Members of Congress responded with skepticism and caution Tuesday to the Trump administration’s decision to impose export controls on Anthropic’s newest AI models.

The Friday order, which Anthropic said forced it to disable its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 artificial intelligence models, was prompted by what the administration said were national security concerns that a large number of cybersecurity professionals have dismissed as ill-founded.

Several Hill Democrats told CyberScoop they were concerned that the administration’s decision was driven by other considerations. Notably, the administration has feuded with Anthropic over use of its models for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, said he would need to be convinced it was a legitimate national security order and hadn’t yet seen a full justification.

“What they did was pretty extreme, and I’d want to see what the basis was, as opposed to all the other issues that are swirling around in cybersecurity,” he said. “I’m a little skeptical because of their otherwise announced antipathy to this company.”

Leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee had contrasting takes, with Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., offering a two-pronged response and the top Democrat on the panel, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, panning the order.

“The administration is right to treat advanced AI cyber capabilities as a national security issue, especially when foreign adversaries and cybercriminals are actively looking for ways to weaponize these tools,” Garbarino said in a statement. “At the same time, we need to make sure our response does not unintentionally disadvantage American companies, allied partners, or critical infrastructure defenders who need access to the best secure tools available in order to protect our networks here at home.”

The United States, not China, needs to set standards for trusted AI, Garbarino said.

But Thompson said the order adds evidence to the appearance that the Trump administration doesn’t “have a coherent plan for mitigating the cybersecurity risks” of frontier AI models, he told CyberScoop in a statement.

“AI regulations should rely on standards and procedures that provide confidence to the public that decisions are based on the evidence and not on politics,” he said. “Instead, the Trump administration has adopted an ad hoc approach where decisions are made by political appointees in the White House rather than experts and where companies are left guessing on how to comply.”

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, had also previously highlighted the administration’s quarrel with Anthropic in response to the order in a statement to CyberScoop.

Behind the scenes, the administration and Anthropic were reportedly continuing to try to forge a truce Tuesday. More broadly, the administration’s AI executive order had a rocky rollout as the administration swung back-and-forth on how involved the government should be.

Some lawmakers deferred on commenting Tuesday, such as Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., who told CyberScoop he didn’t have anything to say on the order.

Others said they were still seeking information from the administration.

“I have not had the opportunity to get a brief specifically as to the logic, the reasoning behind it, and so forth,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, the South Dakota Republican who chairs the Armed Services Subcommittee on Cybersecurity. “So I’m going to withhold judgment until I get an opportunity to get the rest of the story, so to speak.”

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Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are demanding answers from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after KrebsOnSecurity reported this week that a CISA contractor intentionally published AWS GovCloud keys and a vast trove of other agency secrets on a public GitHub account. The inquiry comes as CISA is still struggling to contain the breach and invalidate the leaked credentials.

On May 18, KrebsOnSecurity reported that a CISA contractor with administrative access to the agency’s code development platform had created a public GitHub profile called “Private-CISA” that included plaintext credentials to dozens of internal CISA systems. Experts who reviewed the exposed secrets said the commit logs for the code repository showed the CISA contractor disabled GitHub’s built-in protection against publishing sensitive credentials in public repos.

CISA acknowledged the leak but has not responded to questions about the duration of the data exposure. However, experts who reviewed the now-defunct Private-CISA archive said it was originally created in November 2025, and that it exhibits a pattern consistent with an individual operator using the repository as a working scratchpad or synchronization mechanism rather than a curated project repository.

In a written statement, CISA said “there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of the incident.” But in a May 19 a letter (PDF) to CISA’s Acting Director Nick Andersen, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) said the credential leak raises serious questions about how such a security lapse could occur at the very agency charged with helping to prevent cyber breaches.

“This reporting raises serious concerns regarding CISA’s internal policies and procedures at a time of significant cybersecurity threats against U.S. critical infrastructure,” Sen. Hassan wrote.

Sen. Hassan noted that the incident occurred against the backdrop of major disruptions internally at CISA, which lost more than a third of it workforce and almost all of its senior leaders after the Trump administration forced a series of early retirements, buyouts, and resignations across the agency’s various divisions.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee, echoed the senator’s concerns.

“We are concerned that this incident reflects a diminished security culture and/or an inability for CISA to adequately manage its contract support,” Thompson wrote in a May 19 letter to the acting CISA chief that was co-signed by Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill), the ranking member of the panel’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection. “It’s no secret that our adversaries — like China, Russia, and Iran — seek to gain access to and persistence on federal networks. The files contained in the ‘Private-CISA’ repository provided the information, access, and roadmap to do just that.”

