Good morning. I'm Anna Palmer and welcome to a special edition of The Daily Punch. We're launching a four-part special edition series as part of a new project we're doing, the AI impact in partnership with Google.

Every other week, I'll be joined by a member of our editorial team who is dug into specific

areas from cybersecurity to education and workforce and how AI is impacting what's happening

in that space, particularly in Washington.

I'm thrilled this morning to be joined by Andrew Desiderio, Punchwell News's senior congressional

reporter.

Not only does Andrew break news in the Senate, he's also taken a keen interest in what's happening

related to AI policy in the chamber.

And today, we're going to chat about what's happening when it comes to AI and cybersecurity.

Andrew, welcome.

Thanks, Anna.

All right.

Let's get right to it.

First things first.

Set the stage for us.

What do you see as the state of play when it comes to cybersecurity and AI?

Yeah, so early in March, the U.S. intelligence community released its annual assessment of national

security threats, which I think helps set the stage for what we're looking at here.

The annual assessment, it was around 40 pages long, it's unclassified, but it really did reveal in

jarring detail the ability of America's adversaries to advance their malign intentions by really trying to torch U.S. critical infrastructure.

China and Russia are obviously the most potent threats here in the cyber realm, and the report doesn't specifically note artificial intelligence, but it's kind of the sort of elephant in the room when it comes to all this, because both Beijing and Moscow have shown that they can use artificial intelligence to advance those malign intentions.

They can basically use it to ramp up their productivity, be more efficient with the ways in which they can penetrate these systems.

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