Expect more cybersecurity executive orders soon, national cyber director says
At the Semafor World Economy forum in Washington, D.C., Cairncross said, “I think that that's the case, yeah,” when asked about the likelihood of more cyber executive actions from the president.
“There’s more coming and we expect that it will be relatively soon,” he added, without elaborating.
The second Trump administration’s national cyber strategy was unveiled early last month, alongside an executive order focused on “combating cybercrime, fraud, and predatory schemes.”
Executive orders and possible revisions to long-standing cybersecurity laws were expected to follow the strategy’s release, Nextgov/FCW previously reported.
The strategy’s pillars include goals to reshape adversary behavior; promote common sense regulation; modernize and secure federal government networks; secure critical infrastructure; sustain superiority in critical and emerging technologies; and build cyber talent and capacity.
Asked about the recent announcement of Anthropic’s Project Glasswing initiative and its concurrent Mythos Preview model, Cairncross said that Mythos is “the model right now that everyone’s talking about” but that AI capabilities, generally, are getting more sophisticated.
Advanced AI threats have caught the attention of senior administration officials, including Cairncross. The intelligence community has already been eyeing the Mythos Preview capabilities.
Earlier this year, Anthropic declined to ease restrictions against its tools being used for domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons for Pentagon use, triggering a “supply chain risk” designation from the Defense Department and a White House order that all federal agencies phase out their uses of Anthropic tools. The company has legally challenged the move.
Cairncross didn’t directly answer questions about whether Mythos Preview should be widely distributed. Anthropic says it held back the full, public release of its Claude Mythos Preview model because it was deemed too dangerous due to its advanced, autonomous hacking capabilities.
Project Glasswing grants certain companies selective access to Mythos for further safety and capability testing.
Asked about U.S. agencies — including the Treasury Department and Commerce Department — seeking access to the Mythos model, he said, “we’re working closely with the large-language model companies, we’re working closely with the tech sector [and] we’re working closely with industry to make sure that we do this in a responsible fashion.”
“This is not a special model,” Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said Monday, referring to Mythos Preview. “There will be other systems just like this in a few months from other companies, and then a year to a year and a half later, there’ll be open-weight models from China that have these capabilities. So the world is going to have to get ready for more powerful systems that are going to exist within it.”
Nextgov/FCW Staff Reporter Alexandra Kelley contributed to this report.
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