When data defense becomes national defense

COMMENTARY | The next frontier of defense is not in the skies or at sea; it is in the cloud, in our data centers and in the invisible flows of information that keep our societies running.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming the invisible infrastructure of modern society. It powers the grids that keep cities running, the algorithms that move supplies across continents, the systems that support national security decisions and the predictive engines that sense everything from disease outbreaks to drone trajectories. Yet beneath every AI capability lies something far more fundamental and far more fragile: data.

This is why defending data is now synonymous with defending nations. The World Economic Forum ranks attacks on critical infrastructure among the most severe global risks, noting a sharp rise in cyber-physical incidents across energy, healthcare and transportation. And as federal assessments increasingly acknowledge, AI is now woven through the backbone of those same ...