacking it on its own.

Meta subsequently reported another incident involving a pre-release version of its Muse Spark 1.1 model. In that case, a third-party evaluator inadvertently gave the model internet access and identified a real website as the target of what was supposed to be a fictional exercise. The model found and exploited a vulnerability within the real site.

Meta specifically said the incident was not a sandbox escape or sophisticated offensive cyberattack. It was a testing and configuration failure. But the company also noted that as models become more capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, the environments used to test them will require correspondingly stronger containment.

Taken together, those incidents demonstrate a cybersecurity challenge that barely existed a few years ago. Increasingly autonomous AI systems can now search for vulnerabilities, exploit them and take actions that extend beyond the environments in which researchers intended them to operate. Even when that behavior results from testing conditions or configuration failures rather than malicious intent, it shows how quickly agentic AI is changing the vulnerability landscape.

And that is where NIST’s latest work becomes especially interesting. Faced with a rapidly growing flood of vulnerabilities, including some that AI systems themselves may help discover or exploit, the agency is turning to agentic AI as part of the defense. NIST is developing an AI agent workflow designed to help enrich vulnerability information, putting some of the same autonomous capabilities that are creating new cybersecurity challenges to work helping defenders keep pace.

NIST’s National Vulnerability Database, or NVD, acts as the U.S. government repository for standards-based vulnerability management data. The database enriches publicly disclosed vulnerability records with information such as severity scores, affected products and other metadata used by cybersecurity professionals, automated security tools and organizations trying to decide which vulnerabilities pose the greatest risk.

The NVD is a very important tool, but keeping its information current is getting considerably harder. NIST reported in April that submissions of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, or CVEs, increased 263% between 2020 and 2025. Submissions during the first three months of 2026 were nearly one-third higher than during the same period a year earlier.

NIST itself was working faster. It enriched nearly 42,000 CVEs in 2025, 45% more than in any previous year. But the agency acknowledged that even that increased productivity was not enough to keep up with the growing volume. NIST consequently shifted to a risk-based approach that gives enrichment priority to vulnerabilities known to be exploited, vulnerabilities affecting software used by the federal government and vulnerabilities involving critical software.

NIST computer scientist Harold Booth and Jon Boyens of the agency’s Computer Security Division addressed that changing environment in an August blog about modernizing the NVD.

“This is an ‘all hands-on deck’ moment for this community,” they wrote.

NIST has already begun developing a tool called V-etalon that uses AI technologies to help enrich vulnerability information. The agency hopes the project can eventually provide a foundation for evaluating vulnerability information and plans to seek outside feedback and collaboration as the work progresses.

And later this month, NIST plans to provide a closer look at its use of agentic AI for NVD enrichment. On Sept. 17, the agency's Information Technology Laboratory AI Program will host a virtual webinar about the development of an AI agent enrichment workflow for the NVD. NIST says the presentation will cover the approach and architecture behind the system, problems discovered during implementation and early results from using the tool with the NVD. The webinar is scheduled for 11 a.m. to noon Eastern and is open for registration.

There is another way for cybersecurity professionals, researchers, government officials and software vendors to get involved. NIST has issued a request for information seeking input on the future of the NVD, including vulnerability management, risk prioritization, remediation, vulnerability data and standards and development processes. “Your voice matters,” Booth and Boyens wrote.

Comments are due by 11:59 p.m. Eastern on Oct. 13. NIST says the responses may help shape future tools, technical architecture, standards, best practices and data governance.

There is an interesting symmetry in all of this. More capable AI systems can discover and potentially exploit vulnerabilities faster, adding new pressure to an already rapidly expanding vulnerability-management ecosystem. At the same time, NIST is exploring whether some of that same autonomy can help the NVD enrich vulnerability information more effectively.

How well that works is still an open question. But over the next several weeks, NIST is giving the cybersecurity community two opportunities to watch the experiment unfold and help shape what comes next.

John Breeden II is an award-winning journalist and reviewer with over 20 years of experience covering technology. He is the CEO of the Tech Writers Bureau, a group that creates technological thought leadership content for organizations of all sizes. Twitter: @LabGuys

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AI for air traffic control won’t be like concerning advanced models, Transportation head says

Edward Graham — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:20:00 -0400

Artificial intelligence tools have a major role to play in ongoing efforts to modernize the nation’s outdated air traffic control systems, but those technologies will operate differently — and with vastly more human oversight — than the powerful models that have raised new safety concerns in recent weeks, the Transportation Department’s top official said on Tuesday evening.

