The race to secure artificial intelligence just got its own command center. The newly launched Center for Frontier AI Security (CFAS) aims to become the nation’s central hub for advancing AI safety, governance, and interoperability across defense and intelligence sectors.
Formally debuting in October 2025, the independent nonprofit brought together heavyweights from NVIDIA, Google, OpenAI, and AWS, alongside over 40 leaders from government, academia, and venture capital. Their mission? To turn talk of AI safety into real-world frameworks that can withstand both market pressures and adversarial threats.
A “Think-and-Do” Tank for AI Defense
While Washington has been flooded with AI task forces and ethics boards, CFAS positions itself differently—as what founder and executive director Dr. Marina Theodotou calls a “think-and-do tank.” The goal isn’t just policy papers, but action: translating research into technical standards, testing protocols, and model assurance systems that can be deployed in real defense settings.
“CFAS seeks to operationalize AI in national security,” Theodotou said, emphasizing that the center will convene government, industry, and academia to build “a secure and trustworthy U.S. AI technology ecosystem capable of global leadership and defense resilience.”
AI Security as a Shared Mission
Participants at the inaugural meeting homed in on five top priorities: compute power, model assurance, validated testing, data governance, and supply chain resilience. These themes echo growing concerns across the AI sector about the fragility of foundational model pipelines and the geopolitical risk of unvetted AI tools in sensitive domains.
In practice, CFAS’s work could help define how advanced models are tested, certified, and integrated into systems like intelligence analysis or cybersecurity operations. That’s a significant gap today—one even big tech firms admit hasn’t been adequately addressed.
Bridging Industry and Intelligence
If successful, CFAS could become a bridge between the AI research community and national security stakeholders, ensuring that frontier models developed by commercial labs can be safely adapted for defense use without compromising democratic oversight.
The center plans to host expert working groups, policy simulations, and technical workshops to develop a unified framework for secure AI deployment—one that goes beyond voluntary principles and into enforceable practice.
The Bigger Picture
The launch arrives as the U.S. and its allies race to establish AI governance guardrails amid rising competition with China. While organizations like RAND, CSET, and Partnership on AI explore similar policy terrain, CFAS is unique in its focus on applied, operational AI security for defense contexts.
For an industry long criticized for lagging behind innovation, CFAS’s creation signals a pivot: security-first AI is moving from the academic margins to the heart of strategic policy.
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