National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said the Trump administration is looking for ways to rapidly deploy and secure advanced artificial intelligence (AI) without imposing broad regulations that could slow technology development.
Cairncross made the comments Sept. 29 ahead of a White House meeting between President Donald Trump and top technology executives focused on AI.
Cairncross was called away from a scheduled afternoon appearance at the USTelecom Cybersecurity Leadership Summit to attend the White House meeting. The summit aired a prerecorded discussion Tuesday afternoon that Cairncross taped earlier that morning with USTelecom President and CEO Jonathan Spalter.
During the prerecorded discussion, Cairncross discussed his goals for the White House meeting.
“What we’re looking for are pathways where our systems and the services they provide, the daily life that is supported by these systems, can be protected, can be upscaled, can use the best-in-class technology as quickly as possible,” he said.
Cairncross said the administration wants to avoid a “top-down regulatory regime” that is applied uniformly across industry and could slow innovation.
Discussions about AI regulation accelerated this spring with what he called “the Mythos moment,” when Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview, Cairncross noted. The advanced frontier AI model is capable of autonomously discovering and exploiting thousands of vulnerabilities across major operating systems and web browsers.
“There’s been an enormous amount of work that’s gone in across the interagency, working with industry to get those pathways [for discussion] in place,” Cairncross said, adding that today’s meeting is “in furtherance of that discussion.”
“I think it’ll be a tremendously positive day,” he added.
Separately in the discussion, Cairncross said increasingly capable AI models are making exploits widely accessible that were once largely confined to sophisticated nation-state actors. However, Cairncross stressed that AI is often exposing existing security problems rather than creating entirely new ones.
“What they’re doing is dragging to the surface problems with cybersecurity that have gone unaddressed for decades,” Cairncross said, pointing to legacy systems, end-of-life devices, and edge devices. “The bill for that has come due.”
“It’s not necessarily the newest, shiniest object that is the sole fix here,” he said. “It is doing the blocking and tackling that I think has been under-resourced for years.”