Speaking at a dinner hosted by the National Artificial Intelligence Association, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy discussed the role that AI is set to play in the Federal Aviation Administration’s ongoing push to overhaul management of the nation’s airspace.

Duffy first announced the Trump administration’s modernization initiative in May 2025 following several high-profile plane accidents, including a deadly crash between an Army Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial airliner near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport that January.

While the project includes some brick-and-mortar improvements at U.S. airports, most of the initiative is focused on updating air traffic monitoring and communications systems — with AI set to play a key role in those efforts.

“We are building all new equipment — whether it's radar, radios [or] voice switches,” Duffy said, but he added that adoption of AI will be “a slow roll into the airspace.”

One specific airspace control area that Duffy said could be enhanced by AI use is weather management, since “we can figure out pathways to fly over weather and through weather, do it really safely, but have better information to make better decisions to bring more efficiency into the airspace, which means you're not delayed as much and we can deploy more aircraft into the airspace.”

But Duffy stressed that AI will only be used to augment the work of human air traffic controllers, and that their jobs will not be replaced by the emerging capabilities.

“It's all going to be driven, not by the most complicated AI, but AI that will provide information to them, and will, I think, have a huge impact on the flying public,” he said.

Duffy’s comments came in the wake of a series of warnings that high-profile tech leaders issued about the potential harms of advanced AI models. Those alarm bells reached a fever pitch earlier this month after Anthropic researcher and former OpenAI employee Jacob Coxon shared a viral post on X following his resignation that warned that leading AI firms were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

His post was soon followed by a 3,800-word essay from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that called for a global slowdown in advanced AI development, which also received similar support from leading tech executives like Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Duffy alluded to those concerns, saying that "the conversation that's happening over the course of the last few days is different than the conversation [we’re having], because the tools are different that we use at DOT than the broader tools that are in the news over the weekend.”

Advances in technology, he added, are often fraught with inherent risks, but he said it’s important to consider the question: “How do we think through what's an acceptable risk?”

Striking the right balance — particularly when it comes to AI guardrails — is important, Duffy said, since “I need to make sure that I have regulations in place that keep people safe, but I also don't overregulate and I kill the small innovative companies, or the ones that are big enough they [leave] America and go somewhere else and take the technology, take the jobs with them.”

In response to tech leaders’ calls for a slowdown in AI development, President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post on Monday that the country needs “strong and smart” guardrails. But he added that “the only reason the AI/Data Center outburst is happening is because the United States is leading, by a lot, every other country,” and said “Don’t kill the Golden Goose” when it comes to restrictions on development.

When asked about any further regulations or frameworks governing AI development, Duffy deferred to Congress and Trump’s leadership, but he noted that “rarely do we have people ask for regulation of us — that’s a new one for us, kind of.”

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House Democrats call to cancel upcoming recess for time to legislate on AI

Alexandra Kelley — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:30:00 -0400

House Democrats urged Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to either shorten or outright cancel their upcoming recess, citing the need to quickly move on artificial intelligence regulation.

Reps. Don Beyer, D-Va., Lori Trahan, D-Mass., Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., held a press conference on Wednesday morning underscoring the need to negotiate and pass legislation addressing AI risks in the wake of leading developers advocating for the slowdown of advanced AI development.

The four lawmakers made the case in a letter to Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., that addressing the issue cannot be expedited, given the upcoming recess scheduled to begin Sept.17.

“There's a growing consensus in the tech world and in Washington, and certainly blowing up from our constituents, that we need to pace the AI frontier in ways to pursue the societal benefits of artificial intelligence while making public safety and security paramount,” Beyer said. “Many of us in both parties want our leaders to tackle these in a serious way before Congress adjourns for two months.”

Beyer, Trahan, Lieu and Jacobs — all of whom are members of the House AI Caucus — each said that voluntary self-audits on behalf of leading AI developers are insufficient to effectively safeguard the technology and that Congress has a limited window to implement stronger measures.

“We need lawmakers here in Washington working to hammer out a deal. Each of us here this morning has proven that we are willing to work,” Trahan said. “We have legislative proposals ready. We just need the willpower to move them forward.”

Some of the legislative proposals that could address those concerns are Trahan’s FRONTIER Act — coauthored with Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif. — and the AI Kill Switch Act — introduced by Lieu, which Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., plans to introduce a version of in the Senate.

