Letter from the Executive Director

Dear Friends of CSET,

I have one of the best jobs in the world! I get to lead a vibrant analytic think tank that helps inform critical conversation on emerging technology policy with insight that is hard to find elsewhere. In the 5 years since our founding in 2019, we’ve grown from 2 people to 60+ full time employees, produced 250+ reports, and 100+ data visualizations. We aren’t done innovating. In 2023, CSET made significant strides to increase our responsiveness to decision-makers by experimenting with new ways of communicating our findings with blogs and reports on a page. Plus, we continue to increase our library of 500+ original source translations and released a brand new Chinese tech-news-discovery tool called Scout from the Emerging Technology Observatory. I’m always happy to learn about how our work informs policy and decision-making — please keep sharing!

Personally, I am proudest of the organizational culture we’ve developed that focuses on providing evidence-based, useful research to decision-makers. We follow the data and information to where it leads and work hard to capture perspectives from an increasingly wide variety of lived experiences.

This report focuses on our accomplishments in 2023, but I’d also like to highlight a few more. CSET’s early work on the semiconductor supply chain laid part of the groundwork for what eventually became the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022.

The CyberAI Project’s disinformation work, published in May 2021, provided policymakers with an 18-month head start on the release of ChatGPT and its implications for dis/misinformation.

We’ve contributed new insights on the global gain of function landscape, bridged tech and policy communities’ perspectives on securing AI systems and generative AI, and worked hard to contribute empirical evidence and careful analysis to policy discussion that can drift toward groupthink in areas such as compute and AI governance. CSET’s evidence-based approach busts myths on immigration, provides new frameworks for approaching export controls, outbound investment, and AI harms at a time of rapid AI progress.

In 2024, CSET will continue to do this vital work, while diversifying our funding and research to ensure we will remain DC’s go-to source for non-partisan, hard-to-find insights at the intersection of public policy, emerging technology, and security.

Enjoy!