WASHINGTON (DC News Now) — The National Security Agency (NSA), located in Maryland, is launching an artificial intelligence security center.

“NSA is consolidating its various AI security related activities into a new entity, the NSA AI Security Center (AISC). Since AI security is principally a cybersecurity responsibility, the AISC will be located within and part of NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center,” said a NSA spokesperson, in a statement to DC News Now.

Part of the agency’s goal is to educate leaders “about the threats against their intellectual property and collaborate to help prevent and eradicate threats.”

“Right now, threat actors are actually using AI’s ability to actually create code, based on its understanding and learning from past computer code to actually write things like exploits and malware,” said FTI Consulting’s Managing Director David Youssef. “[It’s] basically cutting the amount of time that it takes a threat actor to create some type of cyber weapon.”

In recent weeks, several celebrities have complained that AI is being used to manipulate their videos and audio, commonly referred to as deepfakes.

“So many people who research AI and associated technologies think of us as now being in what we call a digital cold war,” said Dr. Aram Sinnreich, a professor at American University.  

The new security center comes as the nation prepares for the next presidential election.

“It is absolutely vital that we begin to regulate AI as soon as possible, or else we’re going to be seeing severe negative consequences in the 2024 presidential election and beyond,” Sinnreich said.

The White House has developed an AI Bill of Rights.

“The NSA has to assume that other foreign powers, the Chinese government, the Russian government, are doing the same thing and using those profiles of us to target us with disinformation that might lead us to make poor decisions when we’re voting or when we’re going about our daily lives as American residents and citizens,” Sinnreich said.