⚡ Quick Summary
Published by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), a policy research organization within Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service, this annual report reviews the organization's 2025 research, events and public engagement. A letter from Interim Executive Director Helen Toner frames the year, describing an interdisciplinary team with data skills, foreign-language proficiency, national security experience and deep technical expertise, analysis of how China is modernising its military, and new initiatives including Project ATLAS, which uses LLM-based methods to extract research metadata and map the global scientific landscape.
The body of the report is organised by research team: Applications, CyberAI, Biotech, Data, Governance, Workforce and Peer Watch each summarise published work, briefings and testimony and set out 2026 priorities. Named outputs include analysis of nearly 3,000 AI-related defence contract awards to the People's Liberation Army, the Supply Chain Explorer, the Map of Science and PATHWISE, a tool mapping where cyber and AI talent is produced and demanded. A timeline of 2025 highlights, media quotations, a donor list and a culture statement close the report.
🧩 What’s Covered
- Letter from the Executive Director: Interim Executive Director Helen Toner describes CSET's founding in 2019, its self-description as "the largest research organization in the world working on AI policy", an in-house dataset of People's Liberation Army procurement documents, and 2026 priorities including Project ATLAS and frontier AI security and governance.
- CSET in the Media: Quotations from named staff in Axios, Foreign Policy, The Hill, CNBC, Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, The Diplomat and BBC News, on biosecurity data, military-civil fusion, state AI regulation, semiconductor export controls and compute shifting to inference.
- Highlights of 2025: A dated timeline from February to December covering congressional testimony, IEEE and AAAI presentations, the Violet Teaming AI-Enabled Biosurveillance workshop, the inaugural Spring Symposium, the six-member Advisory Board and the China's AI Leap conference.
- Research — Applications: A report examining nearly 3,000 AI-related defence contract awards that maps cooperation between China's commercial sector and the PLA, informing congressional oversight of advanced chip exports, plus planned work on US military AI adoption.
- Research — CyberAI and Biotech: Analysis of AI's effect on cybersecurity, open weight models and competitors closing on leading US corporate models, including the first reported AI-orchestrated hacking campaign; biotech essays for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and briefings to the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology.
- Research — Data and Workforce: Updates to the Emerging Technology Observatory's Map of Science and Supply Chain Explorer, an NSF-supported workshop on open science and metascience, and PATHWISE, a tool mapping where cyber and AI talent is produced and demanded.
- Research — Governance and Peer Watch: Testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, an IEEE panel comparing US, EU and Chinese approaches, analysis of new AI legislation and frontier governance proposals, and findings that China pursues artificial general intelligence in multiple ways.
- Donors and Culture Statement: Funders grouped by gift size from $1,000,000+ to $1,000–$14,999, the CSET Forum membership programme, and the organisation's culture statement.
💡 Why it matters?
The report helps anyone tracking the US AI policy research landscape see where one influential organisation concentrated its effort in 2025 and what it plans next. It points to evidence and tools others can reuse: the PLA procurement dataset behind work on Chinese military AI, the Supply Chain Explorer on semiconductor capacity, and the Map of Science and PATHWISE on scientific mapping and technical talent. Governance and security teams can use the named 2026 priorities — distillation, cybersecurity acquisition, agentic AI, state-level AI governance — to benchmark their own agendas.
❓ What’s Missing
Team entries are narrative summaries rather than findings: the report gives no methodologies, dataset documentation or citations for the studies it describes, and no links to them, so the underlying evidence cannot be checked here. The PLA procurement dataset, ATLAS, PATHWISE, Map of Science and Supply Chain Explorer are named but not documented. No limitations, uncertainty or external review are discussed, and donors are listed without amounts, grant periods or financial statements.
👥 Best For
Best for policy analysts and research librarians tracking US AI policy output, government affairs and strategy teams monitoring China's military AI adoption and export controls, and organisations seeking datasets or tools on semiconductor supply chains, scientific mapping and cyber and AI talent supply.
📄 Source Details
CSET 2025 Annual Report is published by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. No individual authors are credited; the letter is signed by Interim Executive Director Helen Toner, and the report states it was designed by Jason Ly and produced by CSET. The copyright line reads "©2026". The document is 16 pages in English, with no edition or reference number; the only printed URL is cset.georgetown.edu. Text was extracted from all 16 pages, though page 1, the cover, yielded no text.
