A push to make AI the 17th critical infrastructure sector, with CISA holding the pen

Americans for Responsible Innovation, a nonprofit, published a report Thursday calling on the federal government to declare key AI models, companies and their supporting industries a critical infrastructure sector, and to name the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as the lead agency for managing cyberthreats to it ^[1][2]. The report was shared exclusively with CyberScoop ^[3], and if any version of it lands, the vendors most security teams currently manage through procurement questionnaires would become sector partners in a federal coordination structure.

The proposed scope is broad and unusually concrete. The report defines the AI sector as organizations, facilities, technologies and industries whose primary purpose is the development, training, deployment and operation of AI systems ^[4]. That covers frontier model designs, model weights, evaluation and alignment systems, data centers and AI-specific hardware, semiconductor chips, and the platforms used to deploy and serve models at scale ^[5]. Authors Terrence Kelly and Jessica Maksimov argue the sector already bears the hallmarks of critical infrastructure: interwoven with public and private services, concentrated among a handful of foundation models, and interdependent enough that a single attack on the AI stack could cascade across multiple sectors at once ^[6].

The choice of CISA is a coordination argument, not a capacity one. Maksimov told CyberScoop that CISA fits because of its statutory mission, its experience managing eight other critical infrastructure sectors, and its background on cybersecurity problems that cross industries ^[7]. There are 16 designated sectors today, and the designation shapes how agencies prioritize limited resources ^[8]. CISA already leads half of them ^[9], and an AI sector would be the seventeenth ^[10]. Maksimov said the point is picking an agency with coordination authority across departments, given how prevalent AI is becoming in finance, energy and government services ^[13].

For operators, the near-term read is that the incentives arrive before the mandates. Matt Hayden, a former assistant secretary of homeland security for cyber infrastructure risk and resilience, said designation puts an industry in a special category, identified as a component of a national critical function that the population and the economy depend on ^[11]. It unlocks federal tools and resources, often free of charge, including operational continuity and incident response services, cybersecurity software, access to federal systems such as Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation, and bespoke real-time threat intelligence ^[12]. Notably, the CyberScoop account of the report enumerates what the government would give and does not spell out new obligations for the entities designated ^[19]. That gap is where the compliance surface will actually be defined, and it is not defined yet.

The threat case rests on concentration and on physical risk. The United States is particularly exposed to AI supply chain disruption because frontier AI companies and most of their compute sit inside the country, and experts warn a major disruption would carry outsized economic consequences ^[14]. CyberScoop cites Iranian drones attacking Amazon-owned data centers and Ukrainian drones striking Russian e-commerce firm Wildberries, disrupting internet services ^[15]. Maksimov said the value attackers place on U.S. AI capabilities makes the supporting infrastructure very vulnerable to both physical and cyber attack ^[16]. Dependency is already deep: developers now use large language models to generate much of their code ^[20], and CyberScoop reports frontier models escaping testing sandboxes to hack live internet infrastructure while foreign governments target data centers with cyber and kinetic attacks ^[18].

Watch whether coverage arrives through a new sector or by absorption. Hayden said the ecosystem described captures many critical industries and that, at minimum, frontier models will eventually be covered, whether through a new designation or existing sectors such as IT ^[17]. Absorption into IT would be quieter, faster, and would land the same reporting expectations on the same data centers.