5 Steps to Build Safe Harbor for AI-Driven Cyber Defense

AI is making attackers faster. Automated recon, malware that rewrites itself every hour, phishing campaigns that test a thousand variants before lunch. They're running at machine speed, and they're not asking for permission.

Defenders have the same tools. Better tools, in most cases. But we're the only ones filling out forms first.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was written to stop data brokers from selling your browser history. The EU AI Act wants to prevent algorithmic discrimination in hiring. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) gives California residents the right to know what companies know about them. None of these laws were designed to manage what happens when a ransomware gang locks down a hospital at 2 a.m. and your incident response (IR) team needs to correlate login data across three continents before the next shift starts.

So here we are. The criminals operate without lawyers. We operate with a legal team on speed dial and a compliance checklist that grows every quarter. That's not a fairness complaint. It's a structural defect.

I spent the last few months digging into this topic for a SANS RSAC whitepaper, talking to CISOs who've been forced to choose between stopping an active breach and staying compliant with a data-transfer restriction that was never designed to apply to threat intelligence. The gap isn't theoretical. It's costing time, and time is the only resource that matters when you're already breached.

We can fix this. Not with looser privacy laws — the privacy protections matter — but with narrow, transparent exceptions that let defenders act at the speed the threat demands. Here are five moves that would actually work:

1. Carve out explicit cybersecurity exceptions in law. Right now, GDPR's Recital 49 hints that cybersecurity is a legitimate use case, but it's buried in the preamble. Move it into operative text. In the U.S., extend the liability shields from CISA 2015 and add a "defense of networks" clause to any future federal privacy bill. Make it narrow. Make it auditable. But make it real.
2. Launch regulatory sandboxes for defensive AI. The EU AI Act already includes a sandbox concept. Use it. Let SOC teams test anomaly detection models under supervision, log everything, prove you can catch threats without leaking PII, then codify what works. Data protection authorities and cybersecurity agencies should co-author the rules, not argue over jurisdiction while incidents pile up.
3. Let industry define the operational standards. ISACs and standards bodies already know how to anonymize threat samples and secure training pipelines. Turn that into a certifiable framework. If your AI defense stack meets the standard, you get safe harbor. If it doesn't, you're on your own. That's motivation.
4. Align U.S. and EU rules so multinational IR doesn't require a legal translator. The EU–U.S. Trade and Technology Council exists for a reason. Use it to harmonize what counts as a valid cybersecurity purpose across both jurisdictions. Cyber threats don't stop at borders. The frameworks that slow down cross-border response teams shouldn't either.
5. Show regulators the actual cost of the current setup. When WHOIS data disappeared, domain-based investigations went from hours to weeks. That delay is measurable. Document it. Share anonymized case data with lawmakers. They're not going to fix what they can't see. We must make the trade-off visible: inaction isn't neutral. It's a choice to let attackers keep the speed advantage.

The risk isn't that we'll weaken privacy by creating these exceptions. It’s that we'll protect data so rigidly that we can't defend the systems holding it. I've seen IR teams pull analysts off live hunts to verify data-transfer agreements. I've watched companies delay threat-sharing because they couldn't confirm whether the recipient's jurisdiction allowed it under GDPR.

That isn’t caution. It’s systemic failure.

Security and privacy don't have to trade off. But only if we build the legal and operational space for defenders to act before the damage is done. Right now, we're asking people to choose between being compliant and effective. That's a problem we can solve. We just need to decide it's worth solving.

My full SANS RSAC whitepaper has the legal weeds, case examples, and a breakdown of what "safe harbor" would look like in practice. If this is your world, it's worth the read. Download the whitepaper here.