Cyber and National Security Implications of America’s AI Action Plan

On July 23, 2025, the Trump administration released its highly anticipated “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan.” The plan outlines more than 90 federal policy goals across three key pillars—accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) innovation, building American AI infrastructure, and leading in international AI diplomacy and security—that the administration will work to achieve in the coming weeks and months. In doing so, the plan serves as a national roadmap for mobilizing and unleashing private sector-led innovation to not only win the ongoing AI race against China and other strategic rivals, but also to reassert America’s dominance in technological innovation, economic competitiveness, and global leadership.

Beyond its vision and ambitions, the plan unequivocally establishes cybersecurity as a foundational priority—not a mere compliance exercise or technical footnote, but an essential condition for scaling our progress, protecting our breakthroughs, and sustaining our momentum. By embedding cybersecurity provisions throughout each of the plan’s three pillars, the Trump administration aptly recognizes that winning the AI race depends not only on being the first or best, but also on ensuring that our innovation is resilient, trustworthy, and secure at every stage of its lifecycle.

While the plan includes a wide range of promising initiatives, three are particularly notable for their strategic relevance to cybersecurity and national security. Each aligns with one of the core pillars.

1. Accelerate AI Innovation: Open-Source and Open-Weight AI Are No Longer Just a Debate—They Are National Security Imperatives

Open-source AI development has been the source of contentious debate in both Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. over the past few years. When DeepSeek’s R1 model entered the scene earlier this year, it swiftly reignited national attention and heightened the stakes surrounding whether—and to what extent—open-source and open-weight AI should shape the future of American innovation.

The Trump administration confronts this debate head-on in this plan, explicitly citing the geostrategic value of open models and their potential to become global standards in key commercial sectors and academic research. At the same time, the plan affirms that developers must retain the freedom and right to decide how open their models should be. Ultimately, the plan casts the federal government’s role as that of a facilitator advancing open innovation by cultivating a supportive environment for open models.

To achieve this, the plan outlines several targeted actions aimed at expanding access to critical resources—such as compute, data, and research infrastructure—that are likely to shape the trajectory of open-source AI development in the United States. Notably, the plan recommends accelerating the maturation of a healthy financial market for large-scale computing power for startups and academia through collaboration with industry, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot. In addition, the plan commits to partnering with leading technology companies to increase the research community’s access to world-class private-sector computing, models, data, and software resources as part of the NAIRR pilot. The plan also directs the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to convene stakeholders and accelerate the adoption of open-weight models by small and medium-sized businesses. By fostering interagency coordination and public-private partnerships, the plan ensures that the trajectory of America’s open-source AI advancement is not only supported, but guided by stakeholders positioned to leverage their unique expertise and resources to drive responsible adoption and secure development.

2. Build American AI Infrastructure: Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Construction, and Technological Innovation Must Go Hand in Hand

One of the most welcome developments in America’s AI Action Plan is its clear recognition that cybersecurity, technological innovation, and infrastructure construction are not opposing or wholly separate efforts, but rather complementary objectives to be achieved in tandem.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the plan’s directive to “Create Streamlined Permitting for Data Centers, Semiconductor Manufacturing Facilities, and Energy Infrastructure while Guaranteeing Security.” In addition to accelerating domestic construction, the plan calls for strong security guardrails to prevent adversarial interference in the AI compute stack and ensure critical infrastructure is built on trusted, American products. This includes prohibiting the use of foreign adversary information and communications technology and services—both hardware and software—across the physical systems that support AI development.

The plan outlines additional infrastructure-centric cybersecurity measures, including but not limited to: 

• • Establishing an AI Information Sharing and Analysis Center to improve visibility into AI-related cyber threats across critical infrastructure sectors.
  • Promoting secure-by-design AI technologies and applications across the U.S. government by refining the Department of Defense’s Responsible AI and Generative AI Frameworks, Roadmaps, and Toolkits and publishing an Intelligence Community Standard on AI Assurance under the auspices of Intelligence Community Directive 505 on Artificial Intelligence.
  • Update the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency’s Cybersecurity Incident and Vulnerability Response Playbooks to account for AI-specific risks and require coordination between chief information security officers and key agency stakeholders including chief AI officers, senior privacy officials, and the Center for AI Standards and Innovation at the Department of Commerce. Agencies would be expected to revise their internal playbooks to align with these changes.

While the plan includes other cybersecurity provisions across this and the other two pillars, the preceding examples illustrate how building out America’s AI infrastructure to drive technological innovation can present a vital opportunity to develop new safeguards tailored to emerging technologies and update existing cybersecurity practices.

3. Lead in International AI Diplomacy and Security: Cybersecurity Doesn’t End with AI Systems—or at Our Border

The plan appropriately emphasizes how important it is for the federal government to remain at the forefront of evaluating national risks in frontier models. To stay ahead, the plan calls for close coordination with frontier AI developers to assess emerging threats, including model vulnerabilities and cyberattack vectors, as well as potential misuse, especially in areas like chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or explosives development.

However, national security risks are not confined to the AI systems directly in front of us. For example, loopholes in semiconductor manufacturing export controls can create opportunities for adversaries to access critical subsystem components that power advanced hardware. The plan proposes targeted actions to strengthen our national security by developing new export controls on currently unregulated semiconductor manufacturing subsystems.

The potential rise and expansion of authoritarian influences in international standards-setting bodies can be another U.S. national security risk that extends beyond borders if they manage to shape norms around technologies like facial recognition and surveillance in ways that undermine American values. To counter this, the plan emphasizes the need to leverage U.S. leadership in these bodies to advocate for American values abroad. Finally, advanced tools may also lower the barrier to synthesizing harmful biomolecules, making biosecurity an increasingly important attack vector to monitor and safeguard. To proactively mitigate the risk of bioweapons and biowarfare, the plan details provisions to secure data sharing among nucleic acid synthesis providers to prevent misuse of AI-enabled bioengineering tools.

These examples underscore how cybersecurity and national security resilience are increasingly shared responsibilities across disciplines, industry sectors, and even national borders. As emerging technologies like AI continue to accelerate our connectivity and data sharing, the resulting cybersecurity risks can become more intertwined and difficult to manage. This makes it all the more important to craft flexible, risk-based solutions that harness the benefits of emerging technologies while proactively mitigating the vulnerabilities it may introduce or exacerbate.

Despite the many impressive strides the Trump administration has already made in embracing AI as a national priority and energizing Americans to win the AI race, this plan only marks the beginning. While America’s AI Action Plan rightly recognizes that technology, policy, cybersecurity, energy, and the economy can no longer advance in silos, the true challenge lies in how these policy actions are implemented, sustained by stakeholders over time, and adapted to meet the evolving landscape of cybersecurity threats and emerging technologies.

The forthcoming 2025 National AI R&D Strategic Plan will be central to this next phase, as it operationalizes many of the priorities identified across all three pillars of the AI Action Plan. From guiding federal AI research investments to advancing breakthroughs in theoretical, computational, and experimental innovation to strengthening AI interpretability, control, and robustness, the AI R&D Strategic Plan will help determine whether the United States can once again successfully translate ambition into victory and enduring leadership.

Ultimately, whether this moment materializes as a pivotal turning point for America in the AI race will depend not just on vision, but also on the rigor of our follow-through.