As artificial intelligence (AI) accelerates the sophistication and scale of cyberattacks, Reps. Don Bacon, R-Neb., and James Walkinshaw, D-Va., said today that Congress should prioritize restoring and expanding the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) capabilities to defend the nation’s critical infrastructure from foreign adversaries.
Speaking at the National Cyber Innovation Forum in Washington, D.C., the lawmakers argued that the federal government must move faster to strengthen domestic cyber defenses as AI lowers the barriers for increasingly sophisticated attacks.
The discussion comes as policymakers and cybersecurity officials increasingly point to Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model as evidence that frontier AI systems are changing the pace and scale of cyber operations.
“Unfortunately, this administration has weakened CISA in the last year, because I don’t think they realize the one-for-one output that they provide on defensive cyber,” said Bacon, who serves as the chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation.
“Instead of cutting CISA, we should be expanding CISA’s capabilities to protect our domestic, our non-military cyber systems,” Bacon said.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to CISA. The agency is currently operating with roughly 1,000 fewer staff than it had in January 2025.
Walkinshaw similarly argued that restoring and expanding CISA’s partnerships and capabilities “should be a top priority” in Congress.
“The capabilities of CISA are absolutely critical in this moment,” he said. “Unfortunately, in my view, in this moment, its capabilities have been intentionally diminished.”
Walkinshaw added that advanced AI is expanding the cyberattack surface by enabling smaller and less well-funded actors to launch increasingly sophisticated attacks against “soft targets,” such as critical infrastructure operators and state and local governments. These entities, the congressman said, often lack the resources to defend themselves effectively.
He said that dynamic makes CISA’s role even more critical because the agency helps coordinate threat intelligence and cyber defense support for organizations that cannot withstand nation-state threats on their own. CISA’s partnerships could help get advanced cyber defense tools to small and medium-sized entities around the country, he noted.
“This hyper-partisanship is making it hard to do the basic things that we need to do to defend our country,” Bacon added, referencing the CISA cuts.
While frontier AI models create new risks, they also allow defenders to “turn the tables” if the government can deploy those tools faster than adversaries, Walkinshaw acknowledged.
“We can achieve that if we can deploy the most advanced AI models across our government and across our economy faster than the attackers can deploy theirs,” he said. “So, I think that is our challenge, and that’s a challenge right now with respect to Mythos. It’ll be a challenge into the future with respect to whatever the most advanced model of the week is.”