How AI can help make cities work better for residents

In recent decades, cities have become increasingly adept at amassing all sorts of data. But that data can have limited impact when government officials are unable to communicate, let alone analyze or put to use, all the information they have access to.

This dynamic has always bothered Sarah Williams, a professor of urban planning and technology at MIT. “We do a lot of spatial and data analytics. We sit on academic papers and research that could have a huge impact on the way we plan and design our cities,” she says of her profession. “It wasn’t getting communicated.”

Shortly after joining MIT in 2012, Williams created the Civic Data Design Lab to bridge that divide. Over the years, she and her colleagues have pushed the narrative and expository bounds of urban planning data using the latest technologies available—making numbers vivid and accessible through human stories and striking graphics. One project she was involved in, on rates of incarceration in New York City by neighborhood, is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Williams’s other projects have tracked the spread and impact of air pollution in Beijing using air quality monitors and mapped the daily commutes of Nairobi residents using geographic information systems. 

Cities should be transparent in how they’re using AI and what its limitations are. In doing so, they have an opportunity to model more ethical and responsive ways of using this technology.

In recent years, as AI became more accessible, Williams was intrigued by what it could reveal about cities. “I really started thinking, ‘What are the implications for urban planning?’” she says. These tools have the potential to organize and illustrate vast amounts of data instantaneously. But having more information also increases the risks of misinformation and manipulation. “I wanted to help guide cities in thinking about the positives and negatives of these tools,” she says. 

In 2024, that inquiry led to a collaboration with the city of Boston, which was exploring how and whether to apply AI in various government functions through its Office of Emerging Technology. Over the course of the year, Williams and her team followed along as Boston experimented with several new applications for AI in government and gathered feedback at community meetings.

On the basis of these findings, Williams and the Civic Data Design Lab published the Generative AI Playbook for Civic Engagement in the spring. It’s a publicly available document that helps city governments take advantage of AI’s capabilities and navigate its ­attendant risks. This kind of guidance is especially important as the federal government takes an increasingly laissez-faire approach to AI regulation. 

“That gray zone is where nonprofits and academia can create research to help guide states and private institutions,” Williams says. 

The lab’s playbook and academic papers touch on a wide range of emerging applications, from virtual assistants for Boston’s procurement division to optimization of traffic signals to chatbots for the 311 nonemergency services hotline. But Williams’s primary focus is how to use this technology for civic engagement. AI could help make the membrane between the government and the public more porous, allowing each side to understand the other a little better. 

Right now, civic engagement is mostly limited to “social media, websites, and community meetings,” she says. “If we can create more tools to help close that gap, that’s really important.”

One of Boston’s AI-powered experiments moves in that direction. The city used a large language model to summarize every vote of the Boston City Council for the past 16 years, creating simple and straightforward descriptions of each measure. This easily searchable database “will help you find what you’re looking for a lot more quickly,” says Michael Lawrence Evans, head of the Office of Emerging Technology.  A quick search for “housing” shows the city council’s recent actions to create a new housing accelerator fund and to expand the capacity of migrant shelters. Though not every summary has been double-checked by a human, the tool’s accuracy was confirmed through “a really robust evaluation,” Evans says. 

AI tools may also help governments understand the needs and desires of residents. The community is “already inputting a lot of its knowledge” through community meetings, public surveys, 311 tickets, and other channels, Williams says. Boston, for instance, recorded nearly 300,000 311 requests in 2024 (most were complaints related to parking). New York City recorded 35 million 311 contacts in 2023. It can be difficult for government workers to spot trends in all that noise. “Now they have a more structured way to analyze that data that didn’t really exist before,” she says.

AI can help paint a clearer picture of how these sorts of resident complaints are distributed geographically. At a community meeting in Boston last year, city staff used generative AI to instantly produce a map of pothole complaints from the previous month. 

AI also has the potential to illuminate more abstract data on residents’ desires. One mechanism Williams cites in her research is Polis, an open-source polling platform used by several national governments around the world and a handful of cities and media companies in the US. A recent update allows poll hosts to categorize and summarize responses using AI. It’s something of an experiment in how AI can help facilitate direct democracy—an issue that tool creator Colin Megill has worked on with both OpenAI and Anthropic. 

