Cybersecurity of AI Systems

While AI standards and best practices provide valuable guidance to practitioners, they often are geared toward integrating AI into the structure and practices of large, well-resourced organizations. Yet small and medium enterprises (SMEs) stand to benefit greatly from AI adoption as well. This blog examines the implications of AI standards for smaller organizations and proposes several achievable initial steps that practitioners can take to further responsible AI deployment under resource constraints.

As artificial intelligence introduces new risks, some potentially catastrophic or even existential, there is little data or detailed theory to assess them. Policymakers often resort to expert best guesses for the probability of doom but probability is not always the most appropriate tool, especially for the types of uncertainties in AI risk. This report details a brief introduction to Belief and Plausibility, which provides an alternative approach that is mathematically rigorous, uses familiar vocabulary, and only requires policymakers to ask two simple questions.

Organizations face growing pressure to adopt artificial intelligence, but often lack practical guidance on how to do so effectively. This report bridges the gap between high-level principles and real-world implementation, offering actionable steps across the AI adoption life cycle. Drawing on over 1,200 resources, this reference guide provides practitioners with the knowledge required to operationalize AI safety, security, and governance practices within their organizations.

CSET’s Andrew Lohn shared his expert perspective in an op-ed published by The National Interest. In the piece, he explains that AI-assisted hacking signals a deeper cybersecurity threat: not new tools, but the breakdown of core defenses like defense in depth against adaptive, large-scale attackers.

Red-teaming is a popular evaluation methodology for AI systems, but it is still severely lacking in theoretical grounding and technical best practices. This blog introduces the concept of threat modeling for AI red-teaming and explores the ways that software tools can support or hinder red teams. To do effective evaluations, red-team designers should ensure their tools fit with their threat model and their testers.

AI Control: How to Make Use of Misbehaving AI Agents

Kendrea Beers and Cody Rushing
| October 1, 2025

As AI agents become more autonomous and capable, organizations need new approaches to deploy them safely at scale. This explainer introduces the rapidly growing field of AI control, which offers practical techniques for organizations to get useful outputs from AI agents even when the AI agents attempt to misbehave.

Harmonizing AI Guidance: Distilling Voluntary Standards and Best Practices into a Unified Framework

Kyle Crichton, Abhiram Reddy, Jessica Ji, Ali Crawford, Mia Hoffmann, Colin Shea-Blymyer, and John Bansemer
| September 2025

Organizations looking to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) systems face the challenge of deciphering a myriad of voluntary standards and best practices—requiring time, resources, and expertise that many cannot afford. To address this problem, this report distills over 7,000 recommended practices from 52 reports into a single harmonized framework. Integrating new AI guidance with existing safety and security practices, this work provides a road map for organizations navigating the complex landscape of AI guidance.

CSET’s Jessica Ji shared her expert analysis in an interview published by Science News. The interview discusses the U.S. government’s new action plan to integrate artificial intelligence into federal operations and highlights the significant privacy, cybersecurity, and civil liberties risks of using AI tools on consolidated sensitive data, such as health, financial, and personal records.

Frontier AI capabilities show no sign of slowing down so that governance can catch up, yet national security challenges need addressing in the near term. This blog post outlines a governance approach that complements existing commitments by AI companies. This post argues the government should take targeted actions toward AI preparedness: sharing national security expertise, promoting transparency into frontier AI development, and facilitating the development of best practices.

We investigate the scale of attack and defense mathematically in the context of AI's possible effect on cybersecurity. For a given target today, highly scaled cyber attacks such as from worms or botnets typically all fail or all succeed.