AI Cyber Risks Are Testing the Office Built to Coordinate Them
Congress created the National Cyber Director to solve a coordination problem. AI cyber risks may reveal whether the office has the tools to do so.
Artificial intelligence (AI) models with increasingly sophisticated cyber capabilities are forcing a basic institutional question: Is the federal government prepared to help public and private actors anticipate and respond to the risks those models may create? A review of the administration’s whipsaw approach to AI-related cyber risks indicates that a component of that preparedness—the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD)—may not be fulfilling its intended purpose. More specifically, the ONCD does not seem to be leveraging its cyber expertise to inform and coordinate the executive branch’s response to emerging issues.
Though some cyber experts have dismissed panic over frontier models such as Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.5 as premature and unjustified, several members of the Trump administration have determined that the threats posed by existing models warrant a proactive response. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in particular has pushed the administration to take seriously the cyber capabilities of models like Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5.5.
The administration’s most concrete action was a draft executive order on cyber resilience and pre-deployment evaluation of sufficiently capable AI models. That order was pulled hours before a planned signing ceremony. Even so, the draft confirms that AI-enabled cyber risk has become a live White House concern. Among other provisions, the order directed several executive branch actors to exercise cyber-readiness authorities, including by deploying resources and expertise to private and public actors that may be especially susceptible to threats introduced by advanced AI models.
The episode raises a harder question than whether one executive order was well-conceived: whether the office Congress created to coordinate national cyber policy is structured to handle the cross-cutting risks that AI now presents.
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