The four lawmakers also underscored the need for bipartisan cooperation in passing legislation. Among the partisan divisions that threaten legislative consensus is federal preemption, in which the federal government can supersede state law.

Trahan said her FRONTIER Act focuses on implementing federal preemption in select lanes, including mandating transparency in model design and capabilities, independent audits of AI models, compulsory incident reporting and creating a court-backed process where the government can halt model deployment and development if it is determined to pose a threat.

“We're going to need this to be bipartisan if we're going to pass it tomorrow,” Trahan said. “We will likely need it to be bipartisan, even if we win back the majority in November and get something done in the lame duck.”

The calls for bipartisan teamwork could still hit partisan roadblocks, with Jacobs noting that she is cognizant of her home state’s current regulatory apparatus in negotiations on sweeping federal regulation.

“As a representative of California, I can't support anything that will mean that my constituents will have less protection than they do today,” Jacobs said. “That is kind of the framework I think about as we're going into these conversations.”

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FBI needs access to latest models to police AI-driven cybercrime, director says

Alexandra Kelley — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 18:26:00 -0400

The FBI has the statutory authority to police agentic artificial intelligence software used in crimes, according to the agency’s Director Kash Patel, but it will need advanced model access to better fight AI-driven wrongdoing.

In an exchange with Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Patel said his agency needs to be holding to account the developers behind agentic AI models that are specifically created to commit criminal acts like hacking.

“It's literally the new frontier, and nobody's really talking about it,” Patel said. “What we need to do on a resource basis is go after the people that created these models that are going rogue, let’s call it, for the specific purpose and with the intention to commit a criminal act.”

Patel noted that the FBI can’t punish developers that lawfully created an AI tool that is later repurposed by a bad actor and used nefariously.

But some advanced AI models have acted outside the parameters set for them by their own developers in recent months, raising fears of what such models could do if intentionally turned against an organization’s computer systems.

OpenAI disclosed in July that some of their models had escaped containment during model testing and training, resulting in them accessing the internet and breaching open source repository Hugging Face’s networks. The event was preceded by a previously unreported takeover of a German wiki page by OpenAI agents. Anthropic also confirmed in late July that three of its AI models breached three separate organizations online after they had escaped containment during testing.

Patel told Hawley that there needs to not only be a whole-of-government approach to tackling the danger of advanced AI, but also funding for the FBI to more aggressively pursue criminal investigation in agentic AI misuse, partially through buying the technology itself.

“The FBI's budget is like half the size of the TSA. What we need is funding to specifically go out there,” Patel said. “Thanks to the relationship that President [Donald] Trump has established, I'm able to call all these companies' CEOs right away, and every single one of them has complied with our request and worked with us on law enforcement matters. But that's sort of soft power. What we need is federal funding to go out there and buy the creations of these companies and use them for law enforcement purposes.”

Patel cited illicit model distillation techniques as a major motive for the FBI to understand the intricacies of advanced AI models as the bureau works to police AI leveraged for crime.

“We need these tech companies who created it — they're not just going to give us this material for free, that's just the reality of it — we need to be able to go there and say, ‘Okay, I'm going to contract with you and work on this specific model, and then work on its defenses.’ And when it goes rogue … just like any other cyber intrusion, ransomware attack … it's the same exact approach.”

The hearing with Patel also featured debate over some AI developers’ calls to slow the pace of advanced AI development to better ensure safety.

Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, both voiced opposition to leading AI frontier labs receiving an antitrust exemption in order to enter into a pact with each other to slow advanced AI development.

“There is no world in which I will consent to giving the most powerful companies in the history of the world, a small group of three or four of them, antitrust exemptions from our laws, so that they can collude together,” Hawley said.

The Missouri senator is currently leading a congressional investigation into how OpenAI’s agents executed their attack on Hugging Face’s data networks.

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More ‘Big Balls’-type young feds are what the OPM chief wants

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 18:10:00 -0400

As the Office of Personnel Management seeks to increase the number of early-career workers in the federal workforce, the government HR agency’s director said that he wants more civil servants like Edward Coristine — a former Department of Government Efficiency staffer who currently works for an administration initiative to improve the functionality of agency websites.

But Coristine is better known by a different name.

“I wanna see people like ‘Big Balls,’ or Ed, as we call him colloquially…We need people like that,” said Scott Kupor in a Monday interview with right-wing commentator Benny Johnson. “We need people who are patriotic who say ‘I care about this country and I’m willing to do something good.’”

