CISA’s New AI Guidance: The Leadership Imperative for OT Supply Chain Security

**Executive Summary:** The CISA-led guidance positions secure AI adoption in Operational Technology as a federal imperative, detailing four governance pillars—understanding the AI lifecycle, strategic OT use, governance and assurance, and failsafe oversight—and urging continuous external vendor monitoring, technical control validation (e.g., SBOMs, application security, DNS health, patching cadence), and proactive remediation to prevent AI-driven functional safety and availability failures in critical infrastructure.