Special Competitive Studies Project

The Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) is a nonprofit think tank founded in October 2021 by Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive, to advance United States competitiveness against China in Artificial Intelligence and other emerging technologies. It grew directly out of Schmidt's chairmanship of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which ran from 2018 to 2021, and was consciously modeled on a Cold War studies project. It is a subsidiary of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, the Schmidt family's private foundation, and is led by Ylli Bajraktari, who had been the national-security commission's executive director.¹²

Founding and the Cold War Model

Schmidt announced the project on October 5, 2021, framing it as a successor to the work of his AI commission, whose mandate expired that year. He named it after the Special Studies Project that Nelson Rockefeller commissioned in 1956 and that Henry Kissinger directed, a panel that assessed American strategy across military, economic, and social fronts during the early Cold War. The choice of name signaled the project's ambition to produce sweeping competitiveness strategy rather than narrow technical reports, and Schmidt argued the country needed to "think, organize and compete in significantly new ways."²³

SCSP assembled a bipartisan board drawn heavily from the defense and national-security establishment, including Robert Work, the former deputy secretary of defense who had cochaired the AI commission with Schmidt, Nadia Schadlow, a former deputy national security adviser, Michèle Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense for policy, and Mac Thornberry, the former Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The board was bipartisan and drawn almost entirely from the senior ranks of the defense and national-security establishment.¹²

Mission and Reports

SCSP describes its mission as making recommendations to strengthen America's long-term competitiveness as AI and emerging technologies reshape national security, the economy, and society. It publishes strategy reports and "action plans" on AI, biotechnology, microelectronics, quantum computing, and 5G/6G networks, consistently arguing that the United States is in a technology contest with China that it risks losing without large public investment and a tighter alliance between Silicon Valley and the government. Its reports have cited specific industrial models, such as a Michigan distributed-manufacturing network, as templates the Defense Department should follow.⁴⁵

Reported financial figures for SCSP are limited because of its private foundation structure, with third-party estimates placing its annual revenue in the single-digit millions of dollars and its staff at several dozen employees. The organization registered as a lobbying presence and its leadership testified before Congress, with Schmidt appearing as its chair before a House committee in March 2023, giving the privately funded body a formal channel into legislative technology policy.⁵⁶

The AI Expo for National Competitiveness

In May 2024 SCSP held the inaugural AI Expo for National Competitiveness at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, a two-day event on May 7 and 8 that drew government officials, allied governments, research institutions, and more than two hundred exhibitors. The data-analytics and defense contractor Palantir Technologies was the lead sponsor, and additional sponsors included Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen, Groq, and the China-focused intelligence firms Datenna and Strider.⁷⁸

The expo gave SCSP a recurring venue where defense contractors, AI companies, and national-security officials convened around the China-competition agenda the project promotes, and it returned in subsequent years under the AI+ Expo branding. Many of the technology and defense firms exhibiting stood to benefit from the increased government AI spending SCSP's reports advocate.⁷⁸