KrebsOnSecurity has learned that more a week after CISA was first notified of the data leak by the security firm GitGuardian, the agency is still working to invalidate and replace many of the exposed keys and secrets.

On May 20, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Dylan Ayrey, the creator of TruffleHog, an open-source tool for discovering private keys and other secrets buried in code hosted at GitHub and other public platforms. Ayrey said CISA still hadn’t invalidated an RSA private key exposed in the Private-CISA repo that granted access to a GitHub app which is owned by the CISA enterprise account and installed on the CISA-IT GitHub organization with full access to all code repositories.

“An attacker with this key can read source code from every repository in the CISA-IT organization, including private repos, register rogue self-hosted runners to hijack CI/CD pipelines and access repository secrets, and modify repository admin settings including branch protection rules, webhooks, and deploy keys,” Ayrey told KrebsOnSecurity. CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, and it refers to a set of practices used to automate the building, testing and deployment of software.

KrebsOnSecurity notified CISA about Ayrey’s findings on May 20. Ayrey said CISA appears to have invalidated the exposed RSA private key sometime after that notification. But he noted that CISA still hasn’t rotated leaked credentials tied to other critical security technologies that are deployed across the agency’s technology portfolio (KrebsOnSecurity is not naming those technologies publicly for the time being).

CISA responded with a brief written statement in response to questions about Ayrey’s findings, saying “CISA is actively responding and coordinating with the appropriate parties and vendors to ensure any identified leaked credentials are rotated and rendered invalid and will continue to take appropriate steps to protect the security of our systems.”

Ayrey said his company Truffle Security monitors GitHub and a number of other code platforms for exposed keys, and attempts to alert affected accounts to the sensitive data exposure(s). They can do this easily on GitHub because the platform publishes a live feed which includes a record of all commits and changes to public code repositories. But he said cybercriminal actors also monitor these public feeds, and are often quick to pounce on API or SSH keys that get inadvertently published in code commits.

In practical terms, it is likely that cybercrime groups or foreign adversaries also noticed the publication of these CISA secrets, the most egregious of which appears to have happened in late April 2026, Ayrey said.

“We monitor that firehose of data for keys, and we have tools to try to figure out whose they are,” he said. “We have evidence attackers monitor that firehose as well. Anyone monitoring GitHub events could be sitting on this information.”

James Wilson, the enterprise technology editor for the Risky Business security podcast, said organizations using GitHub to manage code projects can set top-down policies that prevent employees from disabling GitHub’s protections against publishing secret keys and credentials. But Wilson’s co-host Adam Boileau said it’s not clear that any technology could stop employees from opening their own personal GitHub account and using it to store sensitive and proprietary information.

“Ultimately, this is a thing you can’t solve with a technical control,” Boileau said on this week’s podcast. “This is a human problem where you’ve hired a contractor to do this work and they have decided of their own volition to use GitHub to synchronize content from a work machine to a home machine. I don’t know what technical controls you could put in place given that this is being done presumably outside of anything CISA managed or even had visibility on.”

Update, 3:05 p.m. ET: Added statement from CISA. Corrected a date in the story (Truffle Security said it found the repo gained some of its most sensitive secrets in late April 2026, not 2025).

Congress wants answers from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency about the reported public exposure of sensitive agency credential data on GitHub in an incident that the security researcher who discovered it called one of the worst leaks he’s ever seen.

Other security professionals also voiced concern Tuesday about the leak and the potential for abuse by any malicious parties who got a hold of the information.

Security firm GitGuardian said it discovered a public GitHub repository last week that exposed credentials for privileged AWS GovCloud accounts and internal CISA systems dating back to November. The repository, apparently maintained by a contractor, was named “Private-CISA.” 

Krebs on Security first reported the incident.

“My main fear … is that a state actor will get the data and might be able to do bad stuff,” GitGuardian security researcher Guillaume Valadon told CyberScoop that he thought to himself upon discovering the leak, after concluding it was real; he initially thought it looked fake.

State-based attackers who obtained the credentials “might be able to gain persistence,” Valadon said, “so for me it’s even worse than an attacker destroying everything, having someone in a governmental system — it’s really, really bad.”

A House Homeland Security Committee aide said the panel is seeking a staff-level briefing from CISA on the matter.

Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, and Delia Ramirez, the top Democrat on the panel’s cyber subcommittee, had separately demanded a briefing Tuesday in a letter to CISA’s acting director, Nick Andersen. 

