# National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence The **NSCAI** was a fifteen-member commission created by section 1051 of the FY2019 National Defense Authorization Act (August 2018) to "consider the methods and means necessary to advance the development of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and associated technologies" for national security. [[Eric Schmidt]] was chair; Robert Work, the former Deputy Secretary of Defense, was vice chair. The rest of the membership was the AI industry and its customers in one room — Oracle's [[Safra Catz]], Amazon's Andy Jassy, Microsoft's Eric Horvitz, Google's Andrew Moore, [[In-Q-Tel]]'s Chris Darby, the venture investor Gilman Louie, and a handful of academics and former officials. Its executive director was Ylli Bajraktari, a former Pentagon chief of staff. ## What it recommended The commission's 756-page final report (March 1, 2021) opened with the claim that the United States was "not prepared to defend or compete in the AI era" and proposed to fix that with money and structure: federal non-defense AI R&D rising to **$32 billion a year by 2026**; a **$40 billion** total government commitment; a Technology Competitiveness Council in the White House; a Digital Service Academy and a civilian reserve corps to staff the government with technologists; a Pentagon that was "AI-ready" by 2025; export controls and semiconductor policy aimed at [[China]]; and an [[In-Q-Tel]]-style investment vehicle for the Department of Defense. Much of it moved. Recommendations and in some cases the commission's own legislative language went into the FY2021 and FY2023 NDAAs; the chip and export-control agenda became the [[CHIPS and Science Act]] and the October 2022 controls; and the [[Office of Strategic Capital]], created in 2022, is the investment arm the report asked for. ## The conflict The NSCAI is the origin of the pattern the vault tracks under [[Defense Tech Conflicts of Interest]]: the person who wrote the strategy was also the person positioned to profit from it. CNBC reported in 2022 that Schmidt made more than fifty direct personal or indirect corporate investments in AI companies while chairing the commission, and Protocol put his AI-focused holdings above $2 billion. Senator [[Elizabeth Warren]] wrote to Secretary Austin in December 2022 asking for the Pentagon's conflict-of-interest rules for advisory boards and for the specifics of Schmidt's disclosures at NSCAI and the [[Defense Innovation Board]]. Schmidt's answer, through a spokesperson, was that he had complied with every disclosure obligation and that commissions "only make recommendations." That is true and is the point: an advisory body with no formal power wrote language that passed, steered billions toward an industry, and did so under disclosure rules written for people who do not own the industry. The [[Eric Schmidt Holdings]] and [[Eric Schmidt Political Donations]] pages carry the portfolio and the money that followed. ## Afterlife The commission was terminated by statute on October 1, 2021. Its staff, worldview and executive director moved into the [[Special Competitive Studies Project]], which Schmidt founded and funds — a private successor with no statutory charter, no sunset and the same agenda. That transfer is the cleanest example in the vault of a public commission being privatized into a personal think tank; [[Eric Schmidt Ideology]] describes the "techno-economic competition" frame it carries. ## See Also - [[Eric Schmidt]] · [[Eric Schmidt Dossier]] · [[Eric Schmidt Timeline]] · [[Eric Schmidt Holdings]] - [[Special Competitive Studies Project]] · [[Defense Innovation Board]] · [[Defense Tech Conflicts of Interest]] - [[Office of Strategic Capital]] · [[In-Q-Tel]] · [[Defense Tech Timeline]] - [[Artificial Intelligence Hub]]