Tech
Trump looks to power up post-quantum, AI security | Computer Weekly
The Trump administration has set out its long-awaited cyber strategy at the weekend, pledging to “sustain superiority” in emerging areas of security such as post-quantum cryptography and artificial intelligence.
The White House said that securing US innovation and protecting its current intellectual advantage will be paramount.
“We will build secure technologies and supply chains that protect user privacy from design to deployment, including supporting the security of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. We will promote the adoption of post-quantum cryptography and secure quantum computing,” the White House said.
While the so-called ‘Q Day’ that the cyber industry dreads has yet to come to pass, the era of quantum computing – which promises to brick many traditional cyber defences – may be closer than anybody thinks, and work is ramping up around the world to prepare for it, with the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) among the bodies leading the charge.
On AI, the Trump White House pledged to secure the entire technology stack powering AI, including datacentres, and promote innovation in the area. The US will swiftly implement AI-enabled cyber tools to detect, divert and deceive threat actors, it said, as well as adopting and promoting agentic capabilities to scale network defence. On the global stage, it said it will work alongside its allies to ensure both agentic and generative AI are used in ways that address innovation and “global stability” while securing the data and models than underpin US leadership in the area. “And,” the White House said, “we will call out and frustrate the spread of foreign AI platforms that censor, surveil, and mislead their users”.
Bolder action?
The Trump administration accused its predecessors of having done little more than “tinker around the edges” and applying only partial measures and ambiguous strategies that neglected the number and severity of threats faced by the US.
Its own strategy will be different, it reasoned, echoing the “America First” rhetoric of the current administration, and acting decisively to defend US interests in the cyber realm, whether that be through takedowns and asset seizures against cyber criminals, or cyber operations in support of its recent military adventures – it referenced the use of cyber tactics in its January operation against Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, and in its current war on Iran.
“Adversaries are on notice that America’s cyber operators and tools are the best in the world and can be swiftly and effectively deployed to defend America’s interests,” said the White House.
Core policies
The overall strategy is formed by six policy pillars, which are:
- To shape adversary behaviour: deploying a full suite of government defensive and offensive cyber operations in tandem with private sector security companies;
- To promote common sense regulation: streamlining cyber regulations to reduce compliance burdens, address liability, and align to regulators and industry globally while emphasising strict privacy controls for US citizen data;
- To modernise and security federal networks: implementing existing cyber best practice and emphasising post-quantum readiness, zero-trust, and cloud security;
- To secure critical infrastructure: prioritising the hardening and defence of networks at datacentres, energy and utilities operators, financial services organisations, hospitals and telcos;
- To sustain superiority in critical and emerging technologies: as detailed above, working on post-quantum and AI;
- And to build talent and capacity: developing a cyber skills pipeline and addressing the barriers that are currently blocking industry, academia, government and the military from this goal.
The White House said: “This strategy makes clear the course president Trump has pursued in cyberspace, and the direction the US government will pursue with increasing impact. president Trump has acted to ensure that Americans – especially future generations – will have a strong country where they are secure and defended, and a future defined by individual freedom, economic prosperity, and opportunity.
“President Trump will continue showing those who harm our interests and attack our values in cyberspace place themselves at risk.”
Michael Bell, founder and CEO of Suzu Labs, an AI security platform, said that the White House’s six pillars were the right priorities.
“Post-quantum cryptography, private sector offensive operations, regulatory streamlining, AI security. All correct,” he said. “The strategy reads like people who understand the threat landscape were involved in writing it.
“But a strategy without a budget is a press release. The implementation plans need acquisition reform, real funding for post-quantum migration, and measurable timelines. That’s what separates policy from paper.”
Gaps overlooked?
Noting the exit of thousands of cyber professionals – many with high-level security clearance – who have fled US government services of their own accord in the past decade, Bell said the administration first needed to put in place capacity to bring these people back into the fold.
“The strategy says, ‘unleash the private sector,’ and the direction is right, but the contracting vehicles for rapid classified offensive work don’t exist yet. Build those and you have real capability. Without them, you have a slogan,” he said.
“The strategy [also] calls the cyber workforce a strategic asset [but] the same administration cut roughly a thousand CISA employees who were doing vulnerability disclosure, threat briefings, and incident coordination. The strategy promises public-private partnership, but the liability protections that made threat intelligence sharing work between government and industry expired and haven’t been replaced.
