Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON — In the wake of a report accusing China of using publicly available AI tech to launch cyberattacks, experts are warning cyber defenders they’re going to need some AI help of their own.
“Last week, we had the first revelation that there is a capability here that our adversaries can use that can get us to a speed and a scale [of attacks] we haven’t seen before,” said Paul Nakasone, the former four-star chief of the NSA and Cyber Command, at Tuesday’s Aspen Cyber Summit here in Washington. “The question becomes, what are we going to do about it?
“I think what we are going to do about it, and what you will see in the next six months, truly, is how does AI come on the cyber defense [side],” Nakasone continued. “I think we’re going to see tremendous, tremendous advances with regards to what we can do with artificial intelligence in a defensive mindset.”
A “Chinese state-sponsored group,” posing as legitimate cybersecurity testers, recently tricked Anthropic’s Claude Code AI into hacking roughly 30 government and industry targets on their behalf, the company reported.
While AI isn’t replacing human hackers, yet, it can multiply the number and speed of attacks one moderately well-trained human can conduct, experts agreed. In essence, it’s the cyberspace equivalent of unmanned “loyal wingmen” drones directed by a single fighter pilot. But there is, so far, no matching force multiplier for defense.
“We’re now going to see agentic cyber defenses deployed against agentic cyber attacks,” said Jack Shanahan, founder of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.
Pitting algorithm against algorithm at superhuman speeds, however, could lead to results no human on either side expected, let alone desired.
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