Critical Cognitive Infrastructure: Epistemic Security as the precondition to AI Safety.

By Kavya Pearlman @ 2026-09-23T14:13 (+1)

This is my very first post on EA forum, but I have been thinking about this topic for over 10 years, back when I was doing third party security risk management at Facebook in 2016 , during US presidential election time.  

A decade later, what I feared the most is already transpiring, supposedly in “test environments”,  Iran, China and private firms in Israel tested AIs to run autonomous influence campaigns.  The very same week, Treasury Secretary Bessent suggests creating an early warning system for AI incidents. 

The signal I receive from this is that federal agencies recognize that coordination on AI driven epistemic attack is essential. 

From the Cambridge Analytica carrying out Cyber Political Engineering to now, I have been tracking the problem and believe that we need a comprehensive framework , that has policies and toolkits as well as solutions that help create resilient information channels. While I don’t have all the answers, but one I deeply believe in is protecting Critical Cognitive Infrastructure ( CCI ).

CCI : https://xrsi.org/publication/critical-cognitive-infrastructure

we need to protect our ability to make critical decisions , especially when it matters the most. We need to prepare for the time, today. 
What I believe we need: research connecting CCI outcomes to safety governance, practitioners willing to build certifiable standards, federal policy with cross-agency buy-in, and funding to operationalize it.

I welcome any criticism and feedback to the positioning paper I put together here : https://xrsi.org/publication/critical-cognitive-infrastructure

( thank you for your kindness and patience and any perspective you might care to share. After a decade, I feel empowered to share this publicly and feel it might actually help with some of the challenges we might be about to face)