“At some point the budget has to match the strategy, or the strategy doesn’t mean anything,” he warned.
Doug Merritt, CEO of Aviatrix, a specialist in securing cloud workloads, said that while the strategy document shows a recognition in the US government that cyber and national security have become inseparable, at the same time the plan overlooks some pressing cyber gaps.
“The reality is the very nature of cyber risk has fundamentally changed. Today’s most damaging attacks rarely begin at the perimeter. They move laterally through the digital fabric connecting workloads, applications and services across cloud and hybrid environments,” said Merritt. “That complexity and nuance are often underappreciated outside the security community.
“As geopolitical tensions rise and cyber operations increasingly accompany kinetic conflict, securing the infrastructure that connects modern systems will require new approaches that embed protection directly into the architecture itself.
“If we want strategies like this one to translate into real security outcomes, the next step is closing the operational blind spots inside the cloud,” said Merritt.
In a time when almost everything is getting more expensive, this deal on the M5 MacBook Air has me hopeful about how laptop pricing will play out the rest of the year. The M5 MacBook Air has dropped back down to $949, which is $150 off its retail price. It’s only been at this price one other time since the product launched in early March and has more consistently sold for $1,049. As someone who’s reviewed every available MacBook and their strongest competitors, I can unequivocally say that this MacBook Air is one of the very best laptop deals right now.
Take the Surface Laptop 7th Edition, for example, which has been one of my favorite alternatives to the MacBook Air through all of 2025. It had been at competitive prices with the M4 MacBook Air all along, with both laptops sometimes dropping to as low as $799 during sales events like Prime Day throughout the year. But now, the Surface Laptop has gotten an official price hike due to the RAM shortage and is currently sitting at $1,200. It’s still a laptop I like quite a lot, but at $350 more than a similarly configured M5 MacBook Air, it’s very difficult to recommend.
Or consider the MacBook Neo, Apple’s new budget laptop that also launched in March. While it’s much cheaper overall, it’s only ever been sold for $10 off its full price. At this reduced price for the M5 MacBook Air of $949, that leaves only a dangerously small $260 gap between the Neo and the Air. It’s almost embarrassing how much better the Air is by comparison—in every way imaginable. If you’re curious how these two laptops stack up, I’ve done a comprehensive comparison between them that’s worth checking out. But to put it simply, despite all the excitement (and controversy) around the much cheaper MacBook Neo, the MacBook Air still has the most price flexibility in terms of deals.
The latest brain-computer interface could help people recover from severe depression. Motif Neurotech announced Monday that the US Food and Drug Administration has approved a human study to trial the company’s blueberry-sized brain implant that sits in the skull and delivers electrical stimulation to treat depression.
The Houston-based startup, founded in 2022, is part of a budding industry pursuing technology to read and interpret brain signals. While other companies exploring similar technology, like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, Paradromics, and Synchron, are developing devices to enable paralyzed people to communicate and use computers, Motif is aiming to ease depression in people who have not benefited from medication.
The company’s device is implanted in the skull just above the dura, the brain’s protective membrane. It targets the central executive network, a part of the brain that is responsible for high-level cognitive functions and is underactive in major depressive disorder. The implant emits specific patterns of stimulation to turn “on” this network.
Motif’s device would allow patients to receive therapeutic brain stimulation at home. “Through frequent electrical stimulation, we think we can drive that neuroplasticity that creates stronger connectivity within the central executive network for patients with depression, so that they can get out of bed in the morning, call their friends, go to the gym,” says Jacob Robinson, Motif’s cofounder and CEO.
Courtesy of Motif
Electrical stimulation has been used for decades to treat depression, and Motif’s approach is just the latest iteration. Electroconvulsive or “shock” therapy began in the 1930s and is still used today in cases where patients don’t benefit from antidepressants. Deep brain stimulation, which involves surgically implanting electrodes into the brain, is occasionally used experimentally but is not FDA approved. A much milder form of stimulation known as transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, was approved in 2008. While it can be highly effective, it typically requires a lengthy treatment regimen of five treatments a week for six weeks.
A study from 2021 found that during a 12-month period in the United States, nearly 9 million adults were undergoing treatment for major depressive disorder, and of those, almost 3 million were considered to have treatment-resistant depression, when symptoms do not improve after at least two, and often more, antidepressant medications.