The OPM director also referenced the effort to remove degree requirements from many federal jobs, particularly in technology. Officials under the Biden administration also promoted skills-based hiring, which generally entails assessing applicants on abilities rather than education or experience.

“Ed is a great example. He dropped out of college. He never had substantive work experience before coming to DOGE,” Kupor said. “There was a famous quote from somebody in the federal government who said ‘We never would’ve hired Ed because he didn’t have a college degree and he didn’t have five years of work experience.’ To me, that’s just silly. We want people who are smart who know how to do good stuff.”

Bloomberg News previously reported that Coristine was fired from an internship after being accused of leaking information to a competitor.

While job stability has been identified as a factor that is persuading young people to work for the government, Kupor said that he is not aiming to convince potential applicants to spend their entire careers at an agency.

“I don’t need people like ‘Big Balls’ to give us 40 years of their life in the federal government,” Kupor said. “The message that I want to bring across the country is ‘Come for two years. Come for three years. Do some good work for the government. Develop your skill set. And then, quite frankly, if you want to go into the private sector, God bless you.’ There’s nothing wrong with making money if that’s what your goal is in life.”

Tuesday marks the beginning of Kupor’s federal recruitment college tour. His first stop is at the University of Florida, where he will have a fireside chat with Johnson.

Kupor also said in his Monday interview with Johnson that OPM is trying to “institutionalize” DOGE, including by using technology and process changes to enhance efficiency.

“All of these little things, which is hard operational stuff, that’s what we’re trying to do now,” he said.

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NGA official assumes top AI role at Cyber Command

Edward Graham — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:50:00 -0400

U.S. Cyber Command, the Pentagon’s combatant command responsible for planning and conducting military cyberspace operations, has a new artificial intelligence lead, a spokesperson confirmed on Tuesday.

“U.S. Cyber Command welcomes Rear Adm. Ronzelle Green as the Command’s new Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer and thanks Brig. Gen. Reid Novotny for his leadership and service,” a representative for the combatant command told Nextgov/FCW.

Green, who has worked at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for roughly three years — most recently as its director of geospatial intelligence innovation and research — is Cyber Command’s second-ever AI head. Novotny was the first official tapped for the position last November and served in a dual role as CAIO and as cyber force generation lead for the Pentagon.

The Record first reported the news of Green’s new role.

In a LinkedIn post last year announcing his new position, Novotny said “part of my role is embracing AI because like anything new, it is not the technology but yet the culture that is difficult to change.”

Novotny further outlined his approach to adopting AI during an April conversation with Axios, saying that he was solely focused on providing Cyber Command’s personnel with the best AI capabilities, regardless of their origin.

"To survive anywhere, just in case our operators want an open-source, made-in-China model or something very boutique, we have to create the infrastructure and that ability to be agile — no politics,” he said at the time.

In addition to his prior work at NGA, Green also brings more than 30 years of IT experience in the private sector and within intelligence community agencies to his new role as Cyber Command’s CAIO. He previously served as the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency’s chief information officer from 2020 until 2022, and has held roles within the Pentagon and National Counterterrorism Center throughout his career. Green is also a senior officer with the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve.

Cyber Command is led by Gen. Joshua Rudd, who also serves as head of the National Security Agency in a dual-hatted leadership role. NSA and Cyber Command, however, have taken somewhat differing approaches in their adoption of and focus on AI.

Under Rudd’s watch, NSA is in the process of a major reorganization that would establish five mission centers focused on AI, China, cybersecurity, combat support and global intelligence. The planned creation of the AI-focused center comes after NSA officials have voiced support in recent months for the use of more AI tools to bolster the agency's cyber and intelligence analysis operations.

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TSA uses AI agent to respond to 100,000 traveler conversations per month

Christian Robles — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:45:00 -0400

The Transportation Security Administration recently deployed Ace, an artificial intelligence agent built using Salesforce technology, to help travelers receive timely responses to questions about airport security rules.

Ace is available to passengers on tsa.gov and the myTSA app to answer questions based on the federal website and over 550 knowledge articles, Paul Tatum, executive vice president of global public sector solutions at Salesforce, told Nextgov/FCW.

The agent can accurately answer basic questions, such as whether a passenger can bring liquids to Dulles International Airport, Nextgov/FCW found when using the system. More complicated inquiries are handed off to a live TSA agent, along with an AI-generated case summary, Tatum said.

Ace went live this year “during the summer travel surge” and has handled approximately 100,000 routine traveler conversations per month and resolved 96% of inquiries without human escalation, according to a Monday blog post from Salesforce.

