ai
Pentagon Officials Say AI Accelerates Cyber Defense and Exploitation
Assistant Secretary for Cyber Policy Katherine Sutton and Pentagon CTO Emil Michael expressed optimism about AI models like Anthropic's Mythos for rapidly identifying and fixing software vulnerabilities. The officials spoke hours after OpenAI expanded access to its rival model for cyber defenders. Eight leading tech firms also received clearance last week to deploy AI on classified networks.
May 7, 5:56 PM·2m read3 sources
BR
azernews.azAudio version
Tap play to generate a narrated version.
Top Pentagon technology officials voiced optimism Thursday about the potential for AI models to strengthen cyber defenses by finding and patching vulnerabilities far faster than humans can manage. Katherine Sutton, Assistant Secretary for Cyber Policy, spoke at the SCSP AI+Expo this morning. She said she hears a lot of people talking about challenges and threats when they talk about Mythos.
"[But] there’s huge opportunity in these models. One of the foundational things that they’re going to enable is the development of secure code," Sutton stated. " Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s CTO and Under Secretary for Research and Engineering, spoke at the SCSP AI+Expo immediately after Sutton.
David Sanger moderated the session. "Those vulnerabilities have always existed. Now you can find them faster, and the good news is you can patch them faster.
So that creates a moment where it’s incumbent upon the country, not just the government, to harden the systems," Michael said. Michael described how the Defense Department and the nation rely on a patchwork of often-antiquated software systems running sloppy, buggy code.
He argued that AI capable of patching code autonomously could dig America out of decades of accumulated tech debt and fast-forward what should have been done for the last 20 years.
The officials' remarks came against the backdrop of an ongoing dispute with Anthropic. Anthropic is pursuing two parallel lawsuits against the government. President Donald Trump and Secretary Pete Hegseth banned federal use of Anthropic products in blistering social media posts.
Michael himself called Anthropic’s CEO "a liar [with] a God-complex" on X. ” He described Mythos as really just an example of the upcoming evolution of cyber-capable models, just slightly ahead. "These kinds of cyber models … whether OpenAI’s or xAI’s, Google’s … will all come out in the next year or so [with] this exquisite cyber capability.
