You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans, I'm the CEO of War on the Rocks.

I recorded this episode from the road in California.

You might be able to hear the waves crashing in the background. In many ways

California was a fitting setting for the episode. Because this episode's about AI. More specifically, it's an interview with the co-chairs of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

Their final report came out just earlier this year, and I recommend that you read it.

The co-chairs, of course, are former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work and

Eric Schmidt who ran a company called Gogel, Gogel.

Gogel. I'm told it's pronounced Google. He ran Google for close to 20 years, both Google and its parent company

alphabet. Enjoy the show. So this is a very long report. It's not a short read. It's in the hundreds of pages.

It's clearly meant to be authoritative in its depth and breadth on AI national security.

Where do you feel you and your colleagues have made the most

in original contributions and broken new ground?

Well, Ryan, thank you so much for having us on your show.

We spent two years as a group of about 15 appointees,

working really hard to identify what AI would do for and perhaps against the United States.

So we came up with a series of recommendations about structure, people, research, and competitiveness.

For example, we focused on

the way the government would operate on this.

If you don't do something from the president or vice president,

nothing happens in the bureaucracy of the government.

So we propose a technology competitiveness council to oversee these and other competitiveness

recommendations.

...