https://fedtechmagazine.com/ en https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/10/double-edged-sword-ai-faster-defense-faster-threats Somewhere right now, an artificial intelligence agent is reading a vulnerability disclosure that went public an hour ago, writing exploit code for it and testing that code against a live target — without a human in the loop. This is not a far-off forecast. In late 2025, Anthropic disclosed that a Chinese state-sponsored group had jailbroken the company’s Claude Code tool and built an autonomous orchestration framework around it. The group used that framework to run up to 90% of a cyber espionage campaign against roughly 30 organizations: technology firms, financial institutions, chemical… Tue, 20 Oct 2026 17:17:39 -0400 Asim Iqbal https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/10/double-edged-sword-ai-faster-defense-faster-threats https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/10/federal-agencies-should-measure-it-success-based-technological-capabilities-not-infrastructure-alone In the technology industry, we tend to measure our success by what we build rather than by what we make possible. It is a reasonable but limiting habit, because the systems we deliver are only as valuable as the outcomes they create for the people who use them. It is worth returning to a basic question: Why does our industry exist at all? Not to serve itself; we exist to serve citizens and end users. For federal agencies, that means translating a mandate into services people can use — providing information, collecting it, guiding people through workflows and helping them make decisions. No… Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:38:26 -0400 Asim Iqbal https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/10/federal-agencies-should-measure-it-success-based-technological-capabilities-not-infrastructure-alone https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/10/why-data-sovereignty-matters-more-ai-government Ask a simple question — “Where does federal data live?” — and you get a complicated answer. Truthfully, it lives everywhere. Government agencies have built and maintained their own on-premises data centers for decades, protecting siloed data through every security means available. As maintaining that legacy storage, compute and network became more expensive, cloud-first policies pushed agencies to move data out. But “the cloud” means a lot of things to a lot of people, and where federal data can reside is dictated by its classification. Click the banner below to learn more about the… Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:36:14 -0400 Rob Smith, Duke Krocker https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/10/why-data-sovereignty-matters-more-ai-government https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/10/how-hhs-using-tech-fortify-its-procurement-shop The Department of Health and Human Services has moved nearly 5,000 contracts into a new shared-services organization in less than a year, part of a deliberate effort to streamline one of the federal government's largest and most fragmented acquisition portfolios. The initiative, called the Procurement Alignment and Collaboration Task Force (PACT) is the work of Jennifer Johnson, HHS's deputy assistant secretary for acquisitions and senior procurement executive. And true to form for a federal program, it started with the name. At a recent Federal News Network panel, Johnson outlined the work… Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:09:17 -0400 Ashley Hackett https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/10/how-hhs-using-tech-fortify-its-procurement-shop https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/security-stack-working-are-your-security-operations Walk into a modern enterprise security operations center today, and you'll discover just how inexpensive 65-inch monitors are: The walls are covered with them showing dashboards from security information and event management (SIEM) consoles, extended detection and response (XDR) endpoint security platforms, firewall intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and data loss protection (DLP) software. It's all very impressive and mission-control. Yet breaches still occur. And after the worst of them, the postmortem is almost always a variation of the same story. Yes, the alert was received. The log… Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:39:50 -0400 Joel Snyder https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/security-stack-working-are-your-security-operations https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/cdw-summit-2026-it-leaders-seek-new-north-star-age-ai IT leaders are the midst of an identity crisis. Long seen as back-office superheroes, some IT leaders now find themselves expected to serve as innovators, evangelists and even the “fun people.” “I didn’t know that we were the fun people, man. Like, I was supposed to do one thing, now I have to worry about if it’s fun or not?” said Carollo Engineers CIO Andrew Ivey to his fellow panelist, St. Luke’s University Health Network Associate CISO Krista Arndt. The two were having an introspective but casual discussion about how they were responding to all of the changes in the workplace and IT —… Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:37:53 -0400 Ricky Ribeiro https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/cdw-summit-2026-it-leaders-seek-new-north-star-age-ai https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/when-small-language-models-are-right-fit-federal-ai Current federal guidance calls for agencies to accelerate responsible adoption of generative artificial intelligence to improve government efficiency and increase the quality of public services. While using large language models (LLMs) may be the first instinct here and sound synonymous with generative AI, the true mission requirements are more complicated. In particular, the rise of agentic AI use in government is exposing the need for a more nuanced approach to shaping language model size to the nature of the mission.  By decomposing larger objectives into smaller, modular tasks,… Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:45:54 -0400 Darren Pulsipher https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/when-small-language-models-are-right-fit-federal-ai https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/five-questions-ask-launching-your-next-ai-pilot How can artificial intelligence help solve real world problems? It’s the question on every federal IT leader’s mind. After the demo, it’s time to run a pilot to see whether the project is ready to be part of a useful system or needs more workshopping. But it’s not uncommon for AI projects to fail in production even after seemingly successful pilots. Where there are many reasons for this, it clearly indicates the pilot was flawed. To improve the design of your next pilot, here are five questions to ask before launch. Click the banner below to learn why data governance underpins responsible AI… Thu, 24 Sep 2026 12:20:44 -0400 Joel Snyder https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/five-questions-ask-launching-your-next-ai-pilot https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/new-federal-procurement-playbook-google-public-sector-joins-dhss-cumulus-cloud The Department of Homeland Security has awarded Google Public Sector a contract potentially worth just under $876 million to provide commercial cloud services across the department. This marks the third and latest deal struck under Cumulus, DHS’s push to purchase cloud services on a departmentwide basis rather than one component at a time. In an award notice published Monday, the DHS Office of Procurement Operations named Google’s public sector arm to a single-award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract covering commercially available “Anything as a Service” offerings:… Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:59:24 -0400 Ashley Hackett https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/new-federal-procurement-playbook-google-public-sector-joins-dhss-cumulus-cloud https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/data-governance-foundation-trustworthy-agentic-ai For years, federal agencies have treated data governance as a defensive discipline, something tied to compliance audits, retention policies and risk reduction. That mindset is no longer sufficient. As agentic artificial intelligence systems move from experimentation into production, data governance is becoming something far more important: the operational foundation that determines how AI systems behave. This is a major shift. Traditional AI systems primarily generated insights or recommendations for humans to evaluate. Agentic AI platforms are different. These systems can reason, make… Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:08:50 -0400 Brian Hilgenfeld https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/data-governance-foundation-trustworthy-agentic-ai