Policymakers from Congress and the executive branch are looking for ways to further boost the U.S. quantum computing industry, including by growing industrial capacity to translate scientific breakthroughs into workable technology.

Deputy Secretary of Commerce Paul Dabbar said the American industry is “by far the greatest leader in quantum technologies,” with a tech stack that is the envy of the world. The challenge will be translating those technological gains into real, brick-and-mortar industrialization and manufacturing dominance.

Dabbar pointed to other examples of federal support, such as grant funding from the CHIPS and Science Act and letters of intent signed earlier this year with nine companies investing more than $2 billion into different quantum technologies.

But one of the primary questions that Commerce officials ask companies when making decisions on federal investments is “How do we move a bit further down the road from discovery towards actually supporting individual technologies that can commercialize?” he said.

That question is being driven by U.S. assessments that the country’s quantum technology edge is real but is being threatened by countries such as China that have more robust industrial capacity.

Dabbar said the federal government is also attempting to follow its own example, citing White House executive orders on quantum computing and more aggressive timelines for agencies to migrate to quantum encryption, measures that CyberScoop was first to report last year. Commerce is the first agency scheduled to deploy its post-quantum encryption.

The department also has the authority to place export controls on technologies, as it did for Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable AI models earlier this year. Dabbar expressed caution but suggested Commerce officials were willing to use such controls to advance the interests of American technology makers.

“We have to be very careful about American leadership on the frontier on all technologies, and quantum is certainly one of them,” Dabbar said. “We want to be very thoughtful about making certain that which is invented by people in this room are retained by people in this room and are not copied or stolen.”

Dabbar’s comments came the same day that the Commission on U.S. Quantum Primacy released a report detailing the major challenges facing the American quantum industry.

The report warned that while research, software and private investment are “major strengths” for U.S. industry in its global competition with China, China’s manufacturing and supply chain production threatens to erode that edge.

“American scientific strengths may not translate into leadership in deployment and industrial production,” the report stated.

Boosting American industrial capacity in quantum is among the report’s top recommendations, including investments in physical infrastructure such as factories, foundries and suppliers that can “turn future breakthroughs into reliable systems.”

“To date, many quantum milestones have rightfully been measured in technical and scientific terms,” the report stated. “But national leadership requires a broader ambition: quantum primacy—the ability to turn scientific advances into sustained strategic advantage across quantum technologies.”

The commission is due to issue a final report in Spring 2027.

Sens. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M. and Todd Young, R-Ind., served as co-chairs of the commission.

Meanwhile, Luján pointed to an alleged national security incident involving Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang as evidence that U.S. private industry can’t be trusted to protect America’s tech secrets. According to media reports Huang, who is married, had an affair with Chinese tech executive Alice Huang, later identified by U.S. intelligence agencies as a foreign intelligence asset working for China.

When asked about how to maintain U.S. competitiveness in quantum computing and other technologies, Luján said tech executives “need to be smarter” about protecting America’s tech secrets.

“People need to make better decisions when you’re entrusted with that kind of power and responsibility,” he said.

Luján, who did not mention Huang by name, said tech executives “know that other countries, they send people here to do bad things and get people locked up into telling secrets and things of that nature.”

“That clearly happens, and now we’re learning about it and the stock market’s reacting…don’t be stupid,” Luján said.

Luján said that while Democrats taking control of Congress will involve efforts to “push back” against executive branch overreach, he is open to working with the Trump administration and Republicans on legislation focused on the workforce and bringing “substantial investments across the United States in this space to ensure that the United States is going to stay in the front” of quantum computing.

But he suggested those investments could be wasted if Congress does not intervene with “good policy” and if tech executives can’t self-police their behavior. He pointed to another emerging technology, AI, where an innovation-at-all-costs approach has left industry poorly positioned to deal with cybersecurity and safety concerns.

“As we’re learning now from whistleblowers and others from some AI companies that we also need policy and guardrails, and the United States is qualified in a few [of those] areas,” Luján said.

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Anthropic said its AI systems could drastically reshape the software and cybersecurity sectors in the “near term,” while also laying out a litany of cybersecurity and regulatory risks facing the company as it prepares to go public.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of its initial public offering, the company said its technology could transform entire industries and the economy. Already, cybersecurity-focused models by Anthropic and rival OpenAI can find and exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities at an alarming speed.

