The National Security Agency revealed new details Thursday of its pivotal role in tracking the most wanted terrorist in American history: Osama Bin Laden.

The agency is preparing to publish a history of the years it spent searching for the founding leader of al Qaeda on a forthcoming podcast diving into the U.S. government’s secret efforts to intercept terrorist communications.

Details of the NSA’s work on the manhunt were shared early with Threat Status, including the agency’s pursuit of the Saudi-born terrorist’s courier, its help identifying bin Laden’s secret compound in Pakistan, and its support for the daring Navy SEAL May 2011 raid that killed him.

The FBI, facing a massive increase in the number of tips it is receiving, has turned to artificial intelligence to sort through the thousands of incoming phone calls and emails. FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate says the bureau often records some 4,000 incoming calls and emails providing tips in a given day.

Mr. Abbate told the Billington Cybersecurity Summit that he’d learned in a briefing Wednesday morning that the FBI had received a record number of tips, surging past 7,000 in one day. “We only have so many personnel, human beings, that are applied to that, so we’re leveraging technology and AI to help … prioritize incoming complaints so that nothing is missed,” he said at the Billington summit in Washington this week.

Asked by Threat Status later whether the surge was tied to a specific threat or reflected a heightened number of threats, the FBI said that while agents “generally do not discuss specific tip content, there was not an identified theme related to this week’s influx of tips.”

The National Threat Operations Center is “the central intake point of contact for tip information for all 56 FBI field offices, receiving an average of 4,300 calls and electronic tips (E-Tips) per day,” the bureau said in an emailed statement. “Tips are received on a wide array of issues including possible counterterrorism, cyber crime, theft, public corruption, violent crime and various other potential federal violations.”

The bureau has previously shared details about how it uses AI to comb through tips. In June, Cynthia Kaiser, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, said the bureau deployed AI on tips because the tech can spot what a human analyst might miss.

NSA Cybersecurity Collaboration Center Director Kristina Walter tells Threat Status in an exclusive interview that the agency is teaming up with leading artificial intelligence companies to expose malicious use by foreign adversaries of cutting-edge technology emerging in the private sector.

The Cybersecurity Collaboration Center (CCC) has enlisted more than 1,000 companies to help thwart hackers since its launch approximately four years ago. Ms. Walter says her team is now forming a smaller number of select partnerships with key AI firms.

“We’re really focused on quality over quantity there,” she told Mr. Lovelace at this week’s Billington summit, adding that the effort involves working with “frontier companies” supporting the AI industry, and ensuring that information about nation-state actors’ attempts to use AI in malicious ways is shared with those companies so such activity can be disrupted at scale.

Ms. Walter did not specify the companies that NSA is wooing for the effort, but said the selection criterion is whoever will have the biggest impact on national security. It is not hard to identify a handful of companies on the agency’s radar. Retired Army Gen. Paul M. Nakasone left his post atop the NSA earlier this year, and he subsequently joined the board of OpenAI. Ms. Walter said her team has not interacted with Gen. Nakasone “in his capacity on the board.”

Top officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency took this week’s Billington CyberSecurity Summit inside massive changes in progress to the nation’s cybersecurity defenses. NSA Cybersecurity Director Dave Luber told attendees at the summit that his agency’s ranks of codebreakers and codemakers are changing their approach in response to China’s Volt Typhoon’s tactics.

U.S. officials said earlier this year that the Volt Typhoon hackers breached critical infrastructure organizations in the communications, energy, transportation, and water and wastewater sectors. The purpose of the China-sponsored hacks was not espionage but pre-positioning for future attacks, according to the assessment of the FBI, NSA and the Homeland Security Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

CISA Deputy Executive Assistant Director Matthew Hartman said at Billington this week that the whole-of-government response to the China-sponsored cyberattacks is the most sustained effort by the federal government, its international partners and the private sector that he has seen in 16 years of government work. “This is going to be a very, very long, multi-year, multi-decade journey,” he said.

In-Q-Tel’s Ms. Gray, who leads the CIA investment fund’s cyber practice, joined Threat Status for an exclusive podcast interview — outlining In-Q-Tel’s unique role in the cybersecurity realm, reflecting on how AI helps adversarial hackers and how cyberattacks are now an inevitable part of life.

“This is always going to be kind of a cat-and-mouse sort of situation where … the adversaries get better and better tools to … evade the detection tools that we have and we … continue to increase the effectiveness of the tools that we have,” Ms. Gray says in the wide-ranging podcast discussion ahead of this week’s Billington Cybersecurity Summit.

National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang spent the week manning the Threat Status booth at the summit in Washington, recording interviews with leading private sector firms. That special episode of the podcast drops Friday morning on Spotify, Apple and the official Threat Status Weekly Podcast page.

The Biden administration accused Russia this week of a sophisticated effort to disrupt U.S. politics with misinformation crafted in Moscow and injected into the American discourse through unwitting American social media influencers.

Mr. Garland said the operation reached the Russian president’s “inner circle” of advisers and was intended to sway American voters to undermine support for Ukraine and deliver pro-Russian outcomes in the 2024 elections.

The State Department is offering a $10 million bounty for information on a Russian operation known as “RaHDit,” or “Russian Angry Hackers Did It.” White House national security spokesman John Kirby on Wednesday declined reporters’ prods to say if he thought Moscow was trying to boost the campaign of former President Donald Trump at the expense of Vice President Kamala Harris.

• Sept. 3-6 — Billington CyberSecurity Summit

• Sept. 9 — The Role of China in Africa’s Just Energy Transition, Wilson Center

• Sept. 9-11 — Quantum World Congress, Potomac Quantum Innovation Center

• Sept. 10 — How to Counter China’s Global South Strategy in the Indo-Pacific, Hudson Institute

• Oct. 5-8 — 2024 Threat Conference, The Cipher Brief

• Nov. 21 — Competition Policy 2024: Urgent Questions Emerging within Digital Markets, Chatham House