The Cipher Brief

DNI Day Two: Building the Intelligence Community for 2045

A new DNI should refocus ODNI on enterprise leadership, modernize intelligence investment, and close the seams adversaries exploit across the national security landscape.

Author's NoteIn our first paper, DNI Day One: Three Strategic Decisions for National Security Evolution, we identified three challenges confronting [...] More

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Cipher Brief Experts bring context to today’s global events

The AI Bubble and the Growing National Security Problem

The AI Bubble and the Growing National Security Problem

The AI bubble is not a capability bubble. It is an expectation bubble. National security leaders are treating AI as a replacement for analysts, [...] More

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NONE OF WHICH WE TALKED ABOUT: John Bolton, the former national security advisor, pleaded guilty Friday to a federal charge of illegally retaining classified national security information — specifically, by writing it down in a diary and sharing it with his wife and daughter. The case centers on more than a thousand pages of diary-like entries Bolton kept during his tenure as the third national security advisor in President Trump’s first term. Prosecutors say the entries contained information classified as high as Top Secret/SCI, drawn from intelligence briefings, foreign leader conversations, and high-level White House [...] More

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State Secrets

What happens when one of Hollywood's most influential futurists sits down with a former NSA Director?

In this special State Secrets conversation, Ronald D. Moore—the creator behind For All Mankind, Battlestar Galactica, and Star Trek—joins former NSA and U.S. Cyber Command Commander Gen. Timothy Haugh to explore the increasingly blurred line between science fiction and national security reality.

From the new space race and AI-powered disinformation to cyber warfare, Russia, China, and the future of conflict, this wide-ranging discussion reveals how the stories we imagine today may become tomorrow's strategic challenges.

Are we entering a technological revolution as consequential as the space race? And who is best positioned to anticipate what's next—the intelligence community or the storytellers imagining the future?