Congressional lawmakers confronted a stark reality on December 17th: emerging technologies are fundamentally reshaping America’s cybersecurity landscape, and defensive strategies must evolve rapidly to match the threat. Two House Homeland Security subcommittees convened tech industry leaders and security experts to examine how artificial intelligence and quantum computing capabilities are empowering increasingly sophisticated attacks against U.S. digital infrastructure.
The Urgency Behind the Hearing
The joint session between the Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability and the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection deliberately avoided proposing specific legislation. Instead, lawmakers sought to understand the scope and velocity of threats enabled by cutting-edge technologies—attacks that security professionals warn are still in their early stages.
Representative Andy Ogles, who chairs the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Subcommittee, framed the stakes plainly. “If we don’t get this right, we’re screwed, and if we mess this up it changes everything forever,” the Tennessee Republican stated. “Forget ideologies, politics and who you voted for, this is about national security. I truly can’t imagine what the future looks like, but it’s coming whether we prepare for it or not.”
The hearing’s timing reflected mounting concerns from major AI companies about their models being weaponized. Both Anthropic and OpenAI recently published findings detailing how advanced model capabilities—while beneficial for legitimate users—create opportunities for cybercriminals to enhance attack sophistication.
Examining Real-World AI Exploitation
Anthropic’s recent security report became a focal point for congressional inquiry. The document revealed that Chinese hackers had exploited the company’s AI model, Claude, to launch autonomous cyberattacks against roughly thirty organizations worldwide. The threat actors manipulated the system by presenting their activities as legitimate defensive cybersecurity work.
Logan Graham, who leads Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team Department, clarified that the attacks never breached Claude’s underlying code, nor was Anthropic itself compromised. However, the incident demonstrated that agentic AI systems could potentially automate between eighty and ninety percent of tasks traditionally requiring human involvement in executing cyberattacks.
“This is a significant increase in the speed and scale of operations compared to traditional methods,” Graham explained. “This group invested significant resources and used their sophisticated network infrastructure in order to circumvent our safeguards and detection mechanisms. Then, they deceived the model into believing the tasks were ethical cybersecurity tasks.”
The revelation prompted Representative Morgan Luttrell to probe a troubling scenario. The Texas Republican asked what happens when AI advancement reaches a point where human oversight—which ultimately detected this attack—becomes obsolete. “By the time you show up in front of us to tell us what happened, whomever took ahold of Claude, are they lying in-wait?” Luttrell questioned. “Are they sleeping inside the program … so now they know how you fixed it and they’re going to attack someone else who is not as strong and capable?”
Graham acknowledged that automated systems did trigger alerts during the incident. However, the attackers deployed an obfuscation network that masked their Chinese origins, effectively fragmenting the attack into smaller components that partially evaded detection mechanisms. Had the security features identified the users’ actual location earlier, the activities would have been flagged sooner.
Recommended Congressional Actions
Graham outlined three policy considerations for lawmakers: establishing mechanisms enabling rapid testing of AI models for national security vulnerabilities, creating threat intelligence sharing programs allowing developers to report concerns to relevant government agencies, and ensuring cyber defenders receive access to comparable AI capabilities.
“This is the first time we’re seeing some of these dynamics,” Graham noted. “Sophisticated actors are now doing preparations for the next time, the next model, for the next capability they can exploit. This is why we have to be detecting them as fast as possible and mitigating them within the model.”
The Evolution of Threat Operations
Google’s Vice President for Privacy, Safety and Security Engineering, Royal Hansen, told lawmakers his company’s threat intelligence team documented a significant shift over the past year. Malicious actors have moved beyond using AI for simple productivity enhancements to deploying novel AI-enabled malware in active operations.
Hansen argued that cybersecurity professionals need access to the same automation capabilities that adversaries now possess. Given that substantial commerce still operates on legacy systems, he contended that embracing AI technologies capable of automatically identifying and patching vulnerabilities represents the most effective defensive approach.
“This marks a new operational phase of AI abuse involving tools that dynamically alter behavior mid-execution, and while still nascent, this development represents a significant step toward more autonomous and adaptive malware,” Hansen testified. “We believe not only that these highly sophisticated threats can be countered, but that AI can supercharge our cyber defenses and enhance our collective security.”
The Quantum Computing Dimension
When discussions shifted to quantum computing, lawmakers concentrated on prioritization strategies—determining which categories of government data require immediate protection against quantum-enabled decryption capabilities.
Eddy Zervigon, CEO of Quantum Xchange, urged Congress to adopt an architectural approach to defending against quantum threats. This strategy would require national security agencies to proactively reinforce networks through post-quantum cryptography rather than waiting for threats to materialize.
“For more than 50 years, encryption has safeguarded our data from theft and misuse. We’ve had the luxury of a set-it-and-forget-it mindset, trusting strength by default,” Zervigon stated. “That era is ending now with quantum computing.”
Building Comprehensive Resilience
Michael Coates, founding partner of Seven Hill Ventures, presented five strategic areas where congressional action could strengthen cyber resilience against emerging AI and quantum threats. Beyond advocating for a proactive defensive posture, Coates recommended mandating secure-by-design principles as baseline expectations for hardware and software development, ensuring cyber defenses can be streamlined and automated, and requiring transparent and trustworthy AI development practices.
“Intelligent automation allows attacks to become continuous rather than episodic, eroding assumptions that organizations can recover between incidents or rely on periodic assessments,” Coates testified. “Artificial intelligence and quantum computing are accelerating forces that dramatically reshape cybersecurity. Our success will depend on whether our technical, operational and institutional responses can adapt at a comparable pace.”
The Broader Threat Landscape
Ranking Member Shri Thanedar emphasized that advanced technologies accelerate not just the capabilities of well-resourced nation-states like China, but also enable less-resourced countries and organized criminal groups to mount sophisticated attacks. The Michigan Democrat noted that over the past year, cyberattacks have grown faster, more widespread, and harder to detect.
Thanedar pointed out that for two decades, organized crime groups and nation-state actors from China, North Korea, and Russia have refined increasingly sophisticated operations to conduct espionage, steal intellectual property, cripple critical infrastructure, and extort ransom payments. He called on Congress to extend the Cyber Security Information Sharing Act—which provides liability protection for companies reporting cyberattacks to the government—before its January expiration.
Forging Bipartisan Solutions
Representative Ogles suggested that addressing these challenges might require establishing a dedicated bipartisan working group tasked with developing concrete proposals for circulation among relevant subcommittees. The approach reflects recognition that partisan divisions must yield to national security imperatives when confronting threats of this magnitude.
The hearing underscored a fundamental tension facing policymakers: the same technological advances that promise economic benefits and scientific breakthroughs simultaneously arm adversaries with powerful new attack vectors. As AI models grow more capable and quantum computing edges closer to practical reality, the window for establishing robust defenses continues narrowing.
The testimony revealed a cybersecurity landscape where attack automation outpaces defensive capabilities, where legacy infrastructure remains vulnerable, and where adversaries are actively preparing to exploit next-generation technologies. Whether Congress can forge the bipartisan consensus and institutional agility necessary to address these accelerating threats may well determine the resilience of America’s digital infrastructure in the years ahead.
