By admin 
Gov. Gavin Newsom directed California agencies on Monday to better prepare for threats from artificial intelligence cyberattacks by using the technology to find vulnerabilities in the state’s systems.
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“The digital environment is rapidly evolving before our eyes,” Newsom said in a statement. “Attacks are faster, more sophisticated and more frequent, putting at risk the basic systems families count on. California can either wait for the next crisis, or we can build the kind of defenses this moment demands. We are choosing to build.”
The announcement comes a few weeks after leading companies OpenAI and Anthropic said that their models had hacked into other organizations on their own, which the Governor’s Office mentioned as part of the announcement. Representatives for the companies appeared before legislators Monday as part of a hearing on how AI systems were changing cybersecurity and said they are supportive of the effort.
Kyla Guru, a cybersecurity official at Anthropic, said most of the software the world runs on, including what the state uses, is built on “decades old code looked at by many people, still carrying serious flaws.”
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The consequences for state and local governments are significant. Suisun City, near Fairfield, was hit with a cyberattack on Friday that hit its ability to route 911 calls and dispatch police officers and firefighters. The city shut down its network and it was still not completely running as of Monday morning. It is not clear if AI was used, but the technology could make such attacks easier to pull off.
Jonathan Snow, homeland security deputy director for California’s emergency services office, told legislators that the recent attacks by systems autonomously targeting organizations “demonstrates that AI is highly capable in uncovering vulnerabilities quickly and potentially— and likely, chaining together multiple weaknesses.”
Newsom announced expanded access for local governments to defense systems, including ones that use AI, and that each state agency must now have a cybersecurity official.
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