The Department of Defense’s National Security Agency (NSA) has launched a new organization to take charge of AI security. The move is primarily geared to protect information systems crucial to national defense and security. But it’s likely to affect hospitals and health systems as well.  

How could it not? Healthcare is not only the country’s largest single industry but also an avid adopter of AI. Plus it’s a hot target for malicious hackers at home and abroad.

Simply called the AI Security Center, AISC for short, the new federal enterprise has as its inaugural leader Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, who will step down as director of the NSA and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. 

Announcing the new center’s birth Sept. 28, Nakasone said the center will work closely with academia and private industry—both in the U.S. and in allied countries—and other AI-intensive domains to “address threats and retain our nation’s advantage in AI.”

Here’s more from Nakasone and others, pro and con, about the need that drove the creation of a centralized AI security operation in our nation.

• PRO: ‘Our adversaries, who have for decades used theft and exploitation of our intellectual property to advance their interests, will seek to co-opt our advances in AI and corrupt our application of it. AI security is about protecting AI systems from learning, doing and revealing the wrong thing.’—Gen. Nakasone via DoD News
   
• PRO: ‘For the private sector, this is an overwhelming win. It means that small to medium businesses, hospitals and other private-sector organizations will be the receiver of some of the most impactful threat intelligence to date.’—Symmetry Systems CTO Landen Brown via Infosecurity magazine
   
• CON: ‘Nobody is clamoring for more data mining and invasion of privacy from three-letter agencies. Congress should be looking to limit the scope of these domestic spying operations, not giving them a de facto green light.’—American Principles Project policy director Jon Schweppe via Fox News Digital
   
• PRO: ‘Prior to the [COVID-19] pandemic, hospitals had already struggled to defend themselves against an onslaught of ransomware and data breaches. Hospitals, medical researchers and other health institutions need the expertise and resources your agencies have developed defending against … sophisticated [cyber] threats.’—Bipartisan group of U.S. senators in a 2020 letter to Gen. Nakasone and Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency