US adversaries – chiefly Iran and North Korea, and to a lesser extent Russia and China – are beginning to use generative artificial intelligence to mount or organize offensive cyber operations, Microsoft said on Wednesday. Microsoft said it detected and disrupted, in collaboration with business partner OpenAI, many threats that used or attempted to exploit AI technology they had developed. In a blogpost, the company said the techniques were "early-stage" and neither "particularly novel or unique" but that it was important to expose them publicly as US rivals leveraging large-language models to expand their ability to breach networks and conduct influence operations. Cybersecurity firms have long used machine-learning on defense, principally to detect anomalous behavior in networks. But criminals and offensive hackers use it as well, and the introduction of large-language models led by OpenAI's ChatGPT upped that game of cat-and-mouse.

Editor's note: What follows is exclusively adapted from a longer essay that was published as a part of the Ronald Reagan Institute's Essay Series on Presidential Principles and Beliefs which is premised on the conviction that President Reagan's words and ideas hold important lessons for today. You can find more about the essay series here. At the height of the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan had the foresight to call upon the nation to support the Strategic Defense Initiative, later known as the "Star Wars" defense system, to protect the United States from a potential USSR missile attack. Due to fierce Democrat opposition, our nation never fully built out our missile defense capability and doubled down on nuclear deterrence. We have relied upon our adversaries' fear that our nuclear weapons could destroy them to deter their use of nuclear weapons against us or our allies.

J. William Middendorf, who lives in Little Compton, served as Secretary of the Navy during the Ford administration. His recent book is "The Great Nightfall: How We Win the New Cold War." Thirteen days passed in October 1962 while President John F. Kennedy and his advisers perched at the edge of the nuclear abyss, pondering their response to the discovery of Russian missiles in Cuba. Today, a president may not have 13 minutes. Indeed, a president may not be involved at all. "Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world."