Our thesis
What we do
We work in three areas, each built to support the National Security Enterprise: the Pentagon, the Intelligence Community, federal agencies, Congress, and our allies. Each brings together people from government, industry, and academia to work a real national security problem. Together, they track the technology through its life in national security: defending it, adopting it, and advancing American interests with it.
See our work →Protecting U.S. frontier AI from theft, disruption, and adversarial attack. We work directly with the frontier labs to close the gap between the threats they face and the authorities the government already has to act.
In the near term, we work across technical, legal, and operational means to close the information gaps that defenders face. Looking further out, we examine the technical and governance structures that can keep American AI ahead for the long term.
Making sure AI is actually fit for the government's purpose. National security has needs that commercial benchmarks don't measure: reliability where failure isn't an option, and security requirements all its own.
We develop clear criteria for testing, evaluating, and fielding AI-enabled systems, so that developers and government users understand each other's needs, acquisition and operational risk goes down, and AI delivers from the tactical level to the strategic.
Advancing U.S. interests as AI capability accelerates. Working with national security veterans who have negotiated directly with America's adversaries, we study how the AI race reshapes American power.
We lay out how the United States can advance global governance of AI: managing competition, lowering the risk of miscalculation, and setting durable rules rather than trading away leverage to get them.
Why us
“AI adoption and U.S. strategic advantage are mutually reinforcing, not competing.”
Our team has worked at the senior levels of the uniformed services, the Intelligence Community, the Department of Commerce, and Congress. That experience shapes the questions we ask and the rigor we bring to answering them.
Meet the teamIf you build, field, govern, or oversee frontier AI in a national security context, that’s what we’re here for.