Motif’s device can be implanted in a 20-minute outpatient procedure without the need for brain surgery. It’s powered by wireless magnetoelectric technology that Robinson developed while at Rice University and is charged with a baseball cap that patients will wear when receiving the stimulation.
David Silver gave the world its very first glimpse of superintelligence.
In 2016, an AI program he developed at Google DeepMind, AlphaGo, taught itself to play the famously difficult game of Go with a kind of mastery that went far beyond mimicry.
Silver has since founded his own company, Ineffable Intelligence, that aims to build more general forms of AI superintelligence. The company will do this, Silver says, by focusing on reinforcement learning, which involves AI models learning new capabilities through trial and error. The vision is to create “superlearners” that go beyond human intelligence in many domains.
This approach stands in contrast to how most AI companies plan to build superintelligence, by exploiting the coding and research capabilities of large-language models.
Silver, speaking to WIRED from his office in London, says he thinks this approach will fail. As amazing as LLMs are, they learn from human intelligence—rather than building their own.
“Human data is like a kind of fossil fuel that has provided an amazing shortcut,” Silver says. “You can think of systems that learn for themselves as a renewable fuel—something that can just learn and learn and learn forever, without limit,” he says.
I’ve met Silver a few times and—despite this proclamation—he’s always struck me as one of the more humble people in AI. Sometimes, when talking about ideas he considers silly, he flashes a puckish grin. Right now, though, he’s deadly serious.
“I think of our mission as making first contact with superintelligence,” he says. “By superintelligence I really mean something incredible. It should discover new forms of science or technology or government or economics for itself.”
Five years ago, such a mission might have seemed ridiculous. But tech CEOs now routinely talk about machines outpacing human intelligence and replacing entire categories of workers. The idea that some new technical twist might unlock superhuman AI capabilities has recently spawned a raft of billion-dollar startups.
Ineffable Intelligence has so far raised $1.1 billion in seed funding at a valuation of $5.1 billion—an enormous sum by European AI standards. Silver has also recruited top AI researchers from Google DeepMind and other frontier labs to join his endeavor.
Silver says he will give all of the money he makes from equity in Effable Intelligence—a sum that could amount to billions if he is successful—away to charity.
“It’s a huge responsibility to build a company focusing on superintelligence,” he tells me. “I think this is something that has to be done for the benefit of humanity, and any money that I make from Ineffable will will go to high-impact charities that save as many lives as possible.”
Total Focus
Silver met Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, at a chess tournament when they were kids, and the pair later became lifelong friends and collaborators.
They remained close after Silver left Google DeepMind, which he did only because he wanted to chart a completely new path. “I feel it’s really important that there is an elite AI lab that actually focuses a hundred percent on this approach,” he says. “That it’s not just a corner of another place dedicated to LLMs.”
The limits of the LLM-based approach can be seen, Silver says, with a simple thought experiment. Imagine going back in time and releasing a large language model in a world that believed the world was flat. Without being able to interact with the real world, the system, he says, would remain an avid flat-earther, even if it continued to improve its own code.
An AI system that can learn about the world for itself, however, could make its own scientific discoveries.
‘I had £20,000 stolen and had to fight a 13-month fraud reporting rule to get it back’
King Charles and the Trumps unite at White House for a historic tea meeting
This M5 MacBook Air Discount Has Renewed My Faith in Cheap Laptops for 2026
-
Sports1 week agoNCAA men’s gymnastics championship: All-time winners list
-
Sports1 week agoWWE WrestleMania 42 Night 2: Live match results and analysis
-
Fashion1 week agoUK’s Sosandar returns to profitability amid robust FY26 performance
-
Politics7 days agoUK’s Starmer seeks to deflect blame over Mandelson appointment
-
Entertainment1 week agoLee Anderson, Zarah Sultana kicked out of UK Parliament for calling PM ‘liar’
-
Business1 week agoHow Trump’s psychedelics executive order could unlock stalled cannabis reform
-
Business1 week agoNo fuel shortage: Govt assures 100% domestic LPG, PNG, CNG supply amid Hormuz energy crunch – The Times of India
-
Sports1 week agoQuetta Gladiators opt to bowl after winning toss against Peshawar Zalmi in PSL 11 clash