DISA Director Calls for Industry Partnerships as Frontier AI Reshapes Warfighting

Frontier artificial intelligence (AI) technology will change the delivery of warfighting capabilities, according to the Defense Information Systems Agency’s most senior official.

According to NVIDIA, frontier AI models are the most advanced of their kind, trained from large datasets for high-powered performance.

“[Frontier models are] changing how we think. They’re changing the operating environment,” Lt. Gen. Paul Stanton said during his keynote address Tuesday at the annual TechNet Cyber conference in Baltimore.

Notably, President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday targeting security risks posed by frontier AI models. Within 60 days, federal agencies are to build a classified system to evaluate the cyber capabilities of advanced AI models and determine which of them qualify as “covered frontier models,” the order reads.  

Stanton warned that standing still is not an option and challenged the audience to consider how teams are being repositioned in response to frontier AI, a technology that can identify and exploit vulnerabilities at speed.

The commander and director of the Department of Defense Cyber Defense Command then laid out the reality of the challenge ahead.

“The window of the requirement from discovery of the vulnerability, to making modifications in your code, to delivering them in a remediation—configuration change, new cybersecurity requirement, a patch—and then driving that across the totality of the Department of War Information Network at speed,” he offered.

“We cannot do that,” Stanton said, referring to his team alone. “We can,” he said, gesturing at the room and calling for strong government-industry partnerships. “It’s going to require us to think a little bit differently to interoperate a little bit differently,” he proceeded.

Teamwork is central to the solution, he emphasized, and that team is all partners working together as one.

“You innovate, you have the talent,” he said. “Let’s incorporate it into a system-of-systems solution that nests into a campaign that solves a warfighting problem. It’s going to take all of us.”

TechNet Cyber is organized by AFCEA International. SIGNAL Media is the official media of AFCEA International.