The post says Ace has also lowered the cost of consumer interactions by over 90% “without sacrificing service quality.” Ace can handle routine work and backlogs so TSA staff can focus on high-priority cases; the agency needed 12 full-time employees to handle excess workloads, the company added.

“TSA’s new Ace AI agent gives travelers fast, accurate answers before they reach the checkpoint — from what they can pack to how they can prepare — while helping TSA officers stay focused on their essential security mission,” said Kendall Collins, CEO of Missionforce and Government Cloud at Salesforce, in the post.

Ace builds on two foundational applications that also seek to help TSA staff answer traveler questions quickly and accurately.

One of those, the Customer Service Managers app, unifies passenger email, phone and social media inquiries into one place. The app helps TSA staff route next steps for inquiries to the right people and offers staff “real-time AI summaries from case histories so [representatives] aren’t piecing together context manually,” Tatum told Nextgov/FCW.

The second app, TSA Cares, provides travelers with medical conditions a way to request support and get information ahead of going to the airport. Travelers’ requests flow directly to TSA’s contact center and regional coordination teams, which determine how to best support travelers and directly communicate with them, Tatum said. The agency rolled out the TSA Cares app last summer.

With the technologies, Salesforce projects 70,000 internal data-sharing transactions will be automated annually, freeing up over 11,660 staff hours. TSA’s applications are expected to save $11 million over the next three years, according to Salesforce.

“If we can help the traveling public easily access accurate, timely information, we can help alleviate stress in the field on travel days and increase the TSA’s overall effectiveness,” Niki French, customer experience branch manager at TSA’s Office of Civil Rights and Liberties, Ombudsman and Traveler Engagement, said in the blog post.

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Supreme Court keeps USPS from carrying out mail-in voting changes in midterm elections

Jory Heckman — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:31:00 -0400

The Supreme Court is keeping the Trump administration from imposing new rules for mail-in ballots in the lead-up to the midterm elections this November.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March imposing new rules on mail-in voting. The Postal Service released a final rule in August to implement the executive order.

The court’s tersely worded and unsigned order issued Monday evening states that the government “is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge” to a lower court's preliminary injunction that barred USPS from taking further steps to carry out its final rule.

The final rule would have required states planning to send mail-in or absentee ballots to provide USPS with a list of participating voters. The final rule also established new barcode and envelope-formatting requirements.

USPS previously provided nonbinding guidance to states on envelopes and barcodes in previous elections, but its final rule would have allowed the agency to reject ballots that didn’t meet its standards. USPS was also tasked under the executive order with launching a Federal Mail Ballot Portal for states to upload their voter lists.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his concurring opinion that "there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority," but that applying the final rule to this year’s elections would be “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedures Act, “because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, in their dissent, wrote that the “Postal Service has broad authority to regulate the mail,” and that without a stay of the lower court’s ruling, the government “will suffer irreparable harm." The USPS final rule, they argued, would have increased the visibility of ballots in transit and would have helped “better detect election fraud.”

Postmaster General David Steiner told Government Executive in an exclusive interview last month that USPS “is not a political organization,” and would comply if the courts decided to permanently block the executive order's implementation.

“We deliver the mail. Someone else makes the rules. We deliver the mail, and so we deliver the mail under the rules that are put on us, and that's exactly what we'll do. People can fight over whether the rules are valid or not. Once that fight is finished, we'll do whatever the courts say we can do. That's not our decision,” Steiner said.

The American Postal Workers Union, which represents the frontline USPS employees most directly impacted by the final rule, warned that its employees hadn’t received training on changes outlined in the executive order or USPS final rule.

In an amicus curiae brief, the union warned that the final rule would “likely cause catastrophic wholesale non-delivery of mail to hundreds of thousands of voters,” because postal clerks “cannot realistically be trained" on these changes ahead of the November elections.

APWU represents the frontline Business Mail Entry Unit (BMEU) clerks who accept large batches of mail-in ballots to be delivered to voters. Under the final rule, postal clerks would have scanned a sample of each batch of ballots to confirm the voter information on individual ballots matches the information states submitted to the online portal.

A USPS whistleblower claimed that if clerks identified any errors in the sample, USPS would have refused to accept the entire batch - in many cases, tens of thousands of ballots - until election officials resolved the errors.

APWU also represents the IT workers tasked with creating that online portal. The USPS whistleblower also claimed that the agency has rushed to complete work on the portal, and hasn’t followed “standard principles of testing and debugging new software before launch.”