But the company also acknowledged serious risks its models, including Claude, pose to itself, its users and the world. Hacks by bad actors using Claude or AI agents could cause financial, legal or physical damage, spark lawsuits and affect Anthropic’s ability to insure against future losses. 

Anthropic expects bad actors, including foreign governments, to increase their efforts to access its latest frontier models as their cybersecurity capabilities improve. That creates persistent risk, since its models could be used in cyberattacks carried out by foreign governments and cybercriminal groups.

“Any successful attempt to misuse, or any perceived misuse of, our models, platform, and applications for a cyberattack or for any other malicious purpose could result in exposure to liability, disruption of our customer or other commercial relationships, or damage to our reputation,” Anthropic said in its filing.

That potential legal and regulatory risk extends to independent security researchers and others who have “used, and may in the future use, our models to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in the systems of other companies, including other AI developers, at times in connection with authorized bug bounty programs.”

Anthropic cited the rise of AI-enabled cybersecurity incidents in the U.S., the U.K. and other countries, saying they could result in more adversarial regulatory environments around the world. European laws, for example, require detailed breach reports within a strict time frame, which could be difficult for Anthropic to meet.

Federal intervention could also disrupt AI development and release timelines. Anthropic cited the Department of Commerce placing export controls on its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models, and confirmed that the Federal Trade Commission issued it a civil investigative demand earlier this month for more information on the safety and security of its products, as well as its consumer, data and privacy protection policies.

AI development will be guided by more than ethics

Anthropic has developed a public reputation as an ethics-first AI company,  most notably in disputes with the Department of Defense over how its models are used in wartime. But the IPO filing states the company must “balance safety considerations against commercial objectives, competitive pressures, and stakeholder expectations.”

The company also said it is “actively” improving security infrastructure and controls. It also has acknowledged it has moved forward on projects with “known limitations or gaps in our defenses” and may do so again.

“There can be no assurance, however, that the safeguards or access regimes we adopt will prove adequate, that we will correctly identify which capabilities require restriction, or that constraints we impose will not be circumvented,” the document stated.

AI agents can create new and “distinct” cybersecurity attack surfaces because they interact with so many other tools, databases, APIs and other third-party systems. That creates  feedback loops between a model and other systems, which can be compromised or manipulated to feed malicious instructions to the agent.

Anthropic suggested the problems could be so pronounced that it may have difficulty obtaining insurance for some cybersecurity incidents and data breaches related to its models.  

Andrew Yoon, head of research at the nonprofit CivAI, told CyberScoop that both the document and Anthropic’s overall record show a company that has consistently put profit considerations over building safer AI.

“I think in general they’re not meeting the moment here,” Yoon said. “Despite all of these risks that they flagged, they’re moving ahead pretty much as fast as humanly possible, and their justification for this is ‘You can’t do safety from second place.’”

Yoon said Anthropic has not only pushed its own frontier research toward dangerous and harmful capabilities like hacking, “they are pushing very aggressively ahead” and in some cases influencing competitors to follow suit. Anthropic’s release of its Mythos and Fable models earlier this year caused OpenAI to shift “its entire corporate strategy” to match the capabilities of Anthropic models in coding, science, and general intelligence by building models at breakneck speed.

“They have pretty directly caused the industry to speed up toward this mad, frenzied race and yet they’re saying ‘Oh, our models are too powerful,’ ”….it just doesn’t add up to me,” said Yoon.

But Yoon said it’s not clear that building AI systems to carry out dangerous, complex activities like hacking or bioweapons is necessary to be competitive in the global marketplace. He pointed to the wide assortment of Chinese-developed, open-weight AI models that are widely used around the world, but are not powerful enough to chain together complex exploits or develop new viruses.  

“This is not an accident, this is not the models generalizing from regular programming capabilities…the labs are intentionally training them on hacking as well,” said Yoon. “This is because they want to offer better defensive capabilities, they want to be able to sell offensive products to the government…and they do pretty cavalier testing with [the models] inside the labs.”

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Members of Congress are pressing the Trump administration to expand the federal government’s role in securing artificial intelligence, wanting new safety standards and regulations, independent testing of models and more “aggressive” use of AI for defensive cybersecurity purposes.

In a letter, Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said that multiple incidents of frontier AI models escaping sandbox protections and breaching real companies, organizations and governments necessitate a stronger federal role in regulating the technology.

