The U.S. State Department establishes a new "Emerging Threats Bureau" to respond to cyber attacks and AI risks in Iran and other countries.

The U.S. State Department recently officially launched a new agency tasked with predicting and responding to "weaponization" trends by Iran and other U.S. adversaries in advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, officials familiar with the matter told ABC News. The agency, called the Bureau of Emerging Threats, is tasked with preventing cyberattacks against U.S. national security, the militarization of outer space, and other similar malicious actions. In addition to Iran, officials also named China, Russia, North Korea and foreign terrorist groups as sources of "new threats" of concern.

According to reports, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the establishment of an "Emerging Threats Directorate" nearly a year ago when he announced a large-scale reorganization of the State Department, but the specific details of its responsibilities and structure were not disclosed until this time. Tommy Pigott, principal deputy spokesman for the State Department, said that the agency will not only respond to current threats in the fields of cyberspace, outer space, critical infrastructure, and the misuse of "disruptive technologies" such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, but also focus on the challenges that the United States will encounter in the next few decades.

The senior official who leads the bureau, Anny Vu, served as the U.S. charge d'affaires in China during the Trump administration. She said the team of experts she leads will be "committed to using foreign policy and all tools of national power" to safeguard U.S. interests. According to reports, the Emerging Threats Bureau will consist of five divisions: the Cyber ​​Security Office, the Critical Infrastructure Security Office, the Disruptive Technology Office, the Space Security Office and the Threat Assessment Office, each of which will assume specific functions from different directions.

The report pointed out that the Iranian regime and its affiliated forces have long frequently used cyber attacks to attack the United States and its related interests. U.S. cybersecurity company CrowdStrike said that since the United States and Israel took military action against Iran in late February this year, the activities of pro-Iranian hacker forces have increased significantly. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is currently investigating at least one major attack suspected to have been carried out by pro-Iranian hackers, targeting the U.S. medical technology company Stryker.

The U.S. State Department formally sent a letter to Congress last Friday notifying the establishment of the Emerging Threats Agency. On the same day, the White House released the National Artificial Intelligence Policy Framework, setting out guiding principles for the governance of artificial intelligence at the federal level. The roughly four-page blueprint calls on Congress to pass relevant legislation with the “minimum regulatory burden” to unify artificial intelligence rules at the federal level and replace more stringent state-level legislation. The document also makes it clear that lawmakers should not attempt to create new federal agencies to specifically regulate artificial intelligence, but should instead make adjustments and coordination within existing institutional systems.

Judging from the timing, the official launch of the State Department's Emerging Threats Bureau is almost synchronized with the release of the White House's national policy on artificial intelligence governance, which shows that the current U.S. government is trying to make efforts on both the technical security and institutional norms fronts to deal with increasingly prominent challenges from rival countries such as Iran and non-state actors in frontier fields such as cyber warfare, space security, and artificial intelligence.