Immigrants make up nearly half of U.S. recipients of the world's most prestigious STEM awards, yet little is known about how this talent first arrives in the country. This data brief analyzes 550 recipients of the Nobel Prize, the Lasker Award, the ACM A.M. Turing Award, and MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 between 2014 and 2024. Most foreign-born U.S. awardees first arrived as students, postdoctoral researchers, or visiting scholars—pathways now exposed to visa suspensions, entry restrictions, and proposed changes to optional practical training. Safeguarding these pathways is critical to maintaining U.S. leadership in STEM and emerging technologies.

How can we connect publication and patent data in new ways to derive useful insights into science and technology activity? How can we characterize these connections, visually or in natural language? This roundtable report summarizes expert responses to these questions and discussion of new approaches to analyze, connect, and visualize scientific publication and patent data to deliver insights and inform S&T decision-making.

Despite decades of reform efforts, the federal government’s Authorization to Operate (ATO) process is a major barrier to delivering secure systems to warfighters at speed. This report examines why past ATO reforms have fallen short of their intent, and offers recommendations to getting leading American technology into the hands of warfighters faster and securely.

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.

AI has the potential to transform cybersecurity through automation of vulnerability discovery, patching, and exploitation. Integrating these models with traditional software security tools allows engineers to proactively secure and harden systems earlier in the software development process.

Computer scientists have long sought to build systems that can actively and autonomously carry out complicated goals in the real world—commonly referred to as artificial intelligence "agents." Recently, significant progress in large language models has fueled new optimism about the prospect of building sophisticated AI agents. This CSET-led workshop report synthesizes findings from a May 2024 workshop on this topic, including what constitutes an AI agent, how the technology is improving, what risks agents exacerbate, and intervention points that could help.

View this session of our Security and Emerging Technology Seminar Series on August 1 at 12 p.m. ET. This session featured a discussion on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) Report on Strategy for Cyber-Physical Resilience.

CSET's Josh A. Goldstein was recently quoted in a WIRED article about state-backed hacking groups using fake LinkedIn profiles to steal information from their targets. Goldstein provides insight by highlighting the issues in the disinformation space.

Militaries seek to harness artificial intelligence for decision advantage. Yet AI systems introduce a new source of uncertainty in the likelihood of technical failures. Such failures could interact with strategic and human factors in ways that lead to miscalculation and escalation in a crisis or conflict. Harnessing AI effectively requires managing these risk trade-offs by reducing the likelihood, and containing the consequences of, AI failures.

A report by CSET’s Josh Goldstein, Micah Musser, and CSET alumna Katerina Sedova in collaboration with OpenAI and Stanford Internet Observatory was cited in an article published on Medium. The report explores how language models could be misused for influence operations in the future, and it provides a framework for assessing potential mitigation strategies.