CISA and Canadian Cyber Centre issue joint guidance on AI token consumption
CISA, Canada's Cyber Centre and partners released joint guidance on managing token consumption in third-party super intelligence services. It treats unmanaged token usage not as a billing nuisance but as an availability and resilience problem for critical infrastructure, and sets out practical steps to prioritise, monitor and optimise consumption while keeping human oversight of AI-enabled defence workflows.
- CISA, the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and partners jointly published the guidance on 22 October 2026.
- The guidance names token exhaustion and denial-of-tokens or denial-of-wallet attacks as risks of unmanaged consumption.
- Recommended steps include prioritising token allocation, caching and reusable context, optimising data before submission, and monitoring consumption over time.
- Critical infrastructure owners are told to identify mission-critical functions dependent on SI and plan for reduced availability during outages, incidents or high demand.
- Cyber defenders are advised to run SI-enabled defence workflows while maintaining human oversight, governance and cybersecurity fundamentals.