Mary Ellen Callahan is an American attorney specializing in privacy, cybersecurity and national security. She served as chief privacy officer at the Department of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2012 and led its Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office from August 2023 to January 2025. She has also held legal roles at Jenner & Block and the Walt Disney Company.
DI has documented statements by Mary Ellen Callahan on Artificial Intelligence, China, and U.S. Politics. Read the quotations, original sources and related cases below.
Role at the time: Former DHS assistant secretary for countering weapons of mass destruction
Condemned
Statement summary
Callahan supports internal review by embedded evaluators, a common approach to security testing and international cooperation, but argues that these safeguards require government expertise. She urges Washington to rebuild its CBRN and cybersecurity capacity and give one person responsibility for the whole CBRN mission.
“Without that capacity even the strongest industry safeguards will leave dangerous gaps.”
Open source (opens in a new tab)Callahan calls for rebuilding government capacity to oversee AISigned Federal News Network commentary, October 29
Why we used this label
Callahan criticizes weakened government capacity and calls for stronger public oversight alongside industry measures.
Trump backs company controls and outside audits for frontier AI. Critics want enforceable federal safeguards, and the White House now calls incident reporting mandatory without identifying enforcement mechanisms or penalties.