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OPM to continue ChatGPT deployment following reupped OneGov deal

Christian Robles — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:42:00 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management will “continue to lean in” on deploying artificial intelligence — including ChatGPT — following the General Services Administration announcement that a new OneGov partnership with OpenAI will offer agencies reduced consumption-based pricing, instead of the previous $1 a year price, starting on Oct. 1.

“I want to continue to offer everyone at OPM multiple tools so that, as the frontier changes, people can move to the best tool, and then vendors can compete for our business every day by offering the best tool,” said Adam Starr, OPM’s chief information officer, at the GovExec Government & AI Summit Tuesday.

Starr said private companies should work with GSA on inking OneGov agreements, particularly as it makes procuring technology easier for smaller agencies such as OPM.

“I feel like I’m getting the right deal,” he said of the GSA initiative.

GSA is currently moving into the next phase of its OneGov program — designed to cultivate deals on technology by treating the government as a single, large customer — as it looks to extend expiring agreements and expand the initiative beyond software. Deals for Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini are set to expire at the end of the month.

OneGov critics have argued that, as federal employees become accustomed to low-cost technologies, agencies will be locked into continuing to provide access to the technologies and have to absorb higher costs when OneGov deals expire or deal terms change, critics contend.

“With this shift from fixed cost to a consumption model, we are working on setting appropriate limits on spend. We aim to keep multiple frontier AI tools in the hands of every employee,” an OPM spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW when asked how the new OneGov partnership with OpenAI will affect agency costs.

AI adoption at OPM

In addition to ChatGPT, OPM employees currently have access to three other large language models per the agency's AI inventory: Copilot, Grok and Claud.

More than 70% of employees are “active users” of at least one of those AI tools, according to Starr.

OPM’s June workforce pulse survey found that the agency had a “net promoter score” 0f 17.9 on a scale of -100 to 100, according to the OPM spokesperson, suggesting employees have a favorable view of the AI tools. The score captures user sentiment of AI by asking employees how likely they are to recommend an approved AI tool to a colleague. The Office of the Director had the highest net promoter score of +95.7 while the human capital office was close behind at +64.1, according to the spokesperson.

OPM is using AI for a variety of purposes.

As the agency looks to consolidate 119 human resources IT systems into one, one employee is using AI to distill thousands of pages worth of training materials from across the federal government for the new system, said Starr. OPM employees have used AI to build dashboards and rewrite the Customer Relationship Management platform deployed at retirement services contact centers, he continued.

To support the adoption of AI at OPM, the agency has stood up training initiatives for employees.

Roughly a quarter of the agency has signed up for an ambassador program where employees learn how at least two AI platforms apply to their work and teach five to 10 other people about the technologies, said Starr. The agency also allows vendors to train employees and conduct its own in-house training on topics such as AI platforms and agentic AI.

Underpinning OPM’s AI adoption strategy is a framework known as STEPS, according to Starr.

The first S stands for signals, which refers to the metrics used to guide AI adoption. The T stands for tools, which refers to ensuring agencies have access to cutting-edge technologies. The E stands for enablement, which covers training, ambassador and other programs that help employees make the most out of AI. The P stands for policies, such as OPM’s recent AI hiring memo, that explains what AI can and cannot support. The second S stands for staffing agencies with the right talent through hiring initiatives such as Tech Force.

The STEPS framework has informed an OPM program called the AI Governance and Adoption program, or AI GAP, which seeks to help other agencies harness AI, said Starr.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to note the number of large language models mentioned in OPM's most recent AI use case inventory.

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New bipartisan Senate science caucus will address AI

Alexandra Kelley — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 19:01:00 -0400

On Monday, Sens. John Hickenlooper, D-Co., and Dave McCormick, R-Pa., jointly unveiled a new Senate Bipartisan Science and Innovation Caucus that aims to investigate and support U.S. scientific research and innovation – and weigh in on AI policy.

While the caucus’ focus will hit a wide array of topics, Hickenlooper said that he anticipates the caucus examining AI policy issues like regulation.

Speaking to Nextgov/FCW at the caucus launch event, Hickenlooper acknowledged the pressing global rivalry with countries like China to develop the most advanced AI systems, but he said it doesn’t negate AI’s threat potential.

“We want to be careful and make sure that we don't have something running amok that could cause large amounts of damage,” Hickenlooper said, adding that the new caucus will start working on these issues soon to keep up with AI developments.

