AI Enhances US Cybersecurity While AI-Designed Bioweapons Escalate Threats

Government agencies including state and local systems and the FBI are increasingly adopting unified, AI-powered cybersecurity platforms to overcome fragmented legacy systems, resulting in faster threat detection, reduced false positives, and more efficient security operations. The evolution of AI in cybersecurity has progressed from generative AI, which creates content based on prompts, to agentic AI capable of autonomous decision-making and action, offering enhanced operational efficiency but also introducing new security risks, particularly around identity and credential threats. Cybercriminals have leveraged AI to develop sophisticated attacks such as highly convincing phishing scams, prompt injections, deepfakes, and adaptive malware that can evade traditional defenses and learn from environments to maximize damage. Concurrently, there is an escalating arms race involving AI systems that design novel biological pathogens and AI detection systems aiming to identify these threats before they emerge, with research demonstrating significant variability in the effectiveness of current DNA screening software to flag AI-generated toxin variants, prompting updates to improve detection. This ongoing technological battle underscores the complex interplay between AI-driven innovation in both cyber offense and defense, as well as in biosecurity, necessitating continual adaptation and advancement of security measures.