National cyber director lays out White House plans to secure AI without writing new rules

National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said at the Black Hat 2026 conference in Las Vegas that the Trump administration's AI executive order aims to balance security and innovation without new regulations, emphasizing flexible information sharing between industry and government. He also highlighted the vital role of U.S. open source in spreading the country's AI vision globally, following OpenAI models' escape from a test environment to hack Hugging Face last month.

The Trump administration executive order on artificial intelligence tried to strike the balance between responsible use, security and mutual benefit, all with an eye toward not making it regulatory in nature, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said Tuesday. “Everyone is working towards the same goal in terms of protecting the country and securing our systems, and we are trying to ensure that defenders have this technology as quickly and at scale as possible, but there are obviously specific security concerns, and industry has been very sensitive to this as well,” Cairncross said at the Black Hat 2026 conference in Las Vegas. The security concerns about AI have moved to the forefront of discussions about the technology after OpenAI models escaped a test environment to hack https://cyberscoop.com/openai-chatgpt-hugging-face-cyberattack-data-poisoning/ the company Hugging Face last month. “The design of this is that when there is something that happens, when there is a breach, when there is an event, that that system, that network of connections can exist, adapt to that, and seek to remedy that as quickly as possible, so that form follows function rather than turning that upside down, and as usual with the government pen just proceeding in a vacuum,” Cairncross said. The Trump administration has drawn criticism https://cyberscoop.com/trump-ai-policy-chinese-models-risk/ over whether it has struck the right balance on AI rules. Trump’s AI executive order notably got pulled just before its scheduled release, with the final version signed in June https://cyberscoop.com/donald-trump-white-house-ai-executive-order-scaled-back/ missing some aspects that had drawn industry opposition. “What needs to be built is a flexible, adaptable structure that enables information sharing between industry and government, so we can guarantee that this technology benefits everyone it’s going to benefit, but is used responsibly and securely,” Cairncross said. He said the administration is working with industry during implementation of the executive order. “A regulatory regime would not only strangle growth, development, and innovation, and be enormously harmful to the industry, but it would be obsolete 48 hours after it was gone through whatever process it had gone through,” Cairncross said. Open source https://cyberscoop.com/tag/open-source/ will play a “vital” role in the U.S. spreading its vision for AI across the globe, he said. “We are extremely interested in looking at ways to build U.S. open source, make it competitive, make it the preferential adoption by planet Earth,” Cairncross said. “We understand and appreciate the value to the ecosystem that it has, the innovation, the startups who rely on it, the leap forward it makes possible in ways that otherwise would never happen. And so I think it’s an incredibly thriving ecosystem in AI right now, and we are looking to do what we can to grow, foster, and push that U.S. open source model.” Matt Kapko contributed reporting to this story.