AI Expands the National Security Rulebook for Tech

Artificial intelligence is ripping up the rulebooks of industries and sectors in real time.

David Plotinsky, partner at Morgan Lewis, said the national security rulebook in the United States is one of them.

“There’s going to need to be, not just in the foreign investment space, but across the board, new ways of thinking about AI,” he told Competition Policy International (CPI), a PYMNTS company, in an interview.

In a world where data, algorithms and digital infrastructure are strategic assets, nearly every technology company is becoming a national security company, whether it intends to or not. The picks and shovels powering AI are being viewed the way governments once viewed oil pipelines or telecom networks. They are strategic assets tied directly to sovereignty, influence and national resilience.

“We need to think about, for example, how things like AI will increase the ability of foreign adversaries to take even public data and leverage it to try to use social media and other platforms to influence public opinion,” Plotinsky said.

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As a result, regulators are no longer merely referees enforcing static rules. They are acting as probabilistic planners and effectively making long-duration bets about which technologies, infrastructures and relationships could create geopolitical vulnerability years into the future.

Compliance Moves From Investment Screening to Technology Governance

For decades, U.S. national security reviews treated foreign ownership as the central proxy for risk. If a foreign company wanted to acquire a U.S. business, regulators stepped in to determine whether sensitive technologies might fall into the wrong hands, with mechanisms like the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and Team Telecom that focused heavily on ownership structures.

However, as AI begins to dominate the geopolitical discourse, what began as a narrow effort to screen foreign investment has evolved into a…

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