Recent revelations that hundreds, and possibly “tens of thousands,” of such incidents may have occurred for months without OpenAI’s staff detecting them makes the need for federal intervention even more urgent, the senators argued.

“These incidents come as AI systems are becoming dramatically more capable at discovering software vulnerabilities, writing and executing code, using digital tools, and operating autonomously,” the senators wrote.

The letter, addressed to Jay Clayton, director of national intelligence and new White House “AI czar” and Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, urges the federal government “to bring its full capacities to bear on this challenge, building a coordinated national response around standards, testing, auditing, and defensive AI.”

The Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI), housed within the Department of Commerce, has become the Trump administration’s main body for evaluating and testing AI models. In the letter, the senators are seeking to expand the center’s resources and mandate.

Under the Trump administration, testing of frontier models has been voluntary and focused on evaluating model capabilities, not restricting them. The administration has since said it has reached a safety testing framework with OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies to govern safety testing, but has not made the agreement public.

The senators call for CAISSI to spearhead the development of “technically grounded and measurable standards and risk management frameworks for advanced AI safety and security.” Those standards would address potential risks like cyberattacks, automated attacks on critical infrastructure and other threats.

“The standards should also address the security of the environments in which advanced AI systems are developed, trained, tested, and used internally, including protections against agents escaping testing environments, gaining unauthorized access to external systems, or taking actions beyond their intended permissions,” the senators wrote.

The letter argues the center and federal technology hubs like the National Institute of Standards and Technology should hire additional expertise in AI, cybersecurity, model evaluation and national security.

It also calls for a much broader community of independent and third-party testers. Currently, that testing is done almost entirely by AI companies and hand-selected auditors, like Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), Redwood Research and others.

Last month, Chris Painter, president of METR, told Congress that the firm’s investigation of the Hugging Face hacking incident was at the invitation of OpenAI, which tightly controls which organizations and testers get access to its unreleased models. While they are permitted to publicize some findings, such as those that relate to potentially catastrophic risks to humanity, researchers are otherwise restricted from discussing other parts of their investigation through nondisclosure agreements.

Additionally, Painter suggested that frontier companies are relying too heavily on their own technology, rather than technical controls, to monitor and restrain their models in testing.

“Because of the scale and speed at which AI agents are deployed, companies depend on AI monitoring and controls instead of human supervision, to prevent unwanted agent behavior,” Painter said. “That is, monitoring of AI is now in large part done by other AI systems.”

The senators call for CAISSI, national laboratories and the Department of Energy to become federal testing sites. There, the government would evaluate AI models for advanced cyber capabilities, biological or chemical threats, threats to critical infrastructure, sandbox evasion techniques and other autonomous rule-breaking behavior. They also want testing opened to universities, independent research organizations and “qualified third-party evaluators,” including private sector companies.

Other federal bodies, like the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and National Science Foundation can help develop new standards and testbeds for AI tools used in defensive cybersecurity that can then be shared across government and with the public.

“The recent incidents make clear that the security infrastructure surrounding advanced AI must advance as quickly as the technology itself,” the senators wrote. “The United States has an opportunity to lead both sides of this challenge: building the standards, testing, and auditing infrastructure needed for increasingly powerful AI, while harnessing those same capabilities to make American networks harder to attack.”

You can read the full letter here.

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The head of a key federal government AI testing lab is leaving his post just months after taking over.

A Department of Commerce spokesperson confirmed to CyberScoop that Chris Fall is stepping down as director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, and his position is being backfilled.

“Following Chris’s departure, NIST Director Dr. Arvind Raman will continue to oversee CAISI and will serve as Acting CAISI Director,” the spokesperson said in a statement to CyberScoop.

Further details about the circumstances behind Fall’s departure were not provided. Axios, which first reported the departure, cited sources saying that Fall resigned.

The Center for AI Standards and Innovation has quietly become a key hub for the federal government to assess potential threats and harms that AI systems can pose to cybersecurity and national security. 

Early in the Trump administration, the center began informally working with frontier AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to test their models for threats, like their offensive hacking skills, assistance with building biological or nuclear weapons and other dangerous capabilities.

Fall was tapped to lead the center in April, and his departure just three months later comes as the White House has elevated the work of the center as one of the key means for determining which frontier AI models do — and do not — represent a step change in cyber or other capabilities compared to what’s available today.

