California, the cradle of the American AI industry, is taking cybersecurity into its own hands. Following a slew of recent reports of AI systems autonomously gaining access to the open internet during internal tests and hacking into third-party organizations, the state says it plans to launch an “AI Cyber Defense Program” geared towards protecting critical infrastructure. The attacks—executed in separate incidents by models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta—were a wake-up call for many in tech and policy circles, alerting them to the fact that the means of breaching existing cybersecurity systems are evolving and spreading much more quickly than adequate defensive measures. “The digital environment is rapidly evolving before our eyes,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “Attacks are faster, more sophisticated, and more frequent, putting at risk the basic systems families count on. California can either wait for the next crisis, or we can build the kind of defenses this moment demands. We are choosing to build.” The program will use AI to identify and patch cybersecurity vulnerabilities in state and local infrastructure under the supervision of a team of AI Cybersecurity Officers, one of which will be appointed per state agency, according to the announcement from Newsom’s office. No timeline was provided for the implementation of the program, and Newsom’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.