But even as Megill explores these frontiers, he is proceeding cautiously. The goal is to “enhance human agency,” he says, and to avoid “manipulation” at all costs: “You want to give the model very specific and discrete tasks that augment human authors but don’t replace them.”

Misinformation is another concern as local governments figure out how best to work with AI. Though they’re increasingly common, 311 chatbots have a mixed record on this front. New York City’s chatbot made headlines last year for providing inaccurate and, at times, bizarre information. When an Associated Press reporter asked if it was legal for a restaurant to serve cheese that had been nibbled on by a rat, the chatbot responded, “Yes, you can still serve the cheese to customers if it has rat bites.” (The New York chatbot appears to have improved since then. When asked by this reporter, it responded firmly in the negative to the nibbling rat question.)

These AI mishaps can reduce trust in government—precisely the opposite of the outcome that Williams is pursuing in her work. 

“Currently, we don’t have a lot of trust in AI systems,” she says. “That’s why having that human facilitator is really important.” Cities should be transparent in how they’re using AI and what its limitations are, she says. In doing so, they have an opportunity to model more ethical and responsive ways of using this technology. 

Next on Williams’s agenda is exploring how cities can develop their own AI systems rather than relying on tech giants, which often have a different set of priorities. This technology could be open-source; not only would communities be able to better understand the data they produce, but they would own it. 

“One of the biggest criticisms of AI right now is that the people who are doing the labor are not paid for the work that they do [to train the systems],” she says. “I’m super excited about how communities can own their large language models. Then communities can own the data that’s inside them and allow people to have access to it.”  

Benjamin Schneider is a freelance writer covering housing, transportation, and urban policy.

Senior State Department official sought internal communications with journalists, European officials, and Trump critics

A previously unreported document distributed by senior US State Department official Darren Beattie reveals a sweeping effort to uncover all communications between the staff of a small government office focused on online disinformation and a lengthy list of public and private figures—many of whom are longtime targets of the political right. 

The document, originally shared in person with roughly a dozen State Department employees in early March, requested staff emails and other records with or about a host of individuals and organizations that track or write about foreign disinformation—including Atlantic journalist Anne Applebaum, former US cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs, and the Stanford Internet Observatory—or have criticized President Donald Trump and his allies, such as the conservative anti-Trump commentator Bill Kristol. 

The document also seeks all staff communications that merely reference Trump or people in his orbit, like Alex Jones, Glenn Greenwald, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In addition, it directs a search of communications for a long list of keywords, including “Pepe the Frog,” “incel,” “q-anon,” “Black Lives Matter,” “great replacement theory,” “far-right,” and “infodemic.”

For several people who received or saw the document, the broad requests for unredacted information felt like a “witch hunt,” one official says—one that could put the privacy and security of numerous individuals and organizations at risk. 

Beattie, whom Trump appointed in February to be the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy, told State Department officials that his goal in seeking these records was a “Twitter files”-like release of internal State Department documents “to rebuild trust with the American public,” according to a State Department employee who heard the remarks. (Beattie was referring to the internal Twitter documents that were released after Elon Musk bought the platform, in an attempt to prove that the company had previously silenced conservatives. While the effort provided more detail on the challenges and mistakes Twitter had already admitted to, it failed to produce a smoking gun.)

“What would be the innocent reason for doing that?” Bill Kristol

The document, dated March 11, 2025, focuses specifically on records and communications from the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub, a small office in the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy that tracked and countered foreign disinformation campaigns; it was created after the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which had the same mission, shut down at the end of 2024. MIT Technology Review broke the news earlier this month that R/FIMI would be shuttered. 

Some R/FIMI staff were at the meeting where the document was initially shared, as were State Department lawyers and staff from the department’s Bureau of Administration, who are responsible for conducting searches to fulfill public records requests. 

Also included among the nearly 60 individuals and organizations caught up in Beattie’s information dragnet are Bill Gates; the open-source journalism outlet Bellingcat; former FBI special agent Clint Watts; Nancy Faeser, the German interior minister; Daniel Fried, a career State Department official and former US ambassador to Poland; Renée DiResta, an expert in online disinformation who led research at Stanford Internet Observatory; and Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher who briefly led the Disinformation Governance Board at the US Department of Homeland Security.

