Director’s note: Technology becoming a primary determinant of national power

Dear readers,

Pope Leo XIV began the week with the release of his anticipated encyclical: “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” This exceptionally thoughtful document centered on ethics and responsibility was preceded by the first update from Project Glasswing, the industry collaboration intended to secure critical systems from potentially dangerous supercharged AI models. According to Anthropic, whose co-founder Chris Olah embraced collaboration alongside Pope Leo on Monday and emphasized the need for “informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing,” Project Glasswing partners have identified more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities with Mythos in its first weeks of testing – an early indication of both the extraordinary potential and profound security challenges posed by frontier AI systems. At The New York Times, Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur take us behind the scenes at Britain’s AI Security Institute, which has been testing Mythos and other AI advances.

Estonia has long been a global pioneer in digital governance, and the Baltic nation is rising to the challenges posed by artificial intelligence. On this week’s Cyber Focus, it was a privilege to sit down with Estonian Ambassador to the United States Kristjan Prikk to delve into his country’s proactive, three-pronged strategy to integrate AI into government services and public education. Instead of starting from scratch, Estonia is leveraging its existing, fully integrated digital ecosystem to build “predictive services” that eliminate bureaucratic red tape for its citizens. Our conversation included how Estonia is automating routine administrative tasks to transform its public sector and launching the ambitious “AI Leap” initiative in schools that aims to empower teachers and prepare students for the AI economy. “We believe that our kids will not lose jobs to AI, but rather they may risk losing their jobs to other kids who know how to use AI better than them,” he said. Estonia’s experience also offers a useful reminder that AI adoption is often less about building entirely new systems and more about intelligently leveraging existing digital infrastructure and public trust.

As allies and adversaries alike flex their AI capabilities and look for ways to gain advantages with tomorrow’s tech, the U.S. military is taking further steps to ensure that our forces can benefit from unmanned systems across operations. The U.S. Marine Corps is testing new ways to combine low-cost drones with traditional aircraft, such as transferring control of a first-person-view drone from the ground operators to Marines aboard a helicopter orbiting miles away in a recent exercise, Eve Sampson reported at Defense News. Also at Defense News, Michael Peck reported on DARPA’s quest for combat-ready robot medics that could drag wounded personnel to safety, inject lifesaving drugs and even form splints around broken limbs.

As Russia struggles to achieve its strategic objectives in Ukraine, GCHQ Director Anne Keast-Butler warned this week that Moscow’s hybrid campaign against Europe continues to intensify, Adam Goldman reported at The New York Times. Her remarks serve as another reminder that adversaries increasingly view cyber operations, infrastructure targeting, influence campaigns and economic coercion as integrated tools of statecraft rather than distinct domains of competition.

There’s new concern about Russia’s orbital maneuvers as satellites are drawing front lines above Earth. Stephen Clark reported at Ars Technica that Greg Gillinger, a retired Air Force space intelligence officer, revealed open-source data showing at least four Russian military satellites recently changing their orbits to match that of a Finnish-American radar surveillance satellite. At the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, U.S. Space Force Col. Kyle Pumroy (Ret.) argues that China’s plans for manned lunar stations and control of lunar territory must be viewed as credible, thus a pragmatic pathway for developing Guardian spaceflight capabilities is essential for long-term space superiority. The competition for strategic advantage is no longer confined to land, sea, air and cyberspace; it increasingly extends into the orbital and cislunar domains as well.

This week by the numbers:

• Vulnerability exploitation accounted for 38% of managed detection and response incident response cases during the first quarter of 2026, overtaking social engineering at 24% and compromised accounts at 14% as the leading initial access vector. (Cyber Daily)

• Deleted Google API keys stay active and can continue authenticating successfully for up to 23 minutes after they are removed. (Hackread)

• The Defense Department is requesting close to $30 billion in fiscal 2027 to purchase and enable next-generation AI supercomputers and modernize the military’s computing infrastructure to power them. (DefenseScoop)

• Krispy Kreme customers whose personal data was exposed in a 2024 cyberattack could qualify for up to a sweet $3,500 payout in a class-action settlement over alleged security failures. (Los Angeles Times)

• Dutch authorities said they also seized laptops, telephones and more than 800 servers and arrested two co-owners of two related Internet hosting companies for operating IT infrastructure used by Russia to carry out cyberattacks, influence operations and disinformation campaigns inside the European Union. (Krebs on Security)

The World Cup kicks off in less than two weeks, and with that the threat environment will only intensify. Major global events increasingly represent exercises in critical infrastructure resilience. Each host city depends upon interconnected transportation, energy, communications, public safety and municipal systems, creating an expansive attack surface for adversaries seeking disruption, influence or visibility on the world stage.

For a timely weekend read, Justin Moore at Unit 42 details the threat landscape over the next several weeks. As he notes, each city hosting matches across the United States, Mexico and Canada depends on a network of public transit, signalized traffic, water and wastewater treatment, regional power, airport operations and emergency services, and “each of those touchpoints is in scope for an adversary” — the only questions are “who, against which targets and at what severity.” The lesson extends well beyond sports: Resilience is no longer a back-office function but an increasingly important element of national competitiveness and security.

If there is a common thread running through many of this week’s stories, it is that technological advantage is increasingly becoming strategic advantage. The nations, institutions and organizations that can adapt fastest will be best positioned to compete, deter and prevail in the years ahead. Technology is no longer merely supporting national power; it is becoming a primary determinant of national power.

We were also pleased to welcome former Acting NSA Director and Commander of U.S. Cyber Command Lt. Gen. Joe Hartman (Ret.) to the McCrary Institute Advisory Board. Joe has spent decades at the forefront of some of the nation’s most consequential cyber, intelligence and national security challenges. At a time when cyber conflict, AI and geopolitical competition are increasingly converging, his insights and experience will help strengthen our ability to bridge policy, operations and strategy to advance a stronger, more secure and more resilient nation.

War Eagle,

Frank Cilluffo