They said they wanted to learn “how this serious security lapse occurred, any potential security consequences, remediation activities, corrective actions related to the contractor personnel involved, and efforts to monitor for and prevent similar activity from occurring in the future.”

Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., also sent a letter Tuesday to Andersen, seeking a classified briefing to answer questions about which systems were exposed, what forensic work CISA did to evaluate potential damage and what corrective action it has taken.

“This reported incident raises serious questions about how such a security lapse could occur at the very agency charged with helping to prevent cyber breaches,” Hassan wrote in the missive first reported by Axios, particularly “regarding CISA’s internal policies and procedures at a time of significant cybersecurity threats against U.S. critical infrastructure.”

Both letters pointed to personnel and budget cutbacks at the agency as a potential contributor to the incident.

CISA said it was looking into what happened.

“The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is aware of the reported exposure and is continuing to investigate the situation,” a spokesperson said. “Currently, there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of this incident. While we hold our team members to the highest standards of integrity and operational awareness, we are working to ensure additional safeguards are implemented to prevent future occurrences.” 

The repository was reportedly maintained by a contractor at Nightwing. A Nightwing spokesperson referred questions to CISA.

The kind of exposure that happened for CISA “is an unfortunately painful, but common and repeated, if not relentless, way that we see organizations inadvertently leak very sensitive credentials to the wider web,” said Ben Harris, founder of WatchTowr, a company that helps organizations detect such exposures.

Harris told CyberScoop he didn’t want to speculate on what attackers who obtained the credentials might be able to do with it, but he said that it would be “terrifying” if the contractor was transferring information from work to home, as one researcher theorized.

Dave Mitchell, senior director of threat intelligence at Infoblox, told CyberScoop the incident showed the importance of teams having controls and audits in place across their repositories.

“Of all the things that keep me up at night, misconfigurations in GitHub are a recurring nightmare. It’s critical for so many organizations — all it takes is one accidental upload or misconfiguration and you’ve signed yourself up for a major incident,” he said in a written statement. “No need for a threat actor to use advanced techniques to compromise you if the keys are already sitting on the counter.”

Travis Rosiek, public sector chief technology officer at Rubrik, noted that the timing of the issue aligned with the government shutdown that only recently resolved for DHS. He said the incident showed the federal government needs to prioritize resilience.

“A persistent shortage of cybersecurity talent, combined with funding lapses, high workforce turnover, and an increasingly complex threat landscape, created the perfect storm for this scenario,” he said in a written statement to CyberScoop. “No organization is immune, and we must ensure that the federal government, which is responsible for helping protect the nation’s critical infrastructure and enhancing our cybersecurity posture, remains fully operational 24-7, 365 days a year.”

Without minimizing the severity of the incident, some researchers who have looked at the leak said there are mitigating circumstances that make elements of it defensible or, at least, understandable.

CISA acted very swiftly to remove the repository, Valadon said, once he alerted them to the leak.

And even if CISA has the right policies in place, human error still can make it difficult to entirely avoid incidents like this, Harris said.

“The reality is this happens every single day to different organizations, including cybersecurity companies,” he said, noting it would be different if it was a pattern. “This is not exclusive to CISA. I don’t really think it reflects well if we saw this every single day with CISA. … It’s not ideal that it’s even happened once, but the reality is that cybersecurity is people, process, technology.”

CISA has had other security incidents in the past, including recently. The former acting director of the agency endured criticism for uploading sensitive contract data to ChatGPT last year. In 2024 the agency notified Congress of a breach of a chemical plant security tool.

Updated 5/20/26: to include more information on a House Homeland Security Committee briefing request.

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The House Homeland Security Committee is digging into Anthropic’s AI model Mythos in a series of briefings and hearings, as questions proliferate on whether and how the federal government will make use of the technology touted for its ability to autonomously uncover cyber vulnerabilities.

Wednesday brought a closed-door briefing for the House Homeland Security Committee from Anthropic. The chairman of the panel’s cybersecurity subcommittee said he is planning to hold a hearing on the topic. And committee Democrats are requesting a classified briefing with Anthropic.

A committee aide who attended the briefing said it included a live demonstration of Mythos, “allowing members to see firsthand how advanced AI can identify and reason through software vulnerabilities. What we saw reinforced the urgency of ensuring that federal agencies, including our civilian cyber defenders, can responsibly access and deploy the most advanced U.S. models to find and patch vulnerabilities before foreign adversaries or criminal actors exploit them.”

