Another Top White House Ai Policy Adviser Is Leaving

A top White House policy adviser who helped the administration navigate increasingly urgent questions around advanced artificial intelligence models with far-reaching hacking capabilities is set to depart.

Thomas Lind, the head of policy in the Office of the National Cyber Director and a senior adviser to National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, plans to leave government soon to spend more time with family, according to two people familiar with the decision, who, like others in this story, were granted anonymity to discuss White House personnel matters.

His exit is the latest in a string of departures from the White House’s tech policy ranks since the release of the long-awaited AI executive order last Tuesday, which had been repeatedly delayed due to infighting over how heavily to regulate the fast-changing technology.

The personnel shake-up at the ONCD threatens to further deplete the Trump administration of significant technical expertise as it moves to implement its AI oversight plan. The order lays out actions the ONCD and other federal agencies must take in the coming weeks to fortify networks against impending hacking risks posed by frontier models such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.

Lind is one of the most technically savvy senior policy officials at the ONCD, which White House chief of staff Susie Wiles charged with leading the response to the emergence of AI models capable of unearthing software flaws lurking inside digital infrastructure. 

He was involved in crafting the executive action, and participated in meetings with Google, Anthropic and OpenAI as they were providing the ONCD with feedback, a third person familiar said.

Two other White House officials closely involved in the Trump administration’s AI policy discussions also made plans to leave following the executive order's release. Lind’s former deputy on policy, Alexandra Seymour, exited last week, and Sriram Krishnan, the White House’s senior policy adviser for AI, plans to leave later this month.

Others from the White House cyber policy shop are looking to exit due to low morale, according to one industry official and a third person familiar with the ONCD's internal dynamics.

Some administration officials blamed early setbacks surrounding the executive order on Cairncross, who they said did not move quickly enough to address ballooning concerns about the technology falling into the wrong hands and failed to hire enough technical talent to support this key White House effort.

Lind did not respond to requests for comment. A White House official, granted anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said the OCND is “actively” looking to hire qualified candidates capable of advancing President Donald Trump’s agenda.

In a statement, White House spokesperson Liz Huston praised Cairncross’s leadership of the ONCD and said the office is working “hand-in-hand with the private sector and other federal agencies” to implement Trump’s policy priorities.

“Sean Cairncross and his entire team at the Office of the National Cyber Director continue to do outstanding work to strengthen America’s cyber and national security, protect critical infrastructure, and ensure the United States remains the global leader in AI innovation,” she wrote.

Trump signed the executive order to little fanfare last Tuesday, after last-minute opposition from the AI industry led him to scuttle the release of an earlier draft order.

Departures in the ONCD may deepen concerns about the technical brainpower supporting Cairncross, a former lawyer and Republican National Committee executive who lacked a background in cybersecurity and digital policy before his August 2025 confirmation. Lind left the NSA last April to become the White House cyber office's senior director for intelligence, according to his LinkedIn profile. He became an adviser to Cairncross in September and assumed the senior-most policy position at the ONCD in April, right as work on the EO heated up.

Congress created the Office of the National Cyber Director in 2021 to oversee the budgets and cyber defense policies of a sprawling federal executive. Cairncross has staffed it with only about three dozen employees, POLITICO has reported, even though it is authorized to staff up to 75 people. His chief of staff and deputy chief of staff also lack tech or cybersecurity experience.

The national cyber director is supposed to serve as the principal adviser to the president on everything from deterring malicious cyber activity to shoring up U.S. cyber defenses.

The White House’s effort to craft new guardrails around artificial intelligence kicked into high gear early in April after Anthropic announced it had built a new model so adept at finding holes in digital infrastructure that it could enable criminals and state-backed operatives to launch a barrage of cyberattacks if made available to the general public.

Anthropic and OpenAI have so far released their most advanced models only to a select group of tech organizations and security researchers to help them fortify cyber defenses before the tools become more widely available.

But the idea that the future security of everything from banks to hospitals hinged on the discretion of private companies prompted the Trump administration to tighten up its previously laissez-faire approach to AI regulation.

The most significant change in the recent White House directive is a voluntary safety-vetting system under which model developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic would submit new models for federal review 30 days prior to release. The directive tasks the ONCD with helping set up that system over the next 60 days.