“How do I even know what’s normal and what’s abnormal so I can detect anomalies? We simply don’t know,” says Dean Souleles, chief technology advisor for the Director of National Intelligence.

“Autonomy may look like an Achilles’ heel, and in a lot of ways it is” – but for both sides, DTRA’s Nick Wager said. “I think that’s as much opportunity as that is vulnerability. We are good at this… and we can be better than the threat.”

An adversary who has access to the dataset your AI trained on can figure out what its likely blind spots are, said Brian Sadler, a senior scientist at the Army Research Laboratory: “If I know your data, I can create ways to fake out your system.”