Nextgov/FCW

Officials with the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Social Security Administration and Indian Health Service were added to the governing council for a federal initiative designed to facilitate the exchange of health data in June, Nextgov/FCW has learned.

The Senate approved a temporary funding measure this weekend that would provide a short-term extension for both the Technology Modernization Fund and a key cybersecurity law, although the proposal faces an uncertain future in the House. The continuing resolution, which overwhelmingly passed the upper chamber in a 90-6 vote on Saturday morning, would punt funding for the federal government until Dec. 11.

A new draft white paper from a top Senate Democrat proposes tax code updates that would shift incentives for data center construction. The paper, released on Aug. 6 by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. — ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee — proposes changing the incentives that could spur more data center construction amid the national boom in a bid to offset consumer burdens associated with more data centers.

LAS VEGAS — An OpenAI agent tasked with finding software flaws escaped its testing environment, hacked into Hugging Face and spent days moving through the company’s systems in search of answers to an evaluation. It had not been sent to attack the company, yet it did so anyway — and a smattering of other accidental AI intrusions in separate environments have since followed.

Cloudflare announced Monday it plans to seek Department of Defense Impact Level 4 authorization to bring a platform that can store and process controlled unclassified information to defense agencies. The connectivity cloud company also achieved FedRAMP High certification, which covers civilian federal agencies, Thursday and GovRAMP Moderate authorization, which covers state and local governments, in April.

LAS VEGAS — After spending roughly six weeks analyzing Dominion voting systems used in Puerto Rico’s 2024 elections, Mojave Research came back to the Trump administration with findings that startled its researchers. The systems contained at least a dozen high- or critical-severity software vulnerabilities. Passwords were reused, firewalls were disabled and basic cryptographic protections were poorly implemented.

The Senate on Friday confirmed Adam Cassady as the new U.S. ambassador for cyber and digital policy, filling a high-profile role that had been vacant since the start of the second Trump administration. Cassady, currently a senior official at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, was approved in a 51-47 vote as part of a package of some 70 nominees.

Deterring AI distillation Lawmakers are looking to address the threat of AI model distillation by adversaries, with a new bill introduced by Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Texas targeting illicit intellectual property infringement by Chinese actors.

LAS VEGAS — A new program is seeking to assist water providers around the country as multiple states grapple with possible Iran-linked cyber intrusions against water infrastructure. The Water Watch Center provides direct cyber mitigation support to utilities serving fewer than 10,000 people, which represents most of the nation’s community water systems.

No one is saying, officially, what was decided when top frontier AI labs—Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta—met with White House officials on Tuesday to discuss voluntary guidelines for testing new models. But Democratic lawmakers described the Trump administration's approach to regulation as “ad-hoc and unpredictable,” and said it’s likely to boost global adoption of rival Chinese models at the worst possible time.