Fall previously held other government posts, including as director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, assistant director for defense programs at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and acting chief scientist at the Office of Naval Research.

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Anthropic has announced its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models will once again be available to the public as it has reached an agreement with the Commerce Department to deploy the AI models with new guardrails and classifiers meant to address jailbreaks.

In a blog posted Tuesday, Anthropic said that export controls that prevented their sale to foreign companies and individuals have been lifted after weeks of negotiation with the White House and Commerce Department. The company has also restored access to the model for U.S. users.

The export controls were put in place after the Trump administration became alarmed by a threat intelligence report from Amazon claiming to have jailbroken Fable’s cybersecurity capabilities.

On X, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick appeared to confirm that the restrictions would be lifted.

“Over the past two weeks, we have worked closely with Anthropic to analyze and approve Fable 5 to ensure alignment across the US Government and strengthen America’s leadership in AI,” Lutnick wrote.

The administration levied the export controls after becoming concerned that the release of Fable 5 would lead to the model being jailbroken, giving users access to cybersecurity and other capabilities that Anthropic has said could wreak havoc on the open internet if  placed in the wrong hands. The Amazon report convinced administration officials that such jailbreaks were on the immediate horizon.

However, one oddity of the administration’s decision is that the capabilities described in the Amazon report, by all accounts, are not cutting-edge. Scanning code and breaking down how to exploit vulnerabilities for a user is already possible with existing models.

Anthropic confirmed that, saying that further testing found that equivalent and lesser models like ChatGPT 5.5, Claude Opus 4.8 and Kimi K2.7 could identify the same vulnerabilities as Fable did in the Amazon report, while a half dozen existing models were able to produce the same proof of concept code as Fable.

Crucially, Anthropic reiterated that they have yet to see a jailbreak that affects the model’s restrictions on cybersecurity and biology work, though they did call this instance “a borderline case.” Indeed, some cybersecurity professionals have publicly complained that existing safety guardrails on Fable 5 blocked many routine defensive cybersecurity work in addition to malicious use cases.

“Importantly, the reported technique did not expose any unique Mythos-level cyber capabilities,” the blog continued. “The behavior reflected a borderline case for Fable 5’s safeguards…there are some tasks that are unlikely to be dangerous but are nonetheless blocked by the safeguards out of an abundance of caution. The reported technique allowed access to one such behavior, but it only involved routine defensive cybersecurity work.”

Anthropic said it has trained new safety classifiers to target and block the behaviors described in the Amazon report and notify users when it happens, and that the new safeguards have been stress tested by the federal Center for AI Standards and Innovation. The new classifiers will block the techniques “99.9%” of the time, but Anthropic said they’re not expected to block all lower risk routine cyberdefense capabilities, just the most harmful ones.

The restrictions will likely make it even harder to use Fable 5 for defensive cybersecurity. One effect the company expects is that more “benign” requests for routine coding and debugging tasks will be flagged by the system.

Christopher Padilla, former Assistant Secretary for Commerce for export administration in the George W. Bush administration, said that while it’s “good news” the controls have ultimately been lifted, the Trump administration’s AI policy stumbles over the past two years illustrate “the risks of ad hoc, transactional policymaking.”

In a LinkedIn post, Padilla called the Trump administration’s approach chaotic and unpredictable — the opposite of the clear, consistent rules industry depends on. While Vice President J.D. Vance mocked AI safety regulations in a speech in Europe last year, the administration has quietly partnered with OpenAI and Anthropic on voluntary national security testing, especially as frontier models began showing advanced automation and cyberattack capabilities.

That national security arrangement was supposedly codified in a White House executive order last month, shaped heavily by industry boosters who feared regulatory delays would slow U.S. development. But days after Fable’s release, Commerce imposed new export controls on Anthropic’s models anyway.

Padilla called proposed AI safety regulations by the Biden administration “flawed and overly complex” but nevertheless predictable compared to the status quo. Instead of replacing those proposed regulations with their own vision, the Trump White House has been “to put it mildly, all over the place on AI policy.”

“The same BIS that stopped Fable and Mythos has a permissive policy for exporting high-end AI semiconductors to China — in exchange for a cut of the take,” said Padilla, referencing the Trump administration’s lifting of export controls on advanced AI chips. “This is not a smart way to make policy. Bad for industry competitiveness and for national security.”

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