A number of key lawmakers, including top committee Democrat Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and GOP cyber subcommittee chair Andy Ogles of Tennessee, told CyberScoop they weren’t able to attend Wednesday’s briefing. A second source who attended said it was a “productive” meeting.

“Members on both sides were focused on preserving U.S. advantage in AI, which basically came down to preserving our edge on compute power,” the source said. “They were also asking questions about whether the federal government was using Mythos, including about where CISA is and the impact of the supply chain risk designation.”

The Hill reported that Wednesday’s briefing was led on the Anthropic side by Logan Graham, from the company’s frontier red team, and Josh Tilstra, from the firm’s national security programs and policy team. It follows another recent closed briefing with Anthropic and OpenAI for the House Homeland Security Committee.

Ogles told CyberScoop he plans to hold a hearing of his subcommittee related to Mythos, but wasn’t able to attend Wednesday’s briefing due to scheduling conflicts. The top Democrat on Ogle’s subcommittee, Delia Ramirez of Illinois, also was unable to join due to prior commitments, but she was set to receive a rundown from staff about Wednesday’s briefing, her office said.

There’s a divide on which federal agencies are using Mythos thus far. For example: CISA reportedly isn’t, but the National Security Agency is. 

The federal divide on its use follows a Department of Defense blacklist that labeled the company a “supply chain risk” after Anthropic resisted pressure from the Pentagon to use its Claude AI model in ways the company opposed. The department says it has been using Mythos to identify cyber vulnerabilities despite the blacklist.

A turf battle is brewing within the Trump administration over testing of AI models, The Washington Post reported this week. Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said this week that it would be ‘insane” for U.S. spy agencies not to have early access to advanced AI models.

The Mythos briefing came one day after OpenAI announced its own cybersecurity initiative.

The committee aide said that “as the PRC aggressively works to close the AI innovation gap with the United States, the committee remains focused on ensuring that America’s AI leadership translates into a durable national security advantage, not a temporary lead that adversaries can copy, steal, or rapidly commoditize.”

Updated 5/13/26: to include comment from a committee aide who attended the briefing.

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President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget would slash the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s total by $707 million, according to a summary released Friday, which would deeply chop down an agency that already took a big hit in Trump’s first year.

Another budget document suggests a smaller — but still substantial — hit of $361 million, with the discrepancy possibly due to the comparison points amid budget uncertainty for CISA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security. DHS and CISA did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.

“At the time the Budget was prepared, the 2026 appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security was not enacted, and funding provided by the last continuing resolution it had been operating under (Continuing Appropriations Act, 2026, division A of Public Law 119-37, as amended by division H of Public Law 119-75) had lapsed,” the budget summary notes. “References to 2026 spending in the text and tables for programs and activities normally provided for in the full-year appropriations bill reflect the annualized level provided by the last continuing resolution.”

By either measurement, the proposed budget would cut deeply into an agency that started the Trump administration at roughly $3 billion, and would be substantially below that if Congress enacts the latest blueprint. The budget appendix says CISA would end up with slightly more than $2 billion in discretionary funding under Trump’s plan. For fiscal 2026, appropriators sought to mitigate some of Trump’s proposed CISA reductions.

The 2027 budget summary recycles identical language from the 2026 budget summary, and makes references to ending programs that CISA has already shuttered.

“The Budget refocuses CISA on its core mission — Federal network defense and enhancing the security and resilience of critical infrastructure — while eliminating weaponization and waste,” the summary states in both the 2026 and 2027 documents.

It makes references to getting rid of things that have already been cut, like “external engagement offices such as council management, stakeholder engagement, and international affairs.” It talks about ending programs focused on censorship, something CISA under the Biden administration said it never had, and on “so-called” misinformation, which CISA said it ended during the former president’s term.

Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, criticized the budget proposal for CISA.

“Like the President’s cyber strategy, the President’s CISA budget reflects his utter lack of understanding of the urgency of the cyber threats we face and how to mobilize the government to help confront them,” he said in a statement to CyberScoop. “As of 2023, CISA was spending $2 million on countering information operations, an effort initially launched at the behest of Congressional Republicans during the first Trump Administration.

“There is nothing that justifies a reckless $700 million cut to CISA, particularly at a time of heightened tensions with Iran and an increasingly aggressive China,” he continued. “I am committed to working with my colleagues to push back against these cuts and ensure we can protect government and critical infrastructure networks.”

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President Donald Trump released his administration’s cyber strategy Friday, promoting offense operations in cyberspace, securing federal networks and critical infrastructure, streamlining regulations, leveraging emerging technologies and strengthening the cybersecurity workforce.