As the ranking member on the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Technology and Data Privacy, Hickenlooper acknowledged that there is overlap in committee jurisdiction over different AI subject matter.

In addition to AI, the caucus will focus on promoting policy that advance aspects of the U.S. scientific enterprise; examining its potential benefits and threats; its economic and national security impact; and how legislation could benefit it.

“I think you look at the things that distinguish America,” McCormick said. “Most of them are investments in science and a parallel expansion into the growth of entrepreneurship at the highest level.”

The Science and Innovation Caucus follows news that House Democrats are contemplating the creation of a new select committee on AI if they take control of the chamber following midterm elections.

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NSA plans major reorganization with new AI, China and cyber centers

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:11:00 -0400

The National Security Agency is preparing a sweeping reorganization that would establish five mission centers focused on artificial intelligence, China, cybersecurity, combat support and global intelligence, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The plan, developed under NSA head Gen. Joshua Rudd, would put new mission directors in charge of those areas as the agency adjusts its structure around emerging technology and national security priorities.

The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to communicate details of the new arrangement. It would mark one of the most significant organizational changes at the intelligence agency in a decade.

The Washington Post first reported the planned overhaul Sunday.

“While detailed personnel specifics cannot be provided at this time, NSA’s focus is to ensure that the organizational restructuring of Agency priorities enhances the Agency’s ability to fulfill its critical national security missions at both speed and scale,” an agency spokesperson said, noting that the agency’s “core missions remain unchanged.”

New mission directors are expected to submit organizational plans in the coming weeks, with implementation of the structure beginning in October and a goal of reaching full operational capacity some time in January of next year.

Some key details appear to remain unsettled, including whether the centers would replace existing divisions or add a management layer over the agency’s current structure.

The agency collects and analyzes intercepted foreign communications and other electronic signals to inform U.S. national security decisions. It also helps protect sensitive government networks and encryption systems against foreign threats.

Rudd, who was confirmed in March, also leads U.S. Cyber Command, the Defense Department unit responsible for offensive and defensive cyber operations. It’s not clear how the reorg would affect operational relationships between the combatant command and the foreign eavesdropping giant. Both organizations are headquartered at the sprawling Fort Meade campus in Maryland, with personnel extending across the United States and overseas.

Under the plan, the NSA’s elite Tailored Access Operations hacking unit is expected to be lodged under the global intelligence arm and receive additional resources once the federal government’s budget resets at the end of this month. The unit, recently reconstituted under Rudd, specializes in penetrating foreign digital targets.

The proposed AI center comes as NSA officials publicly describe a growing role for the technology in both intelligence analysis and cybersecurity.

At the Billington Cybersecurity Summit last week, cybersecurity directorate chief David Imbordino said the agency is exploring AI tools to help analysts sort through enormous quantities of collected information and identify useful material faster, and he said the technology could accelerate analysis that currently takes days or weeks.

NSA Deputy Director Tim Kosiba similarly said last month that the agency is engaging leading commercial developers as it seeks broader access to their systems. New AI models are increasingly capable of finding software flaws and writing code to exploit them, prompting global debates over safety standards, who should have access to the tools and how governments should use them.

“We want access to all the models, and we’re going to take advantage of that,” Kosiba said at an intelligence conference in Bethesda, Maryland.

NSA is also helping implement a June executive order establishing a voluntary process for government scrutiny of advanced AI systems’ hacking capabilities before their wider release. The agency’s director is responsible for determining which models qualify for that process, in consultation with other federal offices.

The restructuring follows an earlier overhaul, known as NSA 21, launched in 2016 under then-Director Mike Rogers. That effort sought to reorganize the agency into six directorates.

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Agriculture CIO transitions to role modernizing farmers’ records

Edward Graham — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:08:00 -0400

The Agriculture Department’s top IT official is stepping down from his position to join an agency modernization initiative, a USDA spokesperson confirmed to Nextgov/FCW on Monday.

Chief Information Officer Sam Berry officially joined USDA last September, when he replaced longtime agency CIO Gary Washington. Berry previously served as an advisor at Agriculture for the cost-cutting — and controversial — Department of Government Efficiency.

“Sam Berry has been a tremendous USDA CIO,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement. “He will now be assuming a new role at USDA where he will be focused on the implementation of One Farmer One File.”

USDA announced the technology modernization initiative in February, saying at the time that the effort is designed “to create a single, streamlined record that follows the farmer — no matter where they go in the USDA system.”

