Cyberwarfare in the AI Age: A Conversation With Jen Easterly

The Foreign Affairs Interview · Aug 6, 2026 · 56m

It’s been nearly 15 years since Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned of a “cyber–Pearl Harbor.” Since then, most people have become fairly inured to such a risk. That’s true even as there’s been a steady clip of cyberattacks on the United States and other countries, some of them quite alarming, and even as a new, more powerful AI model is released by an American or Chinese lab seemingly every week.

Jen Easterly has spent much of the past 20 years defending U.S. cyberspace against such threats. She has been both a military officer and a top civilian official, most recently running the…