EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part one of “Cyber AI Chronicles” – written by lawyers and named by ChatGPT.  This series will highlight key legal, privacy, and technical issues associated with the continued development, regulation, and application of artificial intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence is not a new concept or endeavor. In October 1950, Alan Turing published “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” proposing the question: Can machines think? Since then, the concept has been studied at length, with an immediately recognizable example being IBM Watson, which memorably defeated Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011. AI has been captured and fictionalized in movies, video games, and books. Even if we are not aware of it, AI underlies many technical tools that we use every day.

An updated version of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework is on the way.

In 2013, President Barack Obama directed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”) to lead the development of a cybersecurity framework to “reduce cyber risks to critical infrastructure.” The result was the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (formally, the “Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity”), a comprehensive, flexible, and scalable approach that provides a structure that can be used by entities to create, guide, assess, or improve their cybersecurity programs. The first version, v1.0, of the CSF was released in February 2014. NIST subsequently released v1.1 of the CSF in April 2018 to clarify, refine, and enhance the framework. Since its release, the CSF has been widely adopted across a range of industries within the United States and internationally.