Have more information on this story or a tip for something else that we should report? Using a non-work device, reach the reporter on Signal at eileenguo.15 or tips@technologyreview.com.

When told of their inclusion in the records request, multiple people expressed alarm that such a list exists at all in an American institution. “When I was in government I’d never done anything like that,” Kristol, a former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, says. “What would be the innocent reason for doing that?”

Fried echoes this sentiment. “I spent 40 years in the State Department, and you didn’t collect names or demand email records,” says Fried. “I’ve never heard of such a thing”—at least not in the American context, he clarifies. It did remind him of Eastern European “Communist Party minder[s] watching over the untrusted bureaucracy.” 

He adds: “It also approaches the compilation of an enemies list.” 

Targeting the “censorship industrial complex”

Both GEC and R/FIMI, its pared-down successor office, focused on tracking and countering foreign disinformation efforts from Russia, China, and Iran, among others, but GEC was frequently accused—and was even sued—by conservative critics who claimed that it enabled censorship of conservative Americans’ views. A judge threw out one of those claims against GEC in 2022 (while finding that other parts of the Biden administration did exert undue pressure on tech platforms). 

Beattie has also personally promoted these views. Before joining the State Department, he started Revolver News, a website that espouses far-right talking points that often gain traction in certain conservative circles. Among the ideas promoted in Revolver News is that GEC was part of a “censorship industrial complex” aimed at suppressing American conservative voices, even though GEC’s mission was foreign disinformation. This idea has taken hold more broadly; the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing titled the “Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department,” on April 1 focused on GEC. 

Most people on the list appear to have focused at some point on tracking or challenging disinformation broadly, or on countering specific false claims, including those related to the 2020 election. A few of the individuals appear primarily to be critics of Trump, Beattie, or others in the right-wing media ecosystem. Many have been the subject of Trump’s public grievances for years. (Trump called Krebs, for instance, a “significant bad-faith actor” in an executive order targeting him earlier this month.)   

Beattie specifically asked for “all documents, emails, correspondence, or other records of communications amongst/between employees, contractors, subcontractors or consultants at the GEC or R/FIMI” since 2017 with all the named individuals, as well as communications that merely referenced them. He sought communications that referenced any of the listed organizations.  

Finally, he sought a list of additional unredacted agency records—including all GEC grants and contracts, as well as subgrants, which are particularly sensitive due to the risks of retaliation to subgrantees, who often work in local journalism, fact-checking, or pro-democracy organizations under repressive regimes. It also asked for “all documents mentioning” the Election Integrity Partnership, a research collaboration between academics and tech companies that has been a target of right-wing criticism. 

Several State Department staffers call the records requests “unusual” and “improper” in their scope. MIT Technology Review spoke to three people who had personally seen the document, as well as two others who were aware of it; we agreed to allow them to speak anonymously due to their fears of retaliation. 

While they acknowledge that previous political appointees have, on occasion, made information requests through the records management system, Beattie’s request was something wholly different. 

Never had “an incoming political appointee” sought to “search through seven years’ worth of all staff emails to see whether anything negative had been said about his friends,” says one staffer. 

Another staffer calls it a “pet project” for Beattie. 

Selective transparency

Beattie delivered the request, which he framed as a “transparency” initiative, to the State Department officials in a conference room at its Washington, D.C., headquarters on a Tuesday afternoon in early March, in the form of an 11-page packet titled, “SO [Senior Official] Beattie Inquiry for GEC/R/FIMI Records.” The documents were printed out, rather than emailed.

Labeled “sensitive but unclassified,” the document lays out Beattie’s requests in 12 separate, but sometimes repetitive, bullet points. In total, he sought communications about 16 organizations, including Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), as well as with and about 39 individuals. 

Notably, this includes several journalists: In addition to Bellingcat and Applebaum, the document also asks for communications with NBC News senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny. 

Press-freedom advocates expressed alarm about the inclusion of journalists on the list, as well as the possibility of their communications being released to the public, which goes “considerably well beyond the scope of what … leak investigations in the past have typically focused on,” says Grayson Clary, a staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Rather, the effort seems like “a tactic designed to … make it much harder for journalists to strike up those source relationships in the first instance.”

