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Artificial Intelligence Security Center

Promote the secure development, integration, and adoption of AI capabilities within U.S. National Security Systems and the Defense Industrial Base

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly growing and changing technology, providing incredible opportunities and challenges to our nation. 

While artificial intelligence brings unprecedented opportunity for the advancement of mission for the United States, it opens a large and volatile attack surface, which must be carefully and meticulously addressed. We know our adversaries are using and testing tools for use against this attack surface, attempting to gain a military and economic advantage over the United States. 

To ensure NSA stays in front of our adversaries' tactics and techniques, the Agency launched the NSA Artificial Intelligence Security Center (AISC). The AISC will be a key part of NSA's cybersecurity mission, with the goal to defend the Nation's AI through Intel-Driven collaboration with industry, academia, the IC, and other government partners. 

General Timothy D. Haugh

"When an enterprise runs AI systems, it opens up to new attack surfaces in the AI development lifecycle and AI abilities in model inference services. We need to secure and protect these systems from threats and buy down risks today."

-Gen Timothy Haugh

How can industry, national labs, and academia partner with the AI Security Center?

AISC Tenets

Detect and counter AI vulnerabilities that impact our nation and our allies


Advance partnerships with industry and experts


Develop, evaluate and promote AI security best practices

How We Accomplish This


Threat Driven Insights — We detect and counter AI vulnerabilities. We bring a hacker mindset to defense and preemptively intervene. We have decades-long AI expertise. NSA is a leader in AI, and will remain a leader. 


The Most Exceptional and Technically Superior Talent — NSA possesses deep technical expertise and extensive threat insights, enabling unparalleled capabilities in protecting critical systems and anticipating emerging risks. 


Power of Partnerships — We drive and advance partnerships with industry and experts. As the scope of malicious incidents grows, and the sophistication or our adversaries grows, our successful partnerships will continue to be our competitive advantage.

FAQs

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Why set up an AI Security Center at NSA?


  • AI is here. It is continually and rapidly growing and changing, providing incredible opportunities and challenges to our Nation. 
  • We know that our adversaries are highly capable of using and exploiting AI technologies to compete with us and to do us harm. 
  • NSA possesses deep technical expertise and extensive threat insights, enabling unparalleled capabilities in protecting critical systems and anticipating emerging risks. 
  • Safeguarding AI systems today is paramount for national and global security tomorrow.
 

Where will the AI Security Center be located?


The AI Security Center will be located within the Cybersecurity Collaboration Center within NSA-Washington facilities.
 

 

What is AI Security?


AI Security is protecting AI systems from learning, doing, and revealing the wrong thing. It is a set of practices to protect AI systems—training data, models, abilities, and lifecycles—from digital attacks, thefts, and damage. Securing AI systems will help to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information and services.
 

 

What is the difference between AI Security and Cybersecurity?


Securing AI systems requires us to protect the entire AI development lifecycle, an extension of secure software development practices we have today in cybersecurity. Specifically, we need to protect the training data, training frameworks, models, model abilities, and the machine learning (ML) development operations lifecycle.
 

 

How can industry, national labs, and academia partner with AI Security Center?