My Canadian friend takes it one step further

Yesterday, I published the contents of a lengthy email from a good Canadian friend of mine in the power industry. He has thought a lot about risks to the Bulk Electric System (BES) from cloud and AI use; I can now reveal that one reason he’s thought so much about these questions is that he’s a member of the current NERC “Cloud CIP” Standards Drafting Team; he has been since they first met in the summer of 2024.

He writes very succinctly and elegantly (I’ve always had a problem with both of those qualities, especially succinctness!), so I don’t need to add to what he said:

Let’s say you have Microsoft 365 with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Copilot can search and reason over information that the user is authorized to access across Microsoft 365—including emails, Teams conversations, OneDrive and SharePoint files, meetings, and other connected data sources.

Now imagine that some of that information is BCSI.

The question I think the industry needs to ask is not simply: Does Copilot respect existing permissions?

Of course, permissions matter but the bigger question is:

What happens to BCSI once an AI system can retrieve, combine, summarize, and reproduce it through a simple prompt?

A user may not have intentionally copied the BCSI outside its original system.

They may simply ask: Summarize all the information we have about this BES Cyber System. Or : Find all documents related to this control and give me the key details.

The AI can potentially bring information together from multiple authorized sources that were previously separated by application, repository, or workflow.

That changes the practical accessibility and exposure of BCSI, even when the underlying access permissions have not changed.

And that leads to a question worth discussing: The main question is :

Are our current cybersecurity controls designed for a world where authorized users can ask AI to instantly discover, combine, summarize, and reproduce sensitive BES information?

This is why I believe the intersection of AI + BCSI deserves serious attention.

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