GMF Tech

GMF Tech is a transatlantic team pursuing work that both informs and influences the hot-button and fast-evolving conversations on emerging technology, democracy, and geopolitical competition. We blend a focus on issues of the day with longer-term research that is intellectually grounded yet always directly impactful.

Our theory is that ensuring democracies remain competitive and lead the future of emerging and disruptive technologies requires two intersecting undertakings: 

First, contesting in an allied, democratic fashion the PRC’s growing technology leadership and its effort to use technology to remake the global order in its own image, safe for autocracy, and in direct contravention of democratic leadership and prosperity. This undertaking involves elucidating the drivers of competitiveness in critical and emerging technologies including AI, the future internet, quantum information, biotechnology, and green tech; assessing how democratic allies stand today vis-à-vis their competitors; and forecasting how they can continue to lead together tomorrow. The task will require building and wielding new techno-economic tools in an allied democratic fashion, from industrial policy that can leverage democracies’ strengths to defensive technology measures in export controls and investment screening.

Second, ensuring democratic leadership and competitiveness at a time when autocracy is on the rise worldwide, including within democratic societies, requires advancement of a positive, rights-respecting vision for democratic innovation—one that upholds and promotes our shared values. Our work seeks to embed democratic values in technologies of the future and the policy frameworks that govern them, addressing high-profile emerging tech threats to democratic societies (such as deepfakes in elections) and driving alignment among transatlantic partners on a democratic technology model through research and exchanges.