Center for a New American Security

The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is a Washington, D.C. national-security think tank established in 2007 by Kurt M. Campbell and Michèle A. Flournoy, its co-founders. It describes itself as "an independent, bipartisan, nonprofit organization" and states that "our board members, founders, leaders, scholars, and interns have held or gone on to prominent positions in the U.S. government, at the departments of Defense and State, the White House, and the Central Intelligence Agency as well as in Congress and the private sector." It "does not engage in lobbying activity" and states that, to the extent it accepts foreign funding, "its activities will be limited to bona fide scholastic, academic, and research-related activities."¹ Its offices are at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue NW.²

Leadership

The chief executive, Richard Fontaine, is concurrently a member of the Long-Term Benefit Trust of Anthropic and executive director of the North America group of the Trilateral Commission. He was foreign-policy adviser to Senator John McCain and to McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, minority deputy staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee, associate director for Near Eastern affairs at the National Security Council in 2003 and 2004, and a staff member at the State Department and on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He served on the Defense Policy Board from 2021 to 2025.³

Flournoy was chief executive in 2017.⁴ Victoria Nuland was chief executive from 2018 to 2019.⁵

Movement into Government

On January 21, 2021, CNAS congratulated "its experts and alumni selected for positions of responsibility in the Biden administration." Nuland was nominated as under secretary of state for political affairs; Ely Ratner, CNAS's executive vice president and director of studies, was named special assistant to the secretary of defense; Susanna V. Blume, director of the Defense Program, was named senior adviser to the secretary of defense performing the duties of director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation; Elizabeth Rosenberg, director of the Energy, Economics and Security program, was named counselor to the deputy secretary of the Treasury; and Kayla M. Williams was named an assistant secretary of veterans affairs. Two adjunct senior fellows entered government: David S. Cohen as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Peter Harrell as senior director for international economics and competitiveness on the National Security Council staff. The alumni Derek Chollet and Colin Kahl were named counselor of the State Department and under secretary of defense. The release stated that they entered government alongside two CNAS board members, Campbell and Avril Haines. Fontaine said: "We take great pride in knowing that they will bring their talents and expertise into government. The Center will remain the locus of national security policy development and dedicated to preparing other rising leaders for service."⁵

Technology and National Security Program

On July 17, 2017, CNAS named Paul Scharre, who had led its Future of Warfare Initiative, director of its Technology and National Security Program, which would "focus on the policy implications of artificial intelligence, autonomy, cyber-physical systems, and other emerging technologies for national security." He replaced Ben FitzGerald, "who left CNAS to become a professional staff member for the Majority Staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee." Flournoy described Scharre as "a former Army Ranger with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ... a former force planner in the Pentagon." The same release announced that Melissa Flagg, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for research, had joined as an adjunct senior fellow, and that Gregory Allen would be an adjunct fellow working on "the implications of the artificial intelligence revolution for international security."⁴

The program states that it produces research "to help U.S. and allied policymakers responsibly win and manage the great power competition with China over critical and emerging technologies." In 2026 its director was Vivek Chilukuri and its deputy director Janet Egan. Its adjunct fellows included Michael Sellitto, listed as "Head of Global Affairs, Anthropic"; Lynne E. Parker, listed with the University of Tennessee; Tim Fist; Keegan McBride of the Oxford Internet Institute; Elsa B. Kania; John (Jack) N.T. Shanahan; Anthony Vinci; and Jordan Schneider.⁶ Fist was also director of emerging technology policy at the Institute for Progress.⁷ CNAS's wider roster of adjunct experts included Nathaniel Fick, Markus Anderljung and Richard Danzig.²

Funding

CNAS publishes an annual list of donors. For the year from October 1, 2024, to September 30, 2025, it listed four at 500,000 dollars and above: Amazon.com, Inc.; Coefficient Giving, the former Open Philanthropy; Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation; and the Department of Defense's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. At 250,000 to 499,999 dollars were the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Embassy of Japan, the Smith and Richardson Foundation, DALHAP Investments Ltd., routed through the RAND Corporation, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.²

At 100,000 to 249,999 dollars the list included Amazon Web Services, Anduril Industries, Chevron, Cisco Systems, Google, Intel, JPMorgan Chase, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Meta, Pfizer, Qualcomm, RTX Corporation, the Semiconductor Industry Association, the Business Roundtable, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, Founders Pledge, the Open Society Foundations, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, DARPA, the U.S. European Command's Russia Strategic Initiative, through Huntington Ingalls Industries, and the Savannah River National Laboratory of the National Nuclear Security Administration through Longenecker & Associates. At 50,000 to 99,999 dollars were Microsoft, NVIDIA, Scale AI, BAE Systems, Boeing, Humanity United, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the German Federal Foreign Office, the Korea Foundation and the NATO Summit Consortium, through the Atlantic Council. Smaller donors included Neal Blue, through General Atomics, Epirus, ExxonMobil, General Dynamics, SoftBank Group, the Lithuanian Ministry of Defence, Flournoy, Danzig, Robert O. Work and Peter Harrell.²

Coefficient Giving is also a listed supporter of Americans for Responsible Innovation and of the Foundation for American Innovation.⁸⁹

CNAS files with the Internal Revenue Service as Center For New American Security Inc, EIN 20-8084828. Its returns show the following (in dollars):¹⁰