China’s early success in global AI competition, bolstered by continued massive state investment and other advantages, could help it extend its dominance in international markets for manufactured goods to the software realm.
Although progress in biological sciences and technologies will offer more opportunities to improve human well-being in the coming decades, this progress may also lower barriers that are blocking bad actors from engineering pathogens to cause destruction. In severe cases, the harms of future biological attacks may approach the magnitudes of the worst plagues of history—from the devastation wrought by the Black Death to the epidemics that decimated Mesoamerican societies after initial European contact.
The United States should not kid itself. It will not recover its manufacturing position from China in any foreseeable future.
According to World Bank data, in 2024 the US’s GDP of US$29.2 trillion was 60 percent larger than China’s US$18.7 trillion. But China’s manufacturing sector, worth US$4.7 trillion and representing 25 percent of the country’s GDP, was 60 percent larger than the US’s, worth US$2.9 trillion and representing 10 percent of GDP. Simply put, the economic calculus is daunting.
Last week, AI company Anthropic reported with ‘high confidence’ that a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group had weaponized Anthropic’s own AI tools to run a largely automated cyberattack on several technology firms and government agencies. According to the company, the September operation is the first publicly known case of an AI system conducting target reconnaissance with only minimal human direction.
AI models are out on an energy-intensive training session with no end in sight. The training takes place on the servers in the world’s data centers, which currently number just over 10,000. Especially the large language models and generative AI that creates images and videos consume huge amounts of electricity.
They are so voracious that the International Energy Agency (IEA) has estimated that the power they needed for computing increased a billion-fold from 2022 to 2024.
As President Trump traveled to the Indo-Pacific in late October for his first summit with new Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae and the APEC Summit hosted by President Lee Jae-myung in South Korea, the U.S.
This is the edited text of a speech to the Public Sector Networks’ Government Cyber Security Showcase Federal on 12 November 2025.
It’s an honor to speak with you at a time when the foundations of our digital world are being stress-tested like never before.
The same connectivity that powers our prosperity, and which has driven innovation and growth, has also created shared vulnerabilities and structural fragilities.
We are increasingly seeing how a single weak link, often in a third-party provider, can cascade across industries, economies and borders.
Security researchers have developed the first functional defense mechanism capable of protecting against “cryptanalytic” attacks used to “steal” the model parameters that define how an AI system works.
Strategic competition over the world’s next generation of foundational technologies is underway, and U.S. advantages in artificial intelligence, quantum, and biotechnology are increasingly contested. The United States must address vulnerabilities and mobilize the investment needed to prevail.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) convenes bipartisan Task Forces to assess issues of current and critical importance to U.S. foreign policy.
Governments across the Indo-Pacific are facing a critical question: who can be trusted to build and manage our most sensitive systems? Vendor choices, for everything from cloud infrastructure to identity platforms, are no longer just commercial; they are strategic. As cyber threats rise, supply chains fragment and coercive pressure grows, countries need better ways to assess technology providers and manage risk.
The annual certification of the nuclear weapons stockpile is Sandia’s most important responsibility, according to Labs Director Laura McGill. Sandia’s stockpile teams work throughout the year, conducting tests and analyses to verify that the weapons are safe, secure, reliable and effective.
“Our modernization programs are still critically important and get a lot of attention, but the deployed stockpile serves as the foundation for the U.S. national defense strategy,” Laura said, shortly after signing the annual stockpile assessment letter in her office Sept. 22.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the life sciences, accelerating breakthroughs in research, drug discovery and biotechnology. However, some of the AI tools that drive innovation can also be misused, posing significant dual-use risks.Ensuring that these technologies are developed and deployed responsibly requires a clear, structured understanding of the capabilities of individual AI-enabled biological tools and their potential misuse applications.
In recent months, Russia has frequently flown drones into NATO territory, where NATO countries typically try to shoot them down. By contrast, when three Russian fighter jets made an incursion into Estonian airspace in September, they were intercepted and no attempt was made to shoot them down — although the incident did make headlines and led to a Russian diplomat being expelled from Estonia.
Accusations of state-sponsored cyber espionage have come to define the cyber relations between the US and China over the years. The widespread adoption of Microsoft products has also made them prime targets for state-sponsored cyber espionage. High-profile incidents, such as the SolarWinds breach and attacks on Microsoft 365, have demonstrated how nation-state actors exploit vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s ecosystem to conduct sophisticated espionage operations.
“We couldn’t paint the robot blue like a traditional Smurf. It had to be painted with three reflective coats of yellow paint so that it’s clearly visible,” says Jan Sramota.
Sramota is a researcher at SINTEF and part of the team behind the rescue robot. The robot’s job is to move in after earthquakes, landslides, floods and other natural disasters. The rescue teams can unleash the yellow Smurfs when the situation becomes too unsafe for the human rescuers or there are too many places to handle at once.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, dressed in a military uniform, announced on Oct. 26, 2025, that Russia had successfully tested a nuclear-powered missile. If true, such a weapon could provide Russia with a unique military capability that also has broader political implications.
The Dutch government’s decision on 30 September to impose a last-resort restraint order on China-owned Netherlands-based chipmaker Nexperia is more than a trade dispute. It’s the consequence of a belated realization that technology competition with China is real. Economic security in open and liberal democracies, including Australia, demands foresight, not last-minute intervention.
From composition to performance, two recent studies show how additively manufactured steels measure up to their conventionally produced counterparts.
Stainless steel has long been a workhorse material for the nuclear industry. It fortifies walls and forms crucial components throughout nuclear reactors, where it withstands decades of extreme heat, pressure and irradiation.
Covering half of North America, the U.S. electric grid functions somewhat like a vast, complex organism. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new simulation platform for understanding and predicting the behavior of this modern grid. Using a combination of mathematical tools, automation and analysis, the approach provides highly accurate results with less computing time at a lower cost, increasing the reliability of electricity.
In an approach reminiscent of the classic board game Battleship, Stanford researchers have discovered a way to characterize the microscopic structure of everyday materials such as sand and concrete with high precision.
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