On Reading the National Academy's "Implications of Recent Advancements in Artificial Intelligence for Cybersecurity"
I’m reading the National Academies’ 2026 report Implications of Recent Advancements in Artificial Intelligence for Cybersecurity. I’m especially interested in what it says about the governance challenges associated with AI-supported cybersecurity attacks and society’s short-term inability to completely resist them.
According to the report, a major challenge is caused by “asymmetry”: organizations need to defend against all possible angles of attack, while AI-supported cybersecurity attacks need only find a single vulnerability and then pile on additional attacks against it.
The implications for needing “across the board” defenses are profound. Any organization’s unified governance of data, AI, and cybersecurity requires a framework consisting of three things:
Decision-making bodies.
Decision-making rules and procedures.
Mechanisms to ensure compliance with those rules.
Unfortunately, the speed with which AI-based cybersecurity attacks can learn, adapt, and attack again is a major reason why traditional organizational models may have difficulty keeping up with cybersecurity policies, processes, and systems.
According to the authors of this National Academies report, AI tools must themselves be adopted and managed as an integral part of cybersecurity defense.
What is the likelihood that organizations will be able to pursue unified and coherent responses to AI-based cybersecurity attacks if they enlist AI tools as part of the team?
I’ll be looking for clues to how to answer that question as I read through the report, then I’ll report back.
Copyright © 2026 by Dennis D. McDonald
