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In the news section, our experts take center stage in shaping discussions on technology and policy. Discover articles featuring insights from our experts or citing our research. CSET’s insights and research are pivotal in shaping key conversations within the evolving landscape of emerging technology and policy.

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1 big thing: AI could soon improve on its own

Axios
| January 27, 2026

A CSET workshop report was highlighted in an segment published by Axios in its Axios+ newsletter. The segment explores the growing push toward automating AI research and development, examining how far AI systems might go in designing, improving, and training other AI models and what that could mean for innovation, safety, and governance.

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The article references a recent CSET report by Zachary Arnold and Ashwin Acharya. “The researchers have high confidence that their analysis at least confirms that China’s spending is nowhere near existing claims.”

"Reports of China’s expenditure on AI may be overblown,” finds a recent CSET report by Zachary Arnold and Ashwin Acharya. China "has probably not been dramatically outspending the US government on AI R&D since it unveiled the national plan."

The article references research by Zachary Arnold and Ashwin Acharya on Chinese public AI R&D spending, which concluded that “Chinese spending in 2018 was on the same order of magnitude as U.S. planned spending for FY 2020.”

Immigration and the Future of U.S. AI

Morning Consult
| November 26, 2019

The Forbes AI 50 list “shows that foreign talent is critical to AI innovation—and that for now, the United States can still attract talent from around the world,” write CSET’s Remco Zwetsloot, Tina Huang and Zachary Arnold.

“China clearly wants to lead the world when it comes to AI,” says CSET’s Helen Toner. “It’s hard to imagine China being seen as a world leader if the open-source frameworks are so US-dominated.”

Accelerating threats to cybersecurity, the impact of automation on cyber defense, and the degree to which cyber operations will become faster and more powerful are among the subjects that CSET will now start to explore thanks to a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Green card limits haven’t budged in decades, while new policies make it harder, costlier, and more uncertain for the world’s talent to come to the United States.

As part of the $500,000 agreement, SPL will assist CSET in investigating the legal, policy and security impacts of emerging technology, supporting academic work in security and technology studies and delivering nonpartisan analysis to the law and policy community. Judge Baker is the grant’s primary investigator.

The article referenced CSET recommendations on semiconductor manufacturing equipment export controls.

Jason Matheny said the intelligence community has spent a lot of time looking at ways to use an adversary’s AI tools against them. “You can get a tank that is covered with a sort of form of digital camouflage ... that causes a machine learning classifier to think that it’s a school bus."