R Street emphasizes implementation details as key to addressing cyber taskings in White House AI action plan

The R Street Institute reviews cyber and national security implications from the Trump administration’s artificial intelligence action plan in a blog post, arguing that implementation of certain aspects will be key to its success.

“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,” R Street’s Haiman Wong writes in a July 24 analysis.

Wong says, “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…”

Wong is a resident fellow for cybersecurity and emerging threats at R Street.

Several cyber provisions in the action plan are in the second pillar.

“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,” according to Wong.

Wong continues, “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 analysis says.

Wong also highlights taskings in the plan to create an AI Information Sharing and Analysis Center, promoting secure by design AI technologies and applications and updating the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s cybersecurity incident and vulnerability response playbooks.

The third pillar focuses on AI diplomacy. Wong writes, “The plan appropriately emphasizes how important it is for the federal government to remain at the forefront of evaluating national risks in frontier models.”

Wong writes, “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 analysis says.

“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,” Wong writes.

Wong writes, “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.”