I'm going to do the intros because their bios are so impressive, you should really understand this. So, Anne was most recently the deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging tech in the prior administration. Helped shape US cyber and AI policy at the highest levels. Prior led global intelligence ops for the NSA, senior roles at the Pentagon, and prior to government senior roles in the financial sector. Today, she advises us. She's a distinguished fellow at Stanford and Royal United Services Institute as well as a strategic adviser at Johns Hopkins. Is that enough?
Got a lot going on. Brett spent decades at the center of US foreign policy under four White House administrations, including special presidential envoy leading the global coalition to defeat ISIS. Today he's a special adviser for international affairs for us, partner at Lux Capital, senior adviser at Tidal Partners, global affairs analyst for CNN, distinguished fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center and the Atlantic Council. I hope you guys are clear on why we brought them here today. And Brett, you didn't have all that when I started talking to you. You weren't doing all this stuff. I thought we had an agreement.
I had [laughter] a few things. Um anyway, they're uh they're great experts on the topics that we're uh we're going to talk about today. So, um I want to start with uh Brett. Let's start with uh with Cisco. Why the the areas that you're involved with? You're in venture capital. You're in advanced technology, defense technology. You're working with us. Um how did you choose these areas after you left the White House?
Well, Chuck, it's great to be here. Great to be here with Anne because we were what just 16 months ago just down the hall from each other in the White House. Um, so yeah, I worked across four administrations, spent a lot of time in war zones and saw life and death decision-making as presidents were making them. And I'll just give you an anecdote. So 15 months ago, and this is all in the news now because Iran is in the news, um, bring you into the White House situation room, uh, October 1st, 2024, and we had Iran launched 200 ballistic missiles heading towards, uh, heading towards Israel. And like the movie War Games, you can see the streaks on the screen. And we had prepared a defense for this. We built a coalition. We had destroyers in the Mediterranean. We had Patriot batteries. We had multiple militaries working together. But as that that was like a worst case scenario to that many ballistic missiles in the sky at the same time. And as they launch, it's about a 12 to 13 minute flight.
And the first six, seven minutes, there's nothing you can do. And I it just struck me in that moment. I've been in the situation room Oval Office with presidents multiple times like we are totally dependent right now on