The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has issued a stark warning that artificial intelligence poses "Black Swan" risks to U.S. national security, cautioning that the technology could be exploited by terrorists and adversaries to develop more dangerous weapons and execute deadlier attacks.
The findings appear in a new report authored by Intelligence Chair Rick Crawford, R-Ark., and ranking member Jim Himes, D-Conn., along with Reps. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., and Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J. The report was written to assess U.S. efforts over the past 25 years to address intelligence failures that preceded the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The timing is deliberate. The committee released its findings less than two weeks before the 25th anniversary of the attacks that killed thousands and fundamentally reshaped American security policy.
"Frontier large language models have the possibility of making it significantly easier for any rogue actor, including terrorists, to develop and conduct more destructive attacks," the report states.
The committee's concerns center on the difficulty of keeping advanced AI out of dangerous hands. "[T]he Committee believes the [intelligence community] and policymakers more broadly must carefully consider how to prevent AI tools from being leveraged for use by rogue actors, including terrorists," the report said.
The lawmakers acknowledged that AI developers have built guardrails into their systems but questioned whether those protections are durable. "While AI labs seek to prevent models from returning information that could assist a bad actor in, for example, building a bioweapon, the underlying capability of models is developing rapidly and such a use of a model is difficult to fully control," the four lawmakers wrote.
The report also delivered a broader assessment of the current threat landscape, concluding that the United States "faces a threat environment as complex and dangerous as any since September 11, 2001." On preparedness, the committee was blunt: "Serious gaps remain in our ability to confront and address these vulnerabilities. We are not adequately prepared to confront and address our vulnerabilities."
The committee's recommendations cut in two directions. On one hand, the report urges policymakers to restrict adversary access to AI capabilities. On the other, it calls on U.S. spy agencies to lean into the technology themselves, pushing the intelligence community to "accelerate its own responsible adoption of advanced AI capabilities so that the United States stays ahead of its adversaries."
Investing in "secure AI tools for collection, analysis, and warning paired with rigorous testing, human oversight, and strong privacy and civil liberties protections" is critical to addressing the next generation of threats, the committee wrote.
The report arrives as Washington continues to grapple with how — and whether — to regulate AI, even as the technology drives substantial economic activity and becomes more deeply embedded in both commercial and government systems.
The committee's recommendations will now face the harder test of translating into policy, a process that has historically lagged behind the pace of technological development. With the 9/11 anniversary approaching and AI capabilities advancing rapidly, the pressure on intelligence agencies and lawmakers to close those gaps is likely to intensify.
Disclaimer