Middlebury Institute CTEC

The Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, known as CTEC, is a research center at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, part of Middlebury College. Its stated mission is to advance education, research and intelligence analysis on domestic extremism, transnational emerging threats and trust and safety technology policy, and its website describes work that provides "bespoke analysis for tech and government clients."¹

Founding and staff

Alex Newhouse helped start the center in 2018 while a graduate student at the Institute, first as an independent contractor, then as research lead, and then as deputy director; his biography dates the deputy directorship to 2020, while a Middlebury article of October 27, 2020 lists Kris McGuffie as deputy director and Newhouse as digital research lead. In 2022 he became a senior research fellow while pursuing a doctorate at the University of Colorado Boulder, and he is listed in 2026 as a non-resident senior fellow. His biography lists earlier work on the data governance and fraud management teams of Sony Interactive Entertainment. The October 2020 article described the center's staff as working on extremism research projects "for several notable clients" and did not name them.²

Jason Blazakis, the center's founding executive director, directed the Counterterrorism Finance and Designations Office in the Bureau of Counterterrorism of the United States Department of State from 2008 to 2018, where his biography says he was responsible for directing efforts to designate states, organizations and individuals as state sponsors of terrorism, foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists. His biography also lists earlier positions at the Congressional Research Service, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the embassy in Kabul, and a senior fellowship at the Soufan Center.³

On May 24, 2023 Middlebury announced an anonymous gift of 2 million dollars to expand the center and to provide financial aid to students in the master's program in nonproliferation and terrorism studies. Blazakis was quoted calling it the most significant gift the center had received since its founding in 2018, and the announcement stated that it would support staff positions and senior research scholars.⁴

Katharine Petrich was named interim director on November 17, 2023, and the center announced on February 12, 2024 that Sarah Pollack would become its director of tech policy and strategy; the announcement states that Pollack had led communications for the global counter-terrorism and violent extremism program of Meta Platforms.⁵ J.M. Berger and Sam Jackson joined as senior research fellows in June 2023, alongside Amy Cooter, then the center's director of research, academic development and innovation.⁶ Pages dated August 2026 identify Blazakis again as executive director.⁷

Reports with OpenAI

In November 2019 OpenAI published "Release Strategies and the Social Impacts of Language Models," whose author list includes Newhouse, Blazakis and Kris McGuffie with the affiliation CTEC, alongside OpenAI staff. The report names CTEC as a partner exploring how GPT-2 could be misused by terrorists and extremists, thanks Blazakis and Newhouse for feedback on earlier versions, and reproduces as its Appendix D a CTEC report of October 2019, "The Industrialization of Terrorist Propaganda: Neural Language Models and the Threat of Fake Content Generation," by Newhouse, Blazakis and McGuffie.⁸

In September 2020 McGuffie and Newhouse published "The Radicalization Risks of GPT-3 and Advanced Neural Language Models." The report states on its first page: "This project was made possible by the OpenAI API Academic Access Program." It found that GPT-3 showed significant improvement over GPT-2 in generating extremist texts, and stated that "OpenAI's preventative measures are strong" while describing a risk from unregulated copycat technology.⁹

Grants from the Department of Homeland Security

The Department of Homeland Security announced fiscal year 2021 Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention grants on September 27, 2021. One, of 629,533 dollars, went to CTEC with the iThrive Games Foundation for a game-based curriculum on radicalization; the federal spending database records it as award EMW-2021-GR-00032 with a period from October 1, 2021 to September 30, 2023. Middlebury's announcement of November 9, 2021 gave the amount as 630,000 dollars over two years, with Newhouse as principal investigator.¹⁰¹¹

The DHS announcement of September 14, 2022 listed two further awards connected to Middlebury. One, of 699,763 dollars, went to CTEC for a joint project with the nonprofit Take This and Logically to develop "a shared framework for understanding extremism in games," best practices and training workshops for community managers and trust and safety staff. The other, of 659,327 dollars, went to Arizona State University for the continuation of "Diverting Hate," a project on incel radicalization on Twitter begun by a student team from the Institute in the Invent2Prevent program. The federal spending database records a Middlebury College award, EMW-2022-GR-00036, at 686,633.14 dollars.¹⁰¹¹

The Science and Technology Directorate of DHS paid RTI International to evaluate the 2021 grant, and RTI's profile, dated July 2024 and posted by DHS on January 27, 2025, records that the grant ran from October 2021 to March 2024 including a two-quarter extension. It was the center's first targeted violence prevention grant. The center held two co-design sessions with 22 adolescents and 11 playtests, consulted John Horgan and Christian Picciolini, and built a single-player dialogue game; 13 adolescents completed it and 9 completed the pre- and post-game surveys, too few for an outcome evaluation. RTI reported delays caused by changes to the game format and difficulty recruiting schools.¹²

NCITE, the DHS Center of Excellence at the University of Nebraska Omaha, was evaluating the same grant program during these years, and RTI International was one of its partners.¹³

Funding from technology companies

On September 29, 2022 CTEC announced a two-year grant from Logically, a company that describes itself as using artificial intelligence and human expertise against misinformation, to build a cross-platform social media database on the role of extremist organization, narrative creation and disinformation in radicalization, with Newhouse as principal investigator and the senior research scholar Matt Kriner assisting. The database was to combine archives from Telegram, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Roblox and Steam with leaked material from Epik, the Oath Keepers, Iron March, Fascist Forge and the International Third Positionist Forum. CTEC was one of three recipients of grants announced by Logically.¹⁴ Logically was sold in a pre-pack administration deal confirmed on July 7, 2025, in which Kreatur Ltd, run by a former director and early investor in Logically, acquired its technology, brand and key assets.¹⁵

Middlebury's account of October 19, 2022 states that CTEC would partner with Meta and the White House #UnitedWeStand initiative, and that the partnership was announced at the summit of September 15, 2022. It quotes Dina Hussein, then counterterrorism policy lead at Meta, and Newhouse, and states that CTEC "partners with Spectrum Labs to provide multilingual research support for the construction of artificial intelligence products."¹⁶ The White House fact sheet for the summit lists Meta among technology companies announcing actions and does not mention CTEC or Middlebury.¹⁷

Telegram networks and the Accelerationism Research Consortium

In June 2022 CTEC and Tech Against Terrorism published a report on two coalitions, the United Acceleration Front and the National Socialist Coalition, that emerged on Telegram in early 2021 around Feuerkrieg Division and InJekt Division. The report states that the two organizations collected and analyzed data from associated channels and chats from June 2021 to February 2022, and that Tech Against Terrorism identified 21 entities in the network.¹⁸ Middlebury's 2022 account states that CTEC is a founder of the Accelerationism Research Consortium, which it describes as the first research initiative on militant accelerationism, and Kriner is named as the consortium's managing director.¹⁴¹⁶

Profiles of extremist organizations

The center publishes a series titled "Dangerous Organizations and Bad Actors," with profiles that include The Base (March 6, 2022), the Active Club Network (March 15, 2023), Atomwaffen Division (April 12, 2023) and National Action (August 23, 2023). The profile of The Base states that its founder, Rinaldo Nazzaro, is based in Russia and manages the group from afar, primarily through Telegram.¹⁹ The October 2020 Middlebury article also refers to a CTEC report of April 2020 on the Russian Imperial Movement, which the State Department designated a specially designated global terrorist entity in the same month.²²⁰