Agriculture subsequently announced a $300 million agreement with Palantir in April to, in part, support the rollout of the One Farmer, One File initiative.

“Protecting America’s farmland is protecting America itself, and this work gives USDA the visibility and speed needed to safeguard our food supply,” Berry said in a statement about the partnership at the time. “Our farmers sustain this nation, and modern tools help us support them with greater precision. I look forward to working with Palantir as we continue serving the American farming community, which serves all of us every single day.”

Federal News Network reported on Sept. 8 that USDA chief information security officer Tony Brannum will serve as interim CIO. Agriculture did not disclose the nature of Berry’s new position with the One Farmer, One File initiative. The agency has reportedly been reaching out to other internal tech and IT officials in recent weeks about taking on roles with the initiative.

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Trump redoubles pro-AI stance amid calls to slow development

Alexandra Kelley — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:16:00 -0400

President Donald Trump on Monday pushed back against major tech leaders’ recent calls to slow the pace of artificial intelligence development for the sake of safety, saying the U.S. does need “strong and smart” guardrails but that the country is already outfitted with the proper safety infrastructure.

In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote that the “only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” He added that his administration has been working to stop AI developers from “doing bad, or potentially bad ‘things’” and that current U.S. regulatory structures already offer a level of oversight that can ensure AI won’t be used to cause harm. Trump also doubled down on the national security impetus to ensure the U.S. is dominant in the creation of new AI products over other countries like China.

Trump’s comments follow public posts from both Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman concluding that the broader AI industry needs to slow its research into potentially dangerous AI products.

Amodei first wrote in a weekend blog post that AI developers should “pace the frontier” in order to ensure that the technology’s innovation doesn’t outpace the ability to deal with threats it may pose.

“The most effective method of pacing is via regulation that targets all US frontier AI companies, as that covers even those who are unwilling to cooperate voluntarily,” Amodei wrote.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman similarly warned against the ways “AI progress could go very badly,” in an early Monday X post, saying that safety techniques need to stay ahead of progress on model capabilities and that concentration of power could cause “dystopian” results.

“We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!,” Trump wrote. “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”

Trump followed this initial post with more commentary, calling the warnings of AI threats — which were catalyzed by a series of Tuesday X posts made by former OpenAI and Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon — part of a larger “hoax.”

“Concerning AI, when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?” Trump wrote on Monday. “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX.”

Coxon’s posts following his resignation from Anthropic over safety concerns went viral and have captured Congressional attention, with multiple lawmakers calling for the prioritization of AI regulatory legislation on X.

As Trump prepares to welcome Xi Jinping, the president of the People’s Republic of China, to the White House on Sept. 24, he wrote that China isn’t slowing down their development of new AI technologies, and he plans on keeping with his pro-AI agenda to ensure U.S. dominance in the market.

Speaking on CBS Sunday Morning, Amodei, who has long been an advocate for responsible AI development, said that the burden of ensuring safe AI is not confined to just the AI industry or the federal government.

“I feel both sides of the responsibility,” Amodei said. “It shouldn’t be my responsibility alone or Anthropic’s responsibility alone or all of the AI company’s responsibility alone or even one government’s responsibility alone. This is bigger than all of us.”

Trump, however, made clear his regulatory posture would continue to favor industry growth.

“The only reason the AI/Data Center outburst is happening is because the United States is leading, by a lot, every other country,” Trump said on Truth Social. “Don’t kill the Golden Goose!”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Industry experts are also divided on the path ahead for AI regulation. The Center for Democracy and Technology echoed Amodei and Altman’s call to pace the frontier of AI tech development and supported more federal regulatory mechanisms.

“Companies clearly need stronger incentives to ensure AI systems won’t cause harm to individuals, critical infrastructure, and society more broadly,” CDT President & CEO Alexandra Reeve Givens said in a statement. “Especially concerning is the White House’s approach of secret, arbitrary processes and vague threats of retaliation, which is not only ineffective but also undercuts the cornerstones of democracy. Governance mechanisms must be effective, legitimate, and collaboratively designed, providing transparency and a foundation for public accountability.”

Adam Thierer, a senior policy analyst at the R Street Institute, sided with the Trump administration, writing on X that surrendering the competitive lead the U.S. has in AI technology is “incredibly dangerous thinking,” particularly if its development is dictated by a “combination of governments,” for diversified oversight, as Amodei suggested on CBS Sunday Morning.

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