Beattie also requested a search for communications that mentioned Trump and more than a dozen other prominent right-leaning figures. In addition to Jones, Greenwald, and “RFK Jr.,” the list includes “Don Jr.,” Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Charlie Kirk, Marine Le Pen, “Bolsonaro” (which could cover either Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president, or his son Eduardo, who is seeking political asylum in the US), and Beattie himself. It also asked for a search for 32 right-wing buzzwords related to abortion, immigration, election denial, and January 6, suggesting a determined effort to find State Department staff who even just discussed such matters. 

(Staffers say they doubt that Beattie will find much, unless, one says, it’s “previous [FOIA] queries from people like Beattie” or discussions about “some Russian or PRC [Chinese] narrative that includes some of this stuff.”)

Multiple sources say State Department employees raised alarms internally about the records requests. They worried about the sensitivity and impropriety of the broad scope of the information requested, particularly because records would be unredacted, as well as about how the search would be conducted: through the eRecords file management system, which makes it easy for administrative staff to search through and retrieve State Department employees’ emails, typically in response to FOIA requests. 

This felt, they say, like a powerful misuse of the public records system—or as Jankowicz, the disinformation researcher and former DHS official, put it, “weaponizing the access [Beattie] has to internal communications in order to upend people’s lives.”

“It stank to high heaven,” one staffer says. “This could be used for retaliation. This could be used for any kind of improper purposes, and our oversight committees should be informed of this.”

Another employee expressed concerns about the request for information on the agency’s subgrantees—who were often on the ground in repressive countries and whose information was closely guarded and not shared digitally, unlike the public lists of contractors and grantees typically available on websites like Grants.gov or USAspending.gov. “Making it known that [they] took money from the United States would put a target on them,” this individual explains. “We kept that information very secure. We wouldn’t even email subgrant names back and forth.”

Several people familiar with the matter say that by early April, Beattie had received many of the documents he’d requested, retrieved through eRecords, as well as a list of grantees. One source says the more sensitive list of subgrantees was not shared.  

Neither the State Department nor Beattie responded to requests for comment. A CISA spokesperson emailed, “We do not comment on intergovernmental documents and would refer you back to the State Department.” We reached out to all individuals whose communications were requested and are named here; many declined to comment on the record.

A “chilling effect”

Five weeks after Beattie made his requests for information, the State Department shut down R/FIMI. 

An hour after staff members were informed, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio published a blog post announcing the news on the Federalist, one of the outlets that sued the GEC over allegations of censorship. He then discussed in an interview with the influential right-wing Internet personality Mike Benz plans for Beattie to lead a “transparency effort.”  

“What we have to do now—and Darren will be big involved in that as well—is sort of document what happened … because I think people who were harmed deserve to know that, and be able to prove that they were harmed,” Rubio told Benz.

This is what Beattie—and Benz—have long called for. Many of the names and keywords he included in his request reflect conspiracy theories and grievances promoted by Revolver News—which Beattie founded after being fired from his job as a speechwriter during the first Trump administration when CNN reported that he had spoken at a conference with white nationalists. 

Ultimately, the State Department staffers say they fear that a selective disclosure of documents, taken out of context, could be distorted to fit any kind of narrative Beattie, Rubio, or others create. 

Weaponizing any speech they consider to be critical by deeming it disinformation is not only ironic, says Jankowicz—it will also have “chilling effects” on anyone who conducts disinformation research, and it will result in “less oversight and transparency over tech platforms, over adversarial activities, over, frankly, people who are legitimately trying to disenfranchise US voters.” 

That, she warns, “is something we should all be alarmed about.”

US office that counters foreign disinformation is being eliminated

The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation is to be eliminated, according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, confirming reporting by MIT Technology Review.

The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub is a small office in the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy that tracks and counters foreign disinformation campaigns. 

In shutting R/FIMI, the department’s controversial acting undersecretary, Darren Beattie, is delivering a major win to conservative critics who have alleged that it censors conservative voices. Created at the end of 2024, it was reorganized from the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a larger office with a similar mission that had long been criticized by conservatives who claimed that, despite its international mission, it was censoring American conservatives. In 2023, Elon Musk called the center the “worst offender in US government censorship [and] media manipulation” and a “threat to our democracy.” 

The culling of the office leaves the State Department without a way to actively counter the increasingly sophisticated disinformation campaigns from foreign governments like those of Russia, Iran, and China.

Shortly after publication, employees at R/FIMI received an email, inviting them to an 11:15AM meeting with Beattie, where employees were told that the office and their jobs have been eliminated. 

Have more information on this story or a tip for something else that we should report? Using a non-work device, reach the reporter on Signal at eileenguo.15 or tips@technologyreview.com.

Then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed our reporting in a blog post in The Federalist, which had sued GEC last year alleging that it had infringed on its freedom of speech. “It is my pleasure to announce the State Department is taking a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” he wrote. And he told Mike Benz, a former first-term Trump official who also reportedly has alt right views, during a YouTube interview, “We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department.”  

Censorship claims

For years, conservative voices both in and out of government have accused Big Tech of censoring conservative views—and they often charged GEC with enabling such censorship. 

GEC had its roots as the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), created by an Obama-era executive order, but shifted its mission to fight propaganda and disinformation from foreign governments and terrorist organizations in 2016, becoming the Global Engagement Center. It was always explicitly focused on the international information space, but some of the organizations that it funded also did work in the United States. It shut down last December after a measure to reauthorize its $61 million budget was blocked by Republicans in Congress, who accused it of helping Big Tech censor American conservative voices. 

R/FIMI had a similar goal to fight foreign disinformation, but it was smaller: the newly created office had a $51.9 million budget, and a small staff that, by mid-April, was down to just 40 employees, from 125 at GEC. In a Wednesday morning meeting, those employees were told that they would  be put on administrative leave and terminated within 30 days. 

With the change in administrations, R/FIMI had never really gotten off the ground. Beattie, a controversial pick for undersecretary—he was fired as a speechwriter during the first Trump administration for attending a white nationalism conference, has suggested that the FBI organized the January 6 attack on Congress, and has said that it’s not worth defending Taiwan from China—had instructed the few remaining staff to be “pencils down,” one State Department official told me, meaning to pause in their work. 

The administration’s executive order on “countering censorship and restoring freedom of speech” reads like a summary of conservative accusations against GEC:

“Under the guise of combatting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.  Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”

In 2023, The Daily Wire, founded by conservative media personality Ben Shapiro, joined The Federalist in suing GEC for allegedly infringing on the company’s first amendment rights by funding two non-profit organizations, the London-based Global Disinformation Index and New York-based NewsGuard, that had labeled The Daily Wire as “unreliable,” “risky,” and/or (per GDI), susceptible to foreign disinformation. Those projects were not funded by GEC. The lawsuit alleged that this amounted to censorship by “starving them of advertising revenue and reducing the circulation of their reporting and speech,” the lawsuit continued. 

In 2022, the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana named GEC among the federal agencies that, they alleged, were pressuring social networks to censor conservative views. Though the case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which found no First Amendment violations, a lower court had already removed GEC’s name from the list of defendants, ruling there was “no evidence” that GEC’s communications with the social media platforms had gone beyond “educating the platforms on ‘tools and techniques used by foreign actors.’”

The stakes

The GEC—and now R/FIMI—was targeted as part of a wider campaign to shut down groups accused of being “weaponized” against conservatives. 

Conservative critics railing against what they have alternatively called a disinformation- or censorship- industrial complex have also taken aim at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Stanford Internet Observatory, a prominent research group that conducted widely cited research on the flows of disinformation during elections. 

CISA’s former director, Chris Krebs, was personally targeted in an April 9 White House memo, while in response to the criticism and millions of dollars in legal fees, Stanford University shuttered the Stanford Internet Observatory ahead of the 2024 presidential elections.  

But this targeting comes at a time when foreign disinformation campaigns—especially by Russia, China, and Iran—have become increasingly sophisticated. 

According to one estimate, Russia spends $1.5 billion per year on foreign influence campaigns. In 2022, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, that country’s primary foreign propaganda arm, had a $1.26 billion budget. And a 2015 estimate suggests that China spent up to $10 billion per year on media targeting non-Chinese foreigners—a figure that has almost certainly grown.

In September 2024, the Justice Department indicted two employees of RT, a Russian state-owned propaganda agency, in a $10 million scheme to create propaganda aimed at influencing US audiences through a media company that has since been identified as the conservative Tenet Media. 

The GEC was one effort to counter such campaigns. Some of its recent projects have included developing AI models to detect memes and deepfakes and exposing Russian propaganda efforts to influence Latin American public opinion against the war in Ukraine. 

By law, the Office of Public Diplomacy has to provide Congress with 15-day advance notice of any intent to reassign any funding allocated by Congress over $1 million. Congress then has time to respond, ask questions, and challenge the decisions—though to judge from its record with other unilateral executive-branch decisions to gut government agencies, it is unlikely to do so. 

We have reached out to the State Department for comment. 

This story was updated at 11:55am to note that R/FIMI employees have confirmed that the office closed.
This story was updated at 12:37am to include confirmation about R/FIMI’s shutdown from Marco Rubio.
This story was updated at 6:10pm to add an identifier for Mike Benz.

How the Pentagon is adapting to China’s technological rise

It’s been just over two months since Kathleen Hicks stepped down as US deputy secretary of defense. As the highest-ranking woman in Pentagon history, Hicks shaped US military posture through an era defined by renewed competition between powerful countries and a scramble to modernize defense technology.  

She’s currently taking a break before jumping into her (still unannounced) next act. “It’s been refreshing,” she says—but disconnecting isn’t easy. She continues to monitor defense developments closely and expresses concern over potential setbacks: “New administrations have new priorities, and that’s completely expected, but I do worry about just stalling out on progress that we’ve built over a number of administrations.”

Over the past three decades, Hicks has watched the Pentagon transform—politically, strategically, and technologically. She entered government in the 1990s at the tail end of the Cold War, when optimism and a belief in global cooperation still dominated US foreign policy. But that optimism dimmed. After 9/11, the focus shifted to counterterrorism and nonstate actors. Then came Russia’s resurgence and China’s growing assertiveness. Hicks took two previous breaks from government work—the first to complete a PhD at MIT and joining the think thank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which she later rejoined to lead its International Security Program after her second tour. “By the time I returned in 2021,” she says, “there was one actor—the PRC (People’s Republic of China)—that had the capability and the will to really contest the international system as it’s set up.”

In this conversation with MIT Technology Review, Hicks reflects on how the Pentagon is adapting—or failing to adapt—to a new era of geopolitical competition. She discusses China’s technological rise, the future of AI in warfare, and her signature initiative, Replicator, a Pentagon initiative to rapidly field thousands of low-cost autonomous systems such as drones.

You’ve described China as a “talented fast follower.” Do you still believe that, especially given recent developments in AI and other technologies?

Yes, I do. China is the biggest pacing challenge we face, which means it sets the pace for most capability areas for what we need to be able to defeat to deter them. For example, surface maritime capability, missile capability, stealth fighter capability. They set their minds to achieving a certain capability, they tend to get there, and they tend to get there even faster.

That said, they have a substantial amount of corruption, and they haven’t been engaged in a real conflict or combat operation in the way that Western militaries have trained for or been involved in, and that is a huge X factor in how effective they would be.

China has made major technological strides, and the old narrative of its being a follower is breaking down—not just in commercial tech, but more broadly. Do you think the US still holds a strategic advantage?

I would never want to underestimate their ability—or any nation’s ability—to innovate organically when they put their minds to it. But I still think it’s a helpful comparison to look at the US model. Because we’re a system of free minds, free people, and free markets, we have the potential to generate much more innovation culturally and organically than a statist model does. That’s our advantage—if we can realize it.

China is ahead in manufacturing, especially when it comes to drones and other unmanned systems. How big a problem is that for US defense, and can the US catch up?

I do think it’s a massive problem. When we were conceiving Replicator, one of the big concerns was that DJI had just jumped way out ahead on the manufacturing side, and the US had been left behind. A lot of manufacturers here believe they can catch up if given the right contracts—and I agree with that.

But the harder challenge isn’t just making the drones—it’s integrating them into our broader systems. That’s where the U.S. often struggles. It’s not a complicated manufacturing problem. It’s a systems integration problem: how you take something and make it usable, scalable, and connected across a joint force. Replicator was designed to push through that—to drive not just production, but integration and deployment at speed.

We also spent time identifying broader supply-chain vulnerabilities. Microelectronics was a big one. Critical minerals. Batteries. People sometimes think batteries are just about electrification, but they’re fundamental across our systems—even on ships in the Navy.

When it comes to drones specifically, I actually think it’s a solvable problem. The issue isn’t complexity. It’s just about getting enough mass of contracts to scale up manufacturing. If we do that, I believe the US can absolutely compete.

The Replicator drone program was one of your key initiatives. It promised a very fast timeline—especially compared with the typical defense acquisition cycle. Was that achievable? How is that progressing?

When I left in January, we had still lined up for proving out this summer, and I still believe we should see some completion this year. I hope Congress will stay very engaged in trying to ensure that the capability, in fact, comes to fruition. Even just this week with Secretary [Pete] Hegseth out in the Indo-Pacific, he made some passing reference to the [US Indo-Pacific Command] commander, Admiral [Samuel] Paparo, having the flexibility to create the capability needed, and that gives me a lot of confidence of consistency.

Can you talk about how Replicator fits into broader efforts to speed up defense innovation? What’s actually changing inside the system?

Traditionally, defense acquisition is slow and serial—one step after another, which works for massive, long-term systems like submarines. But for things like drones, that just doesn’t cut it. With Replicator, we aimed to shift to a parallel model: integrating hardware, software, policy, and testing all at once. That’s how you get speed—by breaking down silos and running things simultaneously.

It’s not about “Move fast and break things.” You still have to test and evaluate responsibly. But this approach shows we can move faster without sacrificing accountability—and that’s a big cultural shift.

 How important is AI to the future of national defense?

It’s central. The future of warfare will be about speed and precision—decision advantage. AI helps enable that. It’s about integrating capabilities to create faster, more accurate decision-making: for achieving military objectives, for reducing civilian casualties, and for being able to deter effectively. But we’ve also emphasized responsible AI. If it’s not safe, it’s not going to be effective. That’s been a key focus across administrations.

What about generative AI specifically? Does it have real strategic significance yet, or is it still in the experimental phase?

It does have significance, especially for decision-making and efficiency. We had an effort called Project Lima where we looked at use cases for generative AI—where it might be most useful, and what the rules for responsible use should look like. Some of the biggest use may come first in the back office—human resources, auditing, logistics. But the ability to use generative AI to create a network of capability around unmanned systems or information exchange, either in Replicator or JADC2? That’s where it becomes a real advantage. But those back-office areas are where I would anticipate to see big gains first.

[Editor’s note: JADC2 is Joint All-Domain Command and Control, a DOD initiative to connect sensors from all branches of the armed forces into a unified network powered by artificial intelligence.]

In recent years, we’ve seen more tech industry figures stepping into national defense conversations—sometimes pushing strong political views or advocating for deregulation. How do you see Silicon Valley’s growing influence on US defense strategy?

There’s a long history of innovation in this country coming from outside the government—people who look at big national problems and want to help solve them. That kind of engagement is good, especially when their technical expertise lines up with real national security needs.

But that’s not just one stakeholder group. A healthy democracy includes others, too—workers, environmental voices, allies. We need to reconcile all of that through a functioning democratic process. That’s the only way this works.

How do you view the involvement of prominent tech entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, in shaping national defense policies?

I believe it’s not healthy for any democracy when a single individual wields more power than their technical expertise or official role justifies. We need strong institutions, not just strong personalities.

The US has long attracted top STEM talent from around the world, including many researchers from China. But in recent years, immigration hurdles and heightened scrutiny have made it harder for foreign-born scientists to stay. Do you see this as a threat to US innovation?

I think you have to be confident that you have a secure research community to do secure work. But much of the work that underpins national defense that’s STEM-related research doesn’t need to be tightly secured in that way, and it really is dependent on a diverse ecosystem of talent. Cutting off talent pipelines is like eating our seed corn. Programs like H-1B visas are really important.

And it’s not just about international talent—we need to make sure people from underrepresented communities here in the US see national security as a space where they can contribute. If they don’t feel valued or trusted, they’re less likely to come in and stay.

What do you see as the biggest challenge the Department of Defense faces today?

I do think the  trust—or the lack of it—is a big challenge. Whether it’s trust in government broadly or specific concerns like military spending, audits, or politicization of the uniformed military, that issue manifests in everything DOD is trying to get done. It affects our ability to work with Congress, with allies, with industry, and with the American people. If people don’t believe you’re working in their interest, it’s hard to get anything done.