Advances in robotics technology are having a transformative effect on how people work, travel, communicate, and fight wars. This data brief provides an overview of global trends in robotics patents between 2005 and 2019, focusing in particular on the state of robotics patenting in Russia, as well as developments in military robotics patents both in Russia and across the globe.

This report examines nearly 350 artificial intelligence-related equipment contracts awarded by the People’s Liberation Army and state-owned defense enterprises in 2020 to assess how the Chinese military is adopting AI. The report identifies China’s key AI defense industry suppliers, highlights gaps in U.S. export control policies, and contextualizes the PLA’s AI investments within China’s broader strategy to compete militarily with the United States.

Created through a joint partnership between CSET and the AI Education Project, the AI Education Catalog aims to raise awareness of the AI-related programs available to students and educators, as well as to help inform AI education and workforce policy.

Militaries around the world have often relied on the largest global defense companies to acquire and integrate cutting-edge technologies. This issue brief examines the investment and mergers and acquisition activities in artificial intelligence of the top 50 global defense companies — a key, if limited, approach to accessing AI innovation in the commercial sector — and assesses investment trends of their corporate venture capital subsidiaries and offers a geographic breakdown of defense companies and their AI target companies.

CSET submitted this comment to the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation to support the work of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Task Force to develop an implementation roadmap that would provide AI researchers and students across scientific disciplines access to computational resources, high-quality data, educational tools, and user support.

Software vulnerability discovery, patching, and exploitation—collectively known as the vulnerability lifecycle—is time consuming and labor intensive. Automating the process could significantly improve software security and offensive hacking. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Cyber Grand Challenge supported teams of researchers from 2014 to 2016 that worked to create these tools. China took notice. In 2017, China hosted its first Robot Hacking Game, seeking to automate the software vulnerability lifecycle. Since then, China has hosted seven such competitions and the People’s Liberation Army has increased its role in hosting the games.

As U.S. policymakers grapple with the need to control international technology flows, this annotated bibliography distills key lessons and surveys 50 years of scholarship, government documents, and commentary. The resources it presents are at the intersection of international economics and technology and span from the Cold War to the current challenges surrounding U.S.-China relations.

Conventional wisdom suggests that cutting-edge artificial intelligence is dependent on large volumes of data. An overemphasis on “big data” ignores the existence—and underestimates the potential—of several AI approaches that do not require massive labeled datasets. This issue brief is a primer on “small data” approaches to AI. It presents exploratory findings on the current and projected progress in scientific research across these approaches, which country leads, and the major sources of funding for this research.

Chinese and Russian government officials are keen to publicize their countries’ strategic partnership in emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence. This report evaluates the scope of cooperation between China and Russia as well as relative trends over time in two key metrics of AI development: research publications and investment. The findings expose gaps between aspirations and reality, bringing greater accuracy and nuance to current assessments of Sino-Russian tech cooperation.

The United States and China are keeping an eye on Indonesia’s artificial intelligence potential given the country’s innovation-driven national strategy and flourishing AI industry. China views Indonesia as an anchor for its economic, digital, and political inroads in Southeast Asia and has invested aggressively in new partnerships. The United States, with robust political and economic relations rooted in shared democratic ideals, has an opportunity to leverage its comparative advantages and tap into Indonesia’s AI potential through high-level agreements.