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Artificial Intelligence

A warning about ‘model welfare’

Download a highlighted marked-up version of the Claude ConstitutionDownload the taxonomy as a PDFThis essay was originally published here and is [...] More

The Latest

Not the Destroyer of Worlds: Why Compute is Humanity’s Most Vital Defense

Eighty years ago, the architects of our first dual-use revolution whispered that they had “become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Today, a new power [...] More

When Policy and War Collapse Into One: Fighting in the Sixth Domain

We may soon face conflict with nation-states in a new model of warfare—one not defined by geography, but instead defined by AIs competing directly [...] More

The Compute We Cannot Power

On September 9, Oracle reported a cloud backlog of $664 billion — up $209 billion from a year earlier, an order book the size of a mid-cap national [...] More

Pakistan’s New Military Order Is a Warning for Washington

In Washington, Field Marshal Asim Munir increasingly looks like the man who can make Pakistan useful to the United States. Pakistan has just written [...] More

State Secrets Podcast

The Future of Intelligence in the Age of AI | VADM Trey Whitworth

Artificial intelligence, drones and commercial satellites are transforming the way intelligence is collected, analyzed and used — but as technology [...] More

The AI We Cannot Deploy — And What Is at Stake

Last week, I argued in these pages that the United States is buying an army it cannot command — writing procurement checks at a scale its adversaries [...] More

The New Economics of Warfare: David vs Goliath

The most important lesson emerging from the Iran conflict may not actually be about Iran. It is about the changing economics of warfare and what [...] More

Foreign Spies Don’t Need to Hack You Anymore

Andy Burnham was a few weeks into the job as the new Prime Minister of the UK when he found himself exchanging messages with someone claiming to be [...] More

Beyond Military Interoperability: The Coalition Challenge of Limited War

In our last two articles for The Cipher Brief, Sami Omari and I explained why modern limited wars are so challenging for democracies.We argued that [...] More

The Return of the Essential Art: Electronic Warfare and the Lessons of the Russia-Ukraine War

A Post-Cold War Assumption That No Longer HoldsFor three decades, the Alliance operated under a dangerous assumption: that the electromagnetic [...] More

Iranians Commemorate The Death Of Imam Reza

Inside Iran’s New Wartime Leadership

Tehran’s new power brokersA wave of assassinations rebuilt Iran’s leadership from the top down, leaving a severely wounded supreme leader and a [...] More

It’s Time For The President To Level With The American People on Iran

The U.S. administration’s strategic expectations are increasingly colliding with a set of hard realities. While Iran has taken a considerable [...] More