WASHINGTON — US Cyber Command is requesting a 2,660 percent increase over last year’s budget, in funding for artificial intelligence for cyber operations.
The plus-up comes amidst both a department-wide push to use AI, as well as Congressional direction that dates back to FY23, when the National Defense Authorization Act required CYBERCOM to develop a five-year AI roadmap. As a result, CYBERCOM established an AI task force within its elite Cyber National Mission Force in 2024.
In FY26, CYBERCOM requested only $5 million for its “AI for Cyber Operations” program, which is the first dedicated spend on AI from the command. That number balloons to $138 million in the FY27 request. Interestingly, however, the command anticipates a drop in AI investments going forward, down to $124 million in FY28, $50 million in FY29 and $47 million in FY30.
“Adversary nations —particularly China — are investing heavily in AI, cloud computing, and advanced analytics to gain strategic advantage and hold U.S. critical infrastructure at risk,” budget documents state. “To maintain decision superiority in this environment, USCYBERCOM must field AI capabilities that allow cyber operators to process large volumes of data, identify malicious activity, and respond to threats faster than human operators alone can achieve. AI enabled tools provide the ability to find, characterize, and counter adversary activity at machine speed, ensuring the United States can maintain freedom of action in cyberspace.”
The AI project, which can be found in the command’s research and development budget request, looks to evaluate commercial and government developed initiatives to develop specialized AI and machine learning capabilities for integration into workflows across the cyber mission force. It aims to accelerate decision making, improve threat detection and increase the effectiveness of offensive and defensive cyber operations.
The investments under the project will deliver “measurable” improvement in four specific areas, the documents state:
- Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; developing AI enabled analytic capabilities to accelerate processing of “large datasets and enhance situational awareness for both offensive and defensive missions” in areas such as identifying, accessing, and storing mission critical datasets and advancing AI techniques to track adversary activity and support reconnaissance missions;
- Enhancing offensive operations; the request will expand “AI enabled target development, automated planning, and mission dependency analysis to increase operational throughput … reduce targeting cycle time, accelerate mission planning, and integrate automation into manual workflows to improve operator efficiency.” The enhancements aim to increase the number of operational options available and improve the ability to meet mission priorities at scale;
- Enhancing defensive operations: the request will advance automated intelligence exploitation, accelerate malware analysis for hunt forward operations, and standardize reporting. The improvements aim to enable faster response time to threats;
- Integrated foundational activities: the request will support “AI capabilities that underpin cross mission functions, including AI assurance, C2 enhancement, model training, and technical workforce development.” The investments aim to “establish machine learning operations services, deploy cloud based and generative AI models in operational environments, and integrate Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and agentic AI frameworks.”
Budget documents note that for FY27, the funding request will go toward replicating AI task forces across all of CYBERCOM to scale pilots and institutionalize AI enabled mission workflows. It will also provide large language model access at multiple classifications for advanced analytic capabilities as well as integrating AI into the cyber workforce training pipeline to ensure teams are trained to employ these capabilities.
In addition to the increased funding request, the command established a new one-star position as chief of AI, Brig. Gen. Reid Novotny, who entered the role in November.