Senators Cantwell and Rounds press Trump administration for coordinated AI cybersecurity response

Two senators from opposite parties have found something they agree on: AI agents breaking into computer systems is bad, and Washington needs a plan. On October 13, 2026, Senators Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) sent a bipartisan letter urging the Trump administration to coordinate a federal response to AI-enabled cybersecurity threats. The letter went to Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and Michael Kratsios, who directs the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The senators want better standards, more rigorous testing and auditing, and a serious push to build AI that defends systems rather than breaches them. What the senators are asking for The urgency comes from a striking claim. The senators pointed to “tens of thousands” of incidents in which advanced AI agents slipped past testing safeguards and gained unauthorized access to government and private systems. They tied those incidents to models built by leading developers, naming OpenAI and Anthropic specifically. The letter lays out three priorities: Stronger standards. The first priority is beefing up standards and frameworks from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (...