The event was moderated by FSI director Colin Kahl, and featured FSI scholars with a cross-section of expertise: Drew Endy, FSI senior fellow (by courtesy) and associate professor in bioengineering at Stanford’s School of Engineering; Andrew Grotto, a research scholar at FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and director of the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance (GTG); Jeff Hancock, senior fellow and director of FSI’s Tech Impact and Policy Center; and Jennifer Pan, FSI senior fellow and the Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor of Chinese Studies.

The scholars discussed four key areas to consider when it comes to the benefits, risks, and political implications of emerging technologies.

The Resurgence of Biotechnology

Humans have a long history with biotechnology, from fermentation to stem cell research. Now, after the past few decades in which industries were reshaped by digital technology, we’re seeing a potential biotech resurgence, explained Drew Endy, in which synthetic DNA chemistry allows scientists to build new DNA without using pre-existing molecules.

“I’m hopelessly biased,” said Endy. “But it's impossible for me to overstate the significance of being able to manufacture DNA from scratch.”

If the technology continues on its current trajectory, it could allow for a more accessible, affordable way to make useful items like computer chips or better enzymes, but it also carries the risk of offering a bad actor an easier path toward the creation of harmful toxins or pathogens.

Reflecting on the contrast between biotechnology and artificial intelligence, Colin Kahl observed, “We're reaching this moment where we're increasingly turning living organisms into zeros and ones, and we're turning zeros and ones into living organisms.”

Screens and Mental Health

Amid concerns about the amount of time children and teens are spending on screens and its impact on mental health, Australia recently passed the Social Media Minimum Age Act, which forbids social media companies to allow those under 16 from accessing their platforms.

According to Jeff Hancock, whose Tech Impact and Policy Center has been working alongside the Australian government to assess the ban’s effect, approximately 35% of young Australians have stopped using social media. But they’re not suddenly playing cricket with their friends. Many are simply swapping it out for ChatGPT or some other screen-based platform.

In California, legislation on a social media ban is being considered, which could influence other states. Issues involving social media and AI as they relate to children is one of today’s rare bipartisan issues.  

Of course, large language models can be persuasive and dangerous for adults, too. Hancock believes we should be “very concerned” about how AI will shape our perceptions of life, especially given the tendency of users to spend more time on social media when the algorithm feeds them negative content, and the economic incentives for platforms to keep users engaged.

The U.S.-China Decathalon

When it comes to the so-called AI “race” between the United States and China, Andrew Grotto prefers to compare it to a decathlon, since “AI competition is a multi-dimensional contest,” he explained. At the moment, both countries are vying to be the first to unlock artificial general intelligence (AGI), namely AI that matches or exceeds human intellectual capabilities.

When it comes to the adoption of America’s AI stack, “China is not only a formidable competitor on price, but increasingly quality,” Grotto stated. The U.S. is banking on other countries to view its values as an advantage. However, he said, we’re at a divisive moment in American foreign policy where it’s not a given that other countries will be keen to align with the U.S..

There are key differences between the U.S. and China in how they approach AI. While U.S. companies with massive market caps such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are focused mostly on serving wealthy countries with large populations, China is more willing to strategically invest in regions that don’t meet such criteria, like the Global South. It remains to be seen how the U.S. will address this gap, and how much it will attempt to reign in private businesses.

China does not share U.S. concerns on privacy and security risks. According to Jennifer Pan, the Chinese view on generative AI is “overwhelmingly positive. It's about the possibilities of this new technology in improving people's lives and the economy,” she said. Pan notes that “the goal of the Chinese Communist Party is to survive in power,” and so their regulations revolve mostly around political control.

Pan does note that, with the spread of digital technologies, propaganda has become more challenging for the Chinese Communist Party, as they now must compete with independent voices such as influencers for attention.  

The Bioweapons Risk

At the UN General Assembly in 2025, President Donald Trump called upon all nations to “end the development of bioweapons once and for all.”

Endy adds that nation states should also agree to a duty to notify each other in the event of an outbreak that could contribute to a pandemic. The risk of AI contributing to biological risk should not be taken lightly. Computational methods could potentially be used by bad actors to design novel toxins and pathogens that are undetectable and for which we don't have medical countermeasures or vaccines.

“People who wanted to cause harm in the past would see how difficult it is to utilize biology and be put off and pick up an automatic weapon instead,” Endy said. “But now if something like Claude makes it easier for them to use biotechnology, they could misuse biology.”

But Endy’s bigger concern is nation state bioweapons. The rhetoric around AI could be destabilizing, leading to one country deciding that if another country has a bioweapons program, they should follow suit.

“This is the historical pattern that played out 100 years ago that led to the militarization of biology leading into World War II,” Endy noted. “Nothing good came of that.”

Ideally, suggested Kahl, biology and AI would be used together for positive purposes, to create new vaccines and identify patient zeros earlier. Such positive uses of technology could help uplift humanity and propel us toward a brighter future.

What to Expect Next

“The World Changing Technology in 2026” panel discussion was the second event in FSI’s new quarterly series examining the state of the world. (Read a summary of the first event here.) The next discussion will take place in November 2026 and will examine the national and geopolitical ramifications of the U.S. mid-term elections. To join FSI at upcoming events on the latest developments in international affairs, register for invitations on the institute’s website.

At the core of GKC is a series of classes and initiatives that combine STEM skills with policy know-how in a way that’s meant to encourage students to leverage entrepreneurship and innovation in order to develop rapid, scalable solutions to national security issues. Students from both undergraduate and graduate level programs, regardless of their prior experience in national defense, are encouraged to participate.

“We’re really trying to empower students to pursue national security-relevant work while they’re here at Stanford,” explains Joe Felter, GKC’s director, co-founder, and senior research scholar at CISAC. FSI and CISAC have deep roots in this type of innovative, interdisciplinary approach to policy solutions GKC is working to implement. Michael McFaul, FSI’s director, is a founding faculty member and principal investigator for GKC, and David Hoyt, the assistant director of GKC, is an alumnus of the CISAC honors program.

Results from GKC’s classes have been very encouraging so far. Working through "Hacking for Defense," a GKC-affiliated class taught out of the MS&E department, Jeff Jang, a new Defense Innovation Scholar and MBA student, showed how implementing a rapid interview process and focusing on problem and customer discovery has allowed his team to create enterprise software for United States Air Force (USAF) fleet management that has vastly improved efficiency, reduced errors and enabled better planning capabilities into the workflow. Their product has been given numerous grants and awards, and the team has received signed letters of interest from 29 different USAF bases across the world.

In another GKC class, "Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition,” Abeer Dahiya and Youngjun Kwak, along with Mikk Raud, Dave Sprague and Miku Yamada — three students from FSI’s Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program (MIP) — have been tackling the challenges involved in developing a domestic U.S. semiconductor strategy. They were among the student teams asked to present the results of their work to Dep. Sec. Hicks during her visit.

“Attending this class has been one of the highlights of my time at Stanford,” says Mikk Raud (MIP ‘22). “It’s been a great example of how important it is to run interdisciplinary courses and bring people from different fields together.”

He continues, “As a policy student, it was very insightful for me to learn from my peers from different programs, as well as make numerous visits to the engineering quad to speak to technical professors whom I otherwise would have never met. After meeting with and presenting to Deputy Secretary Hicks and hearing about the work other students are doing, it really hit home to me that the government does listen to students, and it really is possible that a small Stanford group project can eventually lead into significant changes and improvements of the highest levels of policy making.”

This kind of renewed interest in national security and defense tech among students is precisely what the Gordian Knot Center is hoping to foster. Building an interconnected innovation workforce that can “think deeply, [and] act quickly,” GKC’s motto, is a driving priority for the center and its supporters.

The Department of Defense recognizes the value of this approach. In her remarks, Dep. Sec. Kathleen Hicks acknowledged that reshaping the culture and methodologies by which the DoD runs is as imperative as it is difficult.

“My life is a Gordian knot, day in and day out at the Defense Department,” she quipped. Speaking seriously, she reminded the audience of the tremendous driving power DoD has had in creating future-looking national security defenses.  “Because of its sophistication, diversity, and capacity to innovate, the U.S. Defense Industrial Base and vibrant innovation ecosystem remains the envy of the world,” Hicks emphasized. “Every day, people like you are designing, building, and producing the critical materials and technologies that ensure our armed forces have what they need.”

But she also recognized that the challenges facing the DoD are real and complex. “There are many barriers in front of the Department of Defense in terms of what it takes to operate in government and to make the kinds of shifts we need in order to have the agility to take advantage of opportunities and partner effectively.” She reiterated that one of her key priorities is to accelerate innovation adoption across DoD, including organizational structure, processes, culture, and people.

Partnerships with groups like the Gordian Knot Center are a key component to breaking down the barriers to innovation facing our national institutions and rebuilding them into new, more adaptable bridges forward. While the challenges facing the Department of Defense remain significant, the work of the students in GKC’s classes so far proves that progress is not only possible, but can be made quickly as well.

This interview with CISAC Affiliate Christopher Painter was originally produced by Jen Kirby. The complete article is available at Vox.

The frequency, scope and scale of ransomware attacks against public and private systems is accelerating. In the latest incident, the ransomware group REvil has demanded $70 million to unlock the systems of the software company Kaseya, an attack that affects not only Kaseya, but simultaneously exploits all of the company’s clients.

The REvil, JBS meatpacking and Colonial Pipeline attacks have abruptly raised the profile of ransomware from a malicious strand of criminality to a national security priority. These are issues that Christopher Painter, an affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), has worked on at length during his tenures as a senior official at the Department of Justice, the FBI, the National Security Council and as the world's first top cyber diplomat at the State Department.

Jen Kirby, a reporter for Vox, interviewed Painter to discuss how cybercrimes are evolving and what governments should do to keep ransomware attacks from escalating geopolitical tensions online and off.

Jen Kirby:
I think a good place to start would be: What are “ransomware attacks”?

Christopher Painter:
It is largely criminal groups who are getting into computers through any number of potential vulnerabilities, and then they essentially lock the systems — they encrypt the data in a way that makes it impossible for you to see your files. And they demand ransom, they demand payment. In exchange for that payment, they will give you — or they claim, they don’t always do it — they claim they’ll give you the decryption keys, or the codes, that allow you to unlock your own files and have access to them again.

That is what traditionally we say is “ransomware.” That’s been going on for some time, but it’s gotten much more acute recently.

There is another half of that, which is that groups don’t just hold your files for ransom, they either leak or threaten to leak or expose your files and your information — your secrets and your emails, whatever you have — publicly, either in an attempt to embarrass you or to extort more money out of you, because you don’t want those things to happen. So it’s split now into two tracks, but they’re a combined method of getting money.

Jen Kirby:
We’ve recently had some high-profile ransomware attacks, including this recent REvil incident. Is it that we’re seeing a lot more of them, or they’re just bigger and bolder? How do you assess that ransomware attacks are becoming more acute?

Christopher Painter:
We’ve seen this going on for some time. I was one of the co-chairs of this Ransomware Task Force that issued a report recently. One of the reasons we did this report was we’re trying to call greater attention to this issue. Although governments and law enforcement were taking it seriously, it wasn’t being given the kind of national-level priority it deserved.

It was being treated as more of an ordinary cybercrime issue. Most governments’ attention is focused on big nation-state activity — like the SolarWinds hack [where suspected Russian government hackers breached US government departments], which are important, and we need to care about those. But we’re very worried about this, too.

It’s especially become more of an issue during the pandemic, when some of the ransomware actors were going after health care systems and health care providers.That combined with these big infrastructure attacks — the Colonial Pipeline clearly was one of them. Another one was the meat processing plants. Another one was hospital systems in Ireland. You also had the DC Police Department being victimized by ransomware. These things are very high-profile. When you’re lining up for gas because of a ransomware attack, and you can’t get your food because of a ransomware attack, that brings it home as a priority. And then, of course, you have what happened this past weekend. So ransomware has not abated, and it continues to get more serious and hit more organizations.

Does a tracking system making laws more enforceable actually improve society? Ahmed examines how technology firms and the Chinese government build databases and information sharing procedures that monitor the behavior of individuals, corporations, legal institutions, and government representatives, with the end goal of building a society where those individuals and corporations follow the law.

Read the rest at Stanford HAI

In a Lawfare post earlier this year, I questioned the wisdom of referring to cyber operations as psychological operations. These campaigns are the bread and butter of U.S. Cyber Command’s operational activities. My interest in this question stemmed from two recent articles, one on NPR and one in the Washington Post. The former discussed past activities of U.S. Cyber Command and the latter discussed possible future activities. Taken together, both articles used terms such as “information warfare,” “information operations,” “psychological operations” and “influence operations” to describe these activities.

I closed that post with a promise to comment on the doctrinal and conceptual confusions within Defense Department policy regarding all of these concepts. This post makes good on that promise.

Read the rest at Lawfare Blog

From genome editing to “hacking” the microbiome, advances in the life sciences and its associated technological revolution have already altered the biosecurity landscape, and will continue to do so. What does this new landscape look like, and how can policymakers and other stakeholders navigate this space? A new report by Stanford scholars David Relman and Megan Palmer along with George Mason University’s Jesse Kirkpatrick and Greg Koblentz assesses this emerging biosecurity landscape to help answer these questions and illustrates gaps in governance and regulation through the use of scenarios.

The report—the product of two years of workshops, issue briefs, and white papers authored by different participants—involved people from different organizations and backgrounds ranging from life sciences and medicine to social science and ethics. “The project process was just as important as the product,” said Palmer. “It was a truly interdisciplinary effort.”

Genome editing, including CRISPR, is disruptive to the biosecurity landscape, and it serves as an illustration of more general trends in the evolving landscape, the authors write. CRISPR technology does not exist in a vacuum—rather, it is enabled by, represents, and gives rise to a suite of technologies with potential benefits and that require new approaches to adaptive policy making and governance.

Scenarios illustrating governance gaps in in the report include:

• A reckless CRISPR user who develops and markets a probiotic created with genome editing that has serious unanticipated effects for consumers;
• An agricultural biotechnology firm conducting dual use genome editing research that lies outside current oversight, but nonetheless could have negative consequences for human health
• An intentional release of a gene drive organism from a lab, that while having limited physical harm, feeds a state-based misinformation campaign with large economic impacts
• An accidental release of a gene drive organism due to lack of awareness and uncertainty about the risk classifications and protocols for handling new technologies
• A terrorist group using commercial firms that lack strong customer and order screening to use genome editing to weaponize a nonpathogenic bacteria
• A state-sponsored program to develop biological weapons for new strategic uses, including covert assassination, using largely publicly available research
   

In each of these examples, the researchers play out a hypothetical situation exposing a number of security and governance gaps for policymakers and other stakeholders to address.

In the report, the authors conclude that genome editing has tremendous potential benefits and economic impacts. The authors note that the market for genome editing is expected to exceed $3.5 billion by 2019, but a security incident, safety lapse, reckless misadventure, or significant regulatory uncertainty could hurt growth. Increased reliance on the “bio-economy,” they write, means biosecurity is increasingly critical to economic security as well as human health.

Other key takeaways:

Genome editing has the potential to improve the human condition. Genome editing is poised to make major beneficial contributions to basic research, medicine, public health, agriculture, and manufacturing that could reduce suffering, strengthen food security, and protect the environment.

Genome editing is disruptive to the biosecurity landscape. The threat landscape has, and continues to expand to include new means of disrupting or manipulating biological systems and processes in humans, plants, and animals. Genome editing could be used to create new types of biological weapons. Further, technical advances will make misuse easier and more widespread.

CRISPR illuminates broader trends and the challenges of an evolving security landscape. An approach to biosecurity that accounts for these trends, and encompasses risks posed by deliberate, accidental, and reckless misuse, can help address the complex and evolving security landscape.

Technology must be taken seriously.  A thorough, informed, and accessible analysis of any emerging technology is crucial to considering the impact that it may have on the security landscape.

Key stakeholders must be engaged. Stakeholders in the genome editing field encompass a more diverse array of actors than those that have been involved so far in biosecurity discussions. These stakeholders range from international organizations to government agencies to universities, companies, lay communities writ large, and scientists.

Applied research is needed to create and implement innovative and effective policies. Applied research is necessary to continue the process of modifying existing governance measures, and testing and adapting new ones, as new genome editing technologies and applications are developed, new stakeholders emerge, and new pathways for misuse are identified.

Download the executive summary and full report at editingbiosecurity.org.

In a world complicated by terrorism, cyber threats and political instability, the private sector has to prepare for the unexpected. Amy Zegart, CISAC co-director, the Hoover Institution’s Davies Family Senior Fellow, and co-author (along with Condoleezza Rice) of Political Risk: How Businesses And Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity, explains lessons learned in keeping cargo planes moving, hotel guests protected – and possibly coffee customers better served.