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The Exchange Daily - December 26, 2025

Today's Show Notes: Federal healthcare AI accelerates, wireless strategy shifts, and identity plus patch governance stay on the critical path.

Federal Register: HHS RFI on accelerating adoption and use of AI in clinical care. A new Request for Information in the Federal Register signals that federal health leaders want faster, more consistent AI adoption in clinical care. The policy direction matters because it will influence how clinical AI is evaluated, procured, and operationalized, including expectations for safety and accountability.

For technology leaders, the most practical angle is procurement readiness. If the government starts asking for auditable controls, measurable performance, and clear risk ownership, that pressure will carry into vendors, providers, and partners. Treat the comment process as a chance to shape requirements that are realistic, testable, and secure.

Sources: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/23/2025-23641/request-for-information-accelerating-the-adoption-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence-as-part-of

Presidential memorandum: “Winning the 6G Race” and implications for secure, AI-driven wireless infrastructure. The new 6G memorandum is a competitiveness signal that ties next-generation connectivity to national capability. The practical impact shows up in latency, bandwidth, and reliability expectations for services that depend on ubiquitous connectivity, including AI-enabled and edge workloads.

For CIOs and CTOs, this is a roadmap-adjacent alert. If you have 5G plans, you should start asking what your long-range wireless posture looks like for standards, security baselines, and vendor selection. Treat wireless as a strategic dependency that will influence your ability to execute digital transformation at speed.

Sources: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/memorandum-winning-the-6g-race

Senate confirms Kirsten Davies as Department of Defense Chief Information Officer. A confirmed CIO at the Department of Defense typically signals an execution pivot point, where priorities become clearer and modernization cadence can tighten. Leadership shifts tend to influence enterprise architecture, identity direction, and the alignment between mission needs and technology investment.

For industry and government leaders, the key is to watch early signals. First policy memos, budget posture, and program language will reveal where modernization is expected to move fastest, and where exceptions will be harder to justify. Governance and decision rights will matter as much as tooling.

Sources: https://www.congress.gov/nomination/119th-congress/655

NIST IR 8587 draft guidance: protecting “tokens and assertions” from forgery, theft, and misuse. Nist’s draft on tokens and assertions targets a real-world failure mode: attackers stealing or forging the artifacts that modern identity systems rely on. As organizations expand single sign-on, federated identity, and machine-to-machine integrations, token misuse becomes a direct path to account takeover and lateral movement.

This also matters for AI agents and automation tools that operate with delegated access. If your organization is expanding agentic workflows, token security becomes a core control, not an implementation detail. Review lifetimes, signing keys, validation, logging, and response playbooks before the next incident forces the issue.

Sources: https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/ir/8587/ipd

Patch governance wrap: Cisco Secure Email (CVE-2025-20393) and WatchGuard Firebox (CVE-2025-14733). Vendor advisories for email security and edge appliances reinforce a consistent message: critical security controls also carry critical patch obligations. These systems often sit in privileged positions, and exploitation risk can outpace traditional change windows.

Leaders should treat this as a governance problem as much as a technical one. Your emergency change process has to be exercised and measurable, and you need a clear executive owner for the risk when patching slips. Inventory accuracy, version visibility, and compensating controls are the difference between “we’re fine” and “we’re exposed.”

Sources: https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-email-cve-2025-20393

https://www.watchguard.com/wgrd-psirt/advisory/wgsa-2025-00001

NIH PRIMED-AI program funding forecast signals next wave of federal health AI investment. Federal funding forecasts are a leading indicator for where partnerships, datasets, and standards activity will cluster next. PRIMED-AI signals continued momentum for clinical AI research and translation, which will pull on security, privacy, and data governance disciplines.

For technology leaders, this is a readiness check. If you want to participate in this ecosystem, you’ll need clear data-sharing posture, strong identity and access controls, and integration strategies that can move from research to operational environments. The opportunity will reward organizations that can demonstrate trust and reproducibility.

ources: https://www.grants.gov/search-results-detail/359269

Topics We’re Tracking (But Didn’t Make the Cut). None today.


Quick Disclaimer and Sources Note: The author used AI in part to create this newscast. Our goal is to be transparent and show you how we sourced the info we used.

This newscast was developed using only public sources of information.

This update was assembled using a mix of human editorial judgment, public records, and reputable national and sector-specific news sources, with help from artificial intelligence tools to summarize and organize information. All information is drawn from publicly available sources listed above. Every effort is made to keep details accurate as of publication time, but readers should always confirm time-sensitive items such as policy changes, budget figures, and timelines with official documents and briefings.

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