How Cyber Command is building its AI cyber war playbook (axios.com)

U.S. Cyber Command intends to test and deploy the strongest possible AI models, regardless of politics and even country of origin, the command's chief AI officer told Axios. Why it matters: Anthropic's models are pushing the frontier, but the company's fight with the Pentagon has complicated the rollout of its latest models within government. Cyber Command is largely sidestepping that debate — building infrastructure designed to swap between models regardless of vendor or origin. "To survive anywhere, just in case our operators want an open-source made-in-China model or something very boutique, we have to create the infrastructure and that ability to be agile — no politics," Brig. Gen. Reid Novotny, chief AI officer at Cyber Command, told Axios. "Our operators are very well set for what they need right now." State of play: The White House is still negotiating access to Anthropic's Mythos Preview, which the company has held back due to its hacking capabilities. Now, only a patchwork of agencies — including the National Security Agency and the Department of Commerce's AI testing institute, but not CISA — have access to the model. Meanwhile, OpenAI is capitalizing on the confusion and quickly engaging with federal, state and international government offices to deploy its competing product, GPT-5.4-Cyber . What they're saying: "I'm zero percent concerned about politics," Novotny told Axios at the SANS AI Cybersecurity Summit in Arlington. "There are so many things we can do in the space right now: adopting newer technologies, going after companies that are model agnostic," he said. Driving the news: 2026 marks the first year Cyber Command has dedicated funding for AI programs, after years of lead time inside the Pentagon and Congress. The command is using that funding to pilot commercial AI capabilities while building underlying infrastructure that allows operators to switch between models as technology evolves. Novotny said that flexibility extends even to models developed outside the U.S. The big picture: Novotny — the first AI officer at Cyber Command — is tasked with integrating AI into both offensive and defensive cyber operations. That includes using models to accelerate operations and process large volumes of intelligence data, but also embracing a level of risk inherent in military missions. "The true point of our military, at some scope and scale, is to be less secure and a little bit more dangerous," he said during a panel. Zoom in: A major concern externally is whether AI systems could misidentify or improperly target civilian infrastructure. But Novotny said those risks are governed by existing military rules, not new AI-specific policies. "If we train a model to go hack an entire country, we know going in about hospitals, schools and so on," he said. "We know what we need to do and not do, and then we prove it out, making sure the model is doing what we say," Novotny said. "I don't want to say we're not worried about it, but we know how