NSF should spend $100M seeding AI resilience startups, argues AI Frontiers brief
luke_drago_ · x · 2026-10-20
Luke Drago (Thinking Machines), Lachlan Carroll, and Finn Metz propose in an AI Frontiers brief that the NSF create an "AI Resilience Pilot" via America's Seed Fund, awarding $100M over two years to startups defending against AI risks.
- Context: monthly disclosures of serious cyber vulnerabilities at major tech companies have surged far above the prior four years since new AI models with enhanced cyber capabilities arrived; AI also raises risks from viral genome design to superhuman persuasion.
- Argument: a lag between AI disruptions and their real-world impact deters private investors from funding defensive tech — waiting for the market to materialize means building too late, echoing early government bets on Qualcomm, Moderna, and SpaceX.
- Use: fund tools to prevent, monitor, and mitigate AI-enabled threats, such as software that fixes critical-infrastructure vulnerabilities.
The authors frame AI resilience as a trillion-dollar industry the government should seed now.
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