The National Security Agency, the Defense Department arm responsible for U.S. cybersecurity and signals intelligence collection, is launching a sweeping reorganization centered on artificial intelligence and China.
NSA Director Joshua Rudd has drawn up a restructuring plan that would create five new organizations covering AI, China, cybersecurity, combat support and warfighting, and global intelligence, the Washington Post reported on the 13th.
Each unit will be led by a newly elevated "mission director." One former NSA official said the directors would effectively hold authority close to that of a deputy director. Rudd has also left open the possibility of selecting the heads of these units from outside the agency as well as from within, according to the report.
It has not yet been decided who will lead the five new units, nor whether existing departments will be eliminated and replaced or whether a new command layer will be added on top of the current structure, the Post said.
The reorganization also brings the NSA's elite hacking arm, the Office of Tailored Access Operations, back to the forefront. TAO, which Rudd has restructured over recent months, is to be placed under the global intelligence division among the new units, and its budget is expected to increase sharply from Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year.
Created in 1997, TAO is considered one of the most secretive organizations within the NSA. It has been tasked with penetrating hard-to-reach digital targets overseas to extract intelligence and, when necessary, disrupting or attacking systems. The TAO name was formally retired in 2016 and its personnel were dispersed to other parts of the NSA, but the unit has recently been reconstituted to consolidate elite hacking capabilities, according to the report.
The NSA, headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, employs more than 30,000 military and civilian personnel, a larger workforce than the Central Intelligence Agency.
The NSA is the core U.S. intelligence agency for signals intelligence, or SIGINT, the collection of communications and electronic signals. It gathers foreign communications and electronic intelligence on a mass scale while also managing and defending encryption systems to keep sensitive U.S. government communications and networks from being penetrated by foreign powers.
The Post described the overhaul as the largest internal restructuring in at least a decade, saying it appeared to reflect Rudd's intent to build current and future U.S. security priorities — AI, China and cyber threats — directly into the agency's structure.
The timeline is moving quickly. The new mission directors are due to submit detailed reorganization plans to Rudd by the end of this month. The NSA aims to formally announce the new structure in mid-October and have it fully operational from mid-January next year.
Rudd, who took office in March after Senate confirmation, has focused in particular on aggressively adopting AI in the agency's work. The NSA recently released a desktop AI tool called "Ask Mary," named after the head of the department overseeing AI integration. The agency has also shown strong interest in partnerships with private AI research institutions and is said to have used Anthropic's advanced AI model Mythos, despite Defense Department-level restrictions on the use of Anthropic.
Rudd has visited the White House frequently since taking office, with much of the discussion focused on AI-related matters. The reorganization is seen as a move to elevate AI and China to independent top-priority missions beyond the NSA's traditional surveillance, cryptology and cyber roles, while also strengthening offensive cyber capabilities.
