The American Position
The Trump administration's Cyber Strategy for America, released in March 2026, is unambiguous on AI's role: it appears across five of the strategy's six pillars. The signal this sends — that AI is now central to every dimension of federal cyber posture, not a single-pillar concern — reflects a genuine shift in the threat and capability assessment, not rhetorical positioning. The operationally significant content is in Pillar 5. The strategy mandates securing "the full AI technology stack — data, infrastructure, and models," directs federal entities to adopt agentic AI for network defense and offensive disruption, and — most consequentially for the geopolitical dimension — explicitly classifies foreign AI platforms as a potential supply chain threat. That framing does not name China. It does not need to. The 2026 National Defense Authorization Act has already named it: the NDAA contains broad prohibitions on the use of "Covered AI" by defense and intelligence contractors, with provisions written specifically around DeepSeek and its parent company, High Flyer. The NDAA provisions extend the logic of the Huawei supply chain exclusion into AI. The same playbook — identify the Chinese-origin capability, define it as a national security risk category, mandate exclusion from government contracting, apply pressure on allied partners to adopt equivalent restrictions — is being applied to AI model procurement. *Assessed with high confidence, based on primary legislative text and public NDAA analysis.* Simultaneously, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director is developing a separate AI security policy framework, reported in February 2026, intended to establish security requirements for AI systems used across the federal enterprise. The ONCD framework and the Cyber Strategy together represent the US government's attempt to define what a "secure" AI system looks like — a definition that will, through contracting requirements and allied-nation influence, propagate well beyond the federal perimeter. ---