- The report argues that global leadership in generative AI should be a U.S. national security priority because it could affect military capabilities, intelligence gathering and analysis, cyber warfare, and strategic advantage.
- SCSP assesses that U.S. frontier generative AI platforms currently lead PRC efforts, while warning that China remains among the few countries capable of building and deploying frontier large language models.
- The report identifies data, compute, people, and a thriving innovation ecosystem as core requirements for broader AI adoption and advantage, and calls for stronger access, investment, and talent development.
- The governance memo argues that generative AI development is moving rapidly while AI governance is moving slowly, creating urgent needs around synthetic media, disinformation, high-consequence use cases, and democratic governance models.
- The economy memo argues that generative AI could increase productivity and economic output, but that U.S. leadership depends on competitiveness in compute resources, data governance and infrastructure, and talent pipelines.
Generative AI: The Future of Innovation Power is an SCSP special edition report assessing the promise, risks, and national security implications of generative AI for the United States, its allies and partners, and strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China. The report says SCSP staff used supervised generative AI assistance for research summaries, brainstorming, style experimentation, examples, and claim review, with human review of text, sources, and numbers, and that Task Force recommendations informed the work. Part I frames generative AI as a general-purpose technology affecting innovation, productivity, military advantage, diplomacy, governance, and social cohesion, and compares U.S. and PRC generative AI ecosystems across government, regulation, investment, major models, compute, data, and talent. Part II presents memorandums to the President and Congress on innovation power, governance, the economy, foreign policy, defense adoption, and intelligence. Principal arguments include that U.S. leadership in generative AI is a national security priority; that success depends on compute, data, people, and public-private coordination; that governance must address near-term disinformation and higher-consequence risks; and that DoD and the Intelligence Community should adopt AI tools urgently but responsibly.
This moment provides the United States government with a unique opportunity to lead with conviction as humanity enters a new era.
SCSP
- Establish a Small, Elite National Technology Strategy Organization. America needs an institutional home for the national technology strategy process to gather the innovation ecosystem’s potential.
- Empower Policymakers to Get Smart on Tech. The White House should convene the best AI minds in the country at regular intervals to teach government leaders about the latest developments.
- Unleash the National Lab Ecosystem with More Public-Private Partnerships. The White House and Congress should cooperate to increase DOE’s ability to leverage public-private partnerships that advance AI.
- Launch and Land Moonshots for the GenAI Era. The White House and Congress should cooperate on national security-focused, government-led moonshots with audacious and clear goals.
Published by the Special Competitive Studies Project. Co-publishers and external authors, where they exist, are credited in the byline above.