The National Security Agency is teaming up with leading artificial intelligence companies to expose foreign adversaries’ malicious use of the cutting-edge technology emerging in the private sector.

The agency is leveraging its Cybersecurity Collaboration Center that rapidly built close working relationships with cybersecurity firms to defend against foreign hacks for a new effort focused on AI attacks, according to NSA’s Kristina Walter.

The center enlisted more than 1,000 cybersecurity companies to help thwart hackers since its launch approximately four years ago. Ms. Walter, who took over the center in June, told The Washington Times on Wednesday her team is forming a smaller number of select partnerships with key AI firms now.

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“We’re really focused on quality over quantity there,” Ms. Walter said in an interview at the Billington CyberSecurity Summit in Washington. “[We’ll] work with those big frontier companies who are supporting the AI industry, and [make] sure that what we know about nation-state actors targeting AI or trying to use it in malicious ways, we can share that so that they can disrupt the activity at scale.”

The effort is part of the NSA’s burgeoning AI Security Center, established last year. Ms. Walter said the team intends to jointly publish advisories with the AI companies similar to NSA’s cybersecurity guidance issued alongside U.S. agencies and foreign allies.

She would not specify the frontier AI companies that the NSA is wooing for its effort, but she said the selection criterion is whomever will have the biggest impact on national security.

It is not hard to identify the handful of companies on the agency’s radar. Retired Army Gen. Paul M. Nakasone left his post atop the NSA earlier this year, and he subsequently joined the board of OpenAI, maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT. Ms. Walter said her team has not interacted with Gen. Nakasone “in his capacity on the board.”

Other potential participants are headed to the United Nations General Assembly in New York this month, where Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to host meetings with leading AI companies. Amb. Nathaniel C. Fick, the nation’s top cyber diplomat, told The Times the meetings will include Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.

If the NSA’s AI efforts succeed, the federal government’s partnership with AI firms will likely mirror its work with cybersecurity companies to root out foreign hackers.

The NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center has played a key role in halting foreign hackers burrowing into critical infrastructure in the previous year, according to Jami Wise, deputy chief of the NSA’s China Strategy Center.

Ms. Wise told attendees at the Billington summit on Wednesday that the NSA knew cyberattackers were targeting a specific capability offered by a company that works with the collaboration center. 

The agency used its public-private partnership to get its hands physically on the problem.

“We were also then able to actually procure one of the devices and provide, bring it into the agency for our technical experts to look at,” Ms. Wise said at the summit. “But simultaneously, we were actually able to work with four industry partners to…try to mitigate the threat and the vulnerability.”

Ms. Walter told The Times it was fair to compare the NSA’s new intimate collaborations with the private sector to the NSA’s increased cooperation with the CIA after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. 

Despite such close teamwork to expose and prevent foreign cyberattackers, Ms. Walter was adamant that the Cybersecurity Collaboration Center’s work with private companies does not have a role in America’s offensive cyber operations.

She dismissed questions about whether the partnerships will put a target on the backs of the American private sector. Ms. Walter said the NSA does not see its private-sector partners facing additional cyberattacks from hostile nations because of the companies’ work with the NSA.

“Those companies are being targeted whether they’re working with us or not, frankly, because they’re critical to U.S. business, they’re critical to national security, they’re critical to the warfighter,” she said. “Us partnering with them is really so that we can better understand the malicious activity and help them defend it. And they can do with what they want with the information.”