Letter from the Director
Dear Friends of CSET,
When we founded CSET in 2019, it was Washington’s first think tank focused entirely on security and emerging technology, and it quickly grew to be the largest research organization in the world working on AI policy. At a time when many viewed these areas as niche, we saw an opportunity to invest in issues that we knew would be enormously consequential for the future.
Central to our approach from the beginning has been building an interdisciplinary team with data skills, foreign-language proficiency, national security experience, and deep technical expertise. This has allowed us to be at the cutting edge of emerging tech issues, from our seminal paper on the importance of AI chips, published a year before semiconductor supply chain issues hit the front pages during the pandemic, to our first-of-its-kind look at the future of sophisticated AI agents.
CSET continues to look around corners. In 2025, we published the first in a series of papers drawing on an in-house dataset that revealed new information on how China is modernizing its military. CSET researchers analyzed thousands of procurement documents showing the efforts of the People’s Liberation Army to purchase AI-related goods and services from both its traditional state-owned contractors and newer vendors. Our September 2025 report revealed who showed up in these tender documents. In 2026, we’ve already published the first in a series on what the PLA was seeking to purchase. CSET is using the PLA’s own contracting records to assess what China is going to do before they do it.
In the summer, CSET hosted a closed-door workshop on the automation of AI R&D, a topic that is increasingly central in conversations among AI insiders but is largely absent from policy conversations. Against a backdrop of strong disagreement between experts, we identified areas of unexpected consensus, clarified points of true divergence, and mapped what further data is needed to fully appreciate the implications of AI R&D automation. This foundational work positions CSET to provide technical expertise to policymakers as AI R&D automation efforts grow.
Entering 2026, our most recent new initiative is Project ATLAS. ATLAS addresses the proliferation of scientific research that too often exists only in large, messy datasets. Building on our Map of Science and led by our data team, ATLAS will make scientific data more practically useful by using new LLM-based methods to extract research metadata, organize and describe the global scientific landscape, and identify emerging areas of activity. ATLAS will be a tool for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to find signals of new scientific or technological applications and plan for the future.
These are a few examples of CSET’s work over the past year. In the following pages, you’ll read more about our pioneering research and impact.
On a personal note, it has been an honor and a joy to step into the role of Executive Director over the past six months. We took the opportunity of this leadership transition—with Cara LaPointe also joining as our new Director of Analysis in the fall—to take time for a strategic review of where we are and what we want to do next. I’m excited about the research priorities we’ve identified for the coming year, where we believe focused investment will have outsized impact: doubling down on analyzing the U.S. and Chinese tech ecosystems, continuing our pioneering work on how the U.S. can responsibly adopt AI for national security missions, investing in Project ATLAS to draw insights from data about scientific progress, and expanding our focus on the security and governance implications of progress at the frontier of AI.
Drawing on the experience, expertise, and energy of our dedicated researchers, we will tackle these big questions and work to inform high-stakes decisions from D.C. to San Francisco and beyond.
We can’t do it without your support. Thank you for your help in making CSET’s work possible.
Sincerely,
Helen Toner