When Army Gen. Paul M. Nakasone left the helm after six years as head of the National Security Agency, he worried about two emergent threats: China’s potential meddling in U.S. elections and deepfakes generated by ever more powerful artificial intelligence systems.

But speaking with reporters at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington this week, the retired general said he now believes “both of those issues really are non-issues to me.”

The former leader of NSA and U.S. Cyber Command mobilized those agencies’ Election Security Group to combat foreign threats last year, amid concerns about Beijing’s capabilities to cause digital chaos.

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Gen. Nakasone, however, sounded confident on Monday evening that China’s Communist regime now views meddling in the upcoming presidential election as “too high a risk.”

“I think we saw this in ’22, where it was very specific elections that they would get involved, but the broad-base influence operations that we’re very familiar with — with regards to Russia or even Iran — that’s not their game,” Gen. Nakasone said.

The retired general is closely tracking threats from China and AI from his perch as the founder of Vanderbilt University’s new Institute of National Security and from his seat on the board of artificial intelligence pioneer OpenAI.

Working in the private sector has revealed that adversaries are not using AI as some officials anticipated. Gen. Nakasone said adversaries’ use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT is not yet having an impact.

The retired leader of the NSA is not letting his guard down when it comes to Chinese cyberattackers, however.

Asked about China’s Typhoon hacking groups, Gen. Nakasone told The Washington Times that he intends for his Vanderbilt institute to help support the community of partners the U.S. government needs to thwart the cyberattackers’ advance.

He is not satisfied with the U.S. response to Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon hacks, which American officials have said infiltrated critical systems for future sabotage and burrowed into telecommunications networks to gather intelligence.

“I am not pleased in terms of where we’re at with either of the Typhoons,” Gen. Nakasone said. “And I think that this is a tremendous challenge that we have for our nation.”

In his new role, he said he wants to train new national security professionals who fully understand influence operations, including the technical aspects, to help academia, industry and government defend against Chinese and other hostile cyberattacks.

As NSA director traveling to Boston, Texas or the West Coast, Gen. Nakasone said he was often twice the age of the tech professionals he encountered. In Washington, the general found he was one of the younger people working in national security.

He intends to bridge the age gap between the Beltway and the rest of the country by establishing a new pipeline from Vanderbilt’s Nashville campus to Washington.

He kick-started that effort in Washington this week, hosting current intelligence and defense officials alongside students to learn about Vanderbilt’s new Institute of National Security.

Retired Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accompanied Gen. Nakasone upon his return to Washington and told attendees that the institute would help train leaders to prevent war.

Reflecting on various hot spots for potential conflict between great powers, Gen. Milley told attendees war with China is not imminent nor inevitable, but its probability may increase over time if national security officials are not careful.

The U.S. intelligence community said Tuesday that China is one of at least three adversaries with the “technical capability to access some U.S. election-related networks and systems.”

The other two adversaries are Russia and Iran, who intelligence officials say are considering more aggressive influence operations that could lead to physical violence, both before and after the upcoming U.S. election.

The intelligence community said in a memo declassified on Monday that it does not believe the foreign actors will try to alter actual vote counts because of the risk of detection, retaliation, and there being no indication of similar previous interference efforts.

The intelligence community said in a separate election security update on Tuesday that it anticipates China will likely deploy influence operations in the post-election period quickly tailored to match ongoing events.