In what officials described as a call to arms, national security officials and ministers are urging all organisations, from the smallest businesses to the largest employers, to draw up contingency plans for the eventuality that your IT infrastructure [is] crippled tomorrow and all your screens [go] blank. The NCSC, which is part of GCHQ, said highly sophisticated China, capable and irresponsible Russia, Iran and North Korea were the main state threats, in its annual review published on Tuesday.
The age of agentic AI - where autonomous systems make decisions and take actions at speed - has dawned in ways government agencies may struggle to grasp. As agencies explore ways to bring agentic AI into public service, resilience can no longer be a component of the strategy; it is the strategy. When integrating AI agents, the federal government must prioritize rapid reversibility and transparent, auditable recovery.
