Nicholas Brown

Cofounder at @techstatecraft Prev: Senior Policy Advisor @CommerceGov, @RANDCorporation, @Google

[Nicholas Brown @nchlsbrwn]

Today, I’m co-founding the Center for Technology and Statecraft (CTS), a new non-partisan policy research initiative in DC. 

AI’s capabilities and impacts continue to grow. Our mission is to produce research that helps policymakers navigate these impacts, with a focus on:

    1    How policy can shape virtual and physical automation over the next decade

    2    How the U.S. can manage national competition with China while ensuring stability

We aspire to produce research that is empirically grounded in the AI value chain, from chipmaking tools to tokens, while also presenting a high-level strategic worldview. For more on our research agenda, see https://t.co/iTLCynVXSb.

I’m excited to work with an exceptional team in this effort: @amelia__michael, @KonstantinPilz, @mary_clare_m, @KhanSaifM. Onwards!

[Saif M. Khan @KhanSaifM]

Today I’m launching the Center for Technology & Statecraft (CTS), an initiative inspired by the lessons I learned first as a policy researcher and later in the White House.

I'm an optimist about technology. Institutions adapt to disruptions — whether the industrial revolution, computing, the internet — through competition, self-correction, and iteration, and we mostly figure it out in the long run.

But we've never had to adapt to a technology that is both this transformative and developing this fast. AI capabilities continue to scale rapidly with no sign of slowing, and it's a full-time job just to keep up with model releases. I worry policy will stay reactive right up until we face immense disruptions — including basic challenges to human agency and relevance in a world of powerful AI.

Even still, I believe policy can steer this transition, but only with foresight and the right information.

CTS aims to provide just that. Our two initial policy focus areas:

1) How policy can shape virtual and physical automation over the next decade as we reimagine the social contract in light of advanced AI.

2) How to manage long-term strategic US-China AI competition while ensuring stability.

These focus areas will build on a deep model of the AI value chain, from chipmaking tools, to the compute, algorithms, and data that make AI, to the tokens, agents and robots that affect the world.

For more on our worldview and research philosophy, read https://t.co/yD25oZWBb4.

I’ve seen firsthand how technical, forward-looking research can inform policy if it’s ready for the policy window. After a decade as an IP and tech lawyer, I joined a think tank, CSET, in 2019 to study AI chips, their supply chains, and AI policy. This was three years before ChatGPT, so these weren't seen as urgent topics at the time.

Soon after, AI quickly became an increasingly salient policy issue. From 2021–2025 I served in the White House NSC and the Commerce Department and put new policy ideas into practice (alongside many brilliant colleagues).

One goal of CTS is to scale this kind of experience to a whole team: @KonstantinPilz @nchlsbrwn @amelia__michael @mary_clare_m already bring a wealth of technical and policy expertise and we’ll continue to grow to tackle an ambitious research agenda.

We're thrilled to be supported by and affiliated with @IFP, and grateful to the advisors and colleagues who helped get CTS off the ground, including @ohlennart, @fiiiiiist, @AlecStapp, and @calebwatney.

Our first major reports will launch soon. You can follow us at @techstatecraft.