Subcommittee Chairman Ogles Opens Hearing on Frontier AI Models, the Future of Cybersecurity

WASHINGTON, D.C. --Today, Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Chairman Andy Ogles (R-TN) delivered the following opening statement in a hearing to examine the growing role of frontier AI models, agentic AI systems, and AI-powered coding tools in both strengthening U.S. cyber defenses and enabling increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.

Watch Subcommittee Chairman Ogles' full opening statement in a hearing entitled, "The AI Security Landscape: How Frontier Models, Agentic AI, and AI Coding Tools Are Reshaping Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Resilience."

As prepared for delivery:

Good morning and thank you all for being here. Today, we are examining how artificial intelligence is changing the foundations of cybersecurity and the security of our critical infrastructure. This Committee has taken these threats and risks seriously for months. We have held roundtables, hearings, and briefings with the leading AI laboratories and cyber companies in the country, and we have opened a joint investigation with the Select Committee on China into the proliferation of Chinese AI models.

On Tuesday, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Secretaries of the Treasury, Homeland Security, and War to develop a classified benchmarking process for advanced AI cyber capabilities and to design a voluntary framework for early government access to covered frontier models. The President is right to act. These models are already reshaping the threat landscape, and the federal government cannot be the last to understand what they can do.

I want to be clear that this Subcommittee intends to watch closely how CISA carries out its responsibilities under that framework. CISA has statutory authorities under the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, operates the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, and serves as the lead civilian agency for critical infrastructure cybersecurity. How CISA fulfills its role under this order, especially in translating early model access into practical guidance and vulnerability remediation for critical infrastructure operators, will be a central oversight question for this Subcommittee in the months ahead.

To understand why that matters, consider what these models can now do. Until recently, finding a serious unknown flaw in widely used software took skilled researchers months of painstaking work. Frontier AI models are collapsing that timeline. We now have models that can discover and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities on their own, at machine speed, across the systems that run nearly everything in our economy. The most advanced of these models was judged too dangerous to release publicly, so it was shared with roughly fifty large companies to help them find and fix flaws before our adversaries could.

In the right hands, that is a powerful defensive advantage. In the wrong hands, it is a weapon. Imagine a Chinese state cyber actor, the kind already burrowing into our power grid and our water systems, armed with a model that finds and exploits unknown flaws faster than any human team alive.

The danger does not stop at cyberattacks. The same models that hunt for software flaws can, without the right safeguards, help a bad actor work through the hardest steps of building a biological weapon. Our leading laboratories build in guardrails to refuse that kind of help, but when a foreign adversary copies an American model, strips those safeguards out, and releases it to the world, those protections vanish. We could find that we have handed the most dangerous knowledge on earth to the people most determined to use it, with the safety switches turned off.

There is a second front that deserves the same attention. The United States leads the world in the most advanced frontier models, and those models are largely closed, proprietary, and expensive. China has taken the opposite path. Chinese labs are releasing open-weight models that anyone can download for free, that run at a fraction of the cost, and that are now good enough for most of what an ordinary developer or business needs to do.

Here is what concerns me. When the cheap, capable, easy option for an AI model is Chinese, the rest of the world will build on it. Developers and companies in the United States, in Europe, in South America, in Asia, and across Africa are making that choice right now. If we do nothing, Chinese models become the default foundation of the global digital economy, carrying embedded censorship, uncertain security, and capabilities distilled from our own laboratories with the safety guardrails stripped out.

We cannot let the world grow dependent on Chinese AI the way it grew dependent on other Chinese technologies we are now scrambling to address. The United States needs a serious strategy to ensure capable American models, especially open-weight models that developers, companies, and governments can deploy and adapt, are a real alternative.

Finally, I want to name the issues practitioners care about, because getting them right is how we secure the country. More of our software is now written by AI, faster than human reviewers can keep up, which makes secure-by-design practices where security is built in from the first line of code more important than ever. It makes AI coding tools a real concern when those tools are built on foreign models we cannot fully vet. And it makes agentic AI, software that plans and acts on its own across our networks, an entirely new attack surface our defenses were never built to withstand.

These are real issues with real consequences, and they deserve a serious, bipartisan response. I look forward to a substantive hearing, and I thank our witnesses for being here.

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