Advanced artificial intelligence models will “fundamentally change warfare as we know it,” a top cyber official at the Defense Department said Thursday, saying it represents “not evolutionary warfare, but revolutionary warfare.”
Paul Lyons, principal deputy assistant secretary for cyber policy, said the development of frontier AI models like Mythos amounted to a “watershed moment,” speaking at Rubrik’s Federal Cyber Resilience Breakfast produced by FedScoop.
Such models will “change both offense and defensive posture within the Department of War to something that’s close to you for critical infrastructure,” he said. “This is the ability to hunt and speed across the domain and outside the fence line in critical dependencies with water, power, compute.”
The advent of the technology is forcing the department to address difficult questions, but it’s a great opportunity as well for the United States given that it’s being developed by American companies, Lyons said. It’s something his department is optimistic about, he said.
“To be blunt, we’re trying to figure out, what authorities do we need? How do you leverage that within both decisionmaking and employment?” he said. “We have the right people looking at the speed, scale and complexity of cyber and how it’s going to be affected through the advent of AI.”
The Pentagon labeled Mythos a “supply chain risk” after its creator, Anthropic, resisted commands from the department to use its Claude model in ways the firm opposed. The department has nonetheless been using Mythos to hunt for cyber vulnerabilities.
Lyons said that cyber warfare overall has become more mature, as recent conflicts have shown.
“We saw it in spades in Venezuela, where you can layer cyber to create conditions that are favorable to the warfighter, that lower risk to mission, lower risk to force that where paired with both no kinetic and kinetic effects, can increase lethality,” he said. “We see it in Iran today.”
President Donald Trump’s cyber strategy places an emphasis on taking the battle to the malicious hackers, something Lyons said was a vital approach.
“America’s posture in cyber defense has been largely a defensive posture,” he said. “That’s a losing strategy for America. America has to dominate the full spectrum of cyber operations.”
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