Trump also signed an executive order Friday directing agencies to take action to combat cybercrime and fraud.

A little more than half of the five pages of strategy text of the long-anticipated document is preamble, and two of its seven pages are title and ending pages. Administration officials have said the strategy is deliberately high-level, and the White House promised more detailed guidance in the future.

The strategy “calls for unprecedented coordination across government and the private sector to invest in the best technologies and continue world-class innovation, and to make the most of America’s cyber capabilities for both offensive and defensive missions,” the White House said in a statement accompanying its release.

Each of the six “pillars” of the strategy offer some prescriptions.

“Shaping adversary behavior” calls for using U.S. government offensive and defensive capabilities in cyberspace, as well as incentivizing the private sector to disrupt adversary networks.

It also says Trump will “counter the spread of the surveillance state and authoritarian technologies that monitor and repress citizens,” even as administration critics argue that his administration has fostered surveillance and repression against U.S. citizens.

The shortest pillar, “promote common sense regulation,” decries rules that are only “costly checklists.” The Biden administration expanded cyber regulations, spurring some industry resistance. But the Trump pillar does talk about addressing liability, a point of emphasis for the prior administration as well.

“Modernize and secure federal networks” talks about using concepts and technologies like post-quantum cryptography, artificial intelligence, zero-trust and lowering barriers for vendors to sell tech to the government to meet those goals.

To “secure critical infrastructure,” the strategy calls for fortifying not just owners and operators but also the supply chain, in part by focusing on U.S.-made rather than adversary-made products.

“We will deny our adversaries initial access, and in the event of an incident, we must be able to recover quickly,” the strategy reads. “We will galvanize the role of state, local, Tribal, and territorial authorities as a complement to— not a substitute for — our national cybersecurity efforts.” Some critics of the administration’s cybersecurity actions have contended that it has shifted the burden to state and local governments too much.

AI usage makes up the bulk of the pillar entitled “sustain superiority in critical and emerging technologies,” in addition to reflecting earlier parts of the strategy on the topics of quantum cryptography and privacy protection. That includes the protection of data centers, the subject of localized fights across the country over their location and resource costs.

The final pillar says the United States must “build talent and capability,” after a year of the administration cutting a significant number of cyber positions in the federal government. “We will eliminate roadblocks that prevent industry, academia, government, and the military from aligning incentives and building a highly skilled cyber workforce,” it states.

Some positive reviews rolled in about the strategy despite the late-Friday afternoon release, traditionally the time of week when an administration looks to publish news it hopes will garner little attention.

“As new and more sophisticated threats emerge, America needed a new national cyber strategy that captures the urgency of this moment,” USTelecom President and CEO Jonathan Spalter said in a news release. “The President’s strategy rightly recognizes that harnessing America’s unique mix of private-sector innovation with public-sector capacity is the best deterrence.”

Frank Cilluffo, Director of the McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security at Auburn University, was struck by the focus on deterrence: “This unified strategy determining a direction on offensive and defensive cyber operations and collaboration couldn’t be more timely.”

The Business Software Alliance cheered the call for streamlining cyber regulations, in particular.

A number of cyber vendors took note of the passages on AI. “Redirecting resources from paperwork to AI-powered security capabilities is the only way to keep pace with modern threats and adversaries who operate at great speed,” said Bill Wright, global head of government affairs at Elastic. “This strategy appears to recognize that fundamental truth.”

Not all the reviews were flattering, however, including from the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, Bennie Thompson, who said the strategy’s “underachieving” was the only thing impressive about it.

“What little ‘substance’ does exist in this pamphlet is a mishmash of vague platitudes, a long catalogue of ‘we will’ statements that may or may not match the Administration’s current behavior, and, mercifully, an apparent extension of some Biden-era policies,” he said. “Completely lacking is even the most basic blueprint for how the Administration will go about achieving any of its cybersecurity goals — an objective possibly hamstrung by the hemorrhage in cyber talent across all Federal agencies since Trump took office.”

The executive order Trump signed Friday coincides with the release of the strategy but there’s little overlap between the subject matter; the strategy makes one mention of cybercrime.

The order directs the attorney general to prioritize prosecution of cybercrime and fraud, orders agencies to review tools that they could use to counter international criminal organizations and  gives the Department of Homeland Security marching orders to improve training, in addition to other steps, according to a fact sheet.

“President Trump is unleashing every available tool to stop foreign-backed criminal networks that exploit vulnerable Americans through cyber-enabled fraud and extortion,” the fact sheet states.

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