# Special Competitive Studies Project [[Eric Schmidt]]'s private successor to the [[National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence]]: a Washington think tank founded in October 2021, the month the commission's statutory life ended, funded by the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, chaired by Schmidt, and run by Ylli Bajraktari, who had been NSCAI's executive director. Its board of advisers is the commission's defense-establishment wing — Robert Work, Michèle Flournoy, Nadia Schadlow, Mac Thornberry — and its stated mission is to keep the United States ahead of China in a "techno-economic" competition that it frames, in the commission's language, as the defining contest of the century. It is the vault's cleanest example of a public body privatized into a personal institution: same staff, same agenda, same access, no charter, no sunset, no disclosure rules. ## What it does Reports and convenings. The flagship *Mid-Decade Challenges to National Competitiveness* (September 2022) set out the frame; *Generative AI: The Future of Innovation Power* (September 2023), the AI governance options memo (June 2023) and a framework for "highly consequential" AI uses followed, each timed to a policy window — the CHIPS implementation, the October 2023 AI executive order, the export-control rounds. The events are where the influence is visible: the Global Emerging Technology Summits, the Ash Carter Exchange, and from 2024 the **AI+ series** — an AI+ Expo in Washington that fills a convention hall with defense officials, contractors and members of Congress, plus AI+Robotics and AI+Biotechnology summits — with Google among the sponsors. SCSP's staff (about fifty) feeds the [[Defense Innovation Board]] and the Hill; its alumni move into government and the defense-tech firms Schmidt invests in. ## The problem it embodies The CNBC and Warren inquiry into Schmidt's undisclosed AI investments while chairing NSCAI ([[Defense Tech Conflicts of Interest]]) had a partial answer in the commission's disclosure rules. SCSP has none: it is a private foundation whose founder's holdings ([[Eric Schmidt Holdings]]) include the companies its reports recommend the government buy from, and whose recommendations reach the same officials the commission's did. The [[Eric Schmidt Ideology]] page describes the worldview; the point of this page is the vehicle — the model, copied since by others, of the commission that never ends. ## See Also - [[Eric Schmidt]] · [[Eric Schmidt Ideology]] · [[Eric Schmidt Holdings]] · [[Eric Schmidt Dossier]] · [[Eric Schmidt Political Donations]] - [[National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence]] · [[Defense Innovation Board]] · [[Defense Tech Conflicts of Interest]] · [[Office of Strategic Capital]] - [[Artificial Intelligence Hub]] · [[Defense Tech Timeline]] · [[Watching]]