The access gap in AI cyber defense for critical infrastructure operators is the constraint this coalition is pressing government to address. One hundred and sixteen companies and entities signed a letter calling for a coordinated government effort to make AI-powered cyber defenses accessible to critical infrastructure, which the signatories characterized as under pressure.
AI cyber defense tooling operates at the detection and response layer of the security stack, automating at speeds that manual or legacy architectures cannot match. The distance between where that capability sits and what critical infrastructure operators can currently deploy and absorb is where the access problem lives.
The coalition's framing is explicitly time-bounded. Signatories described the window for action as limited, which places the coordination ask inside a closing timeframe rather than a long-horizon policy initiative.
The specific request is government coordination. That framing treats the access problem as a structural one that market mechanisms are not resolving on their own. Critical infrastructure operators run on procurement cycles and resource constraints that have not adapted to the pace at which AI-grade security tooling advances, and the letter's case is that coordinated government action is what closes the gap.
At 116 signatories, the coalition reflects cross-industry agreement on that diagnosis. Sign-ons at this scale on a cybersecurity policy question tend to form around shared downstream exposure rather than aligned commercial interest. The 116 signatories put the ask on the record with an explicit constraint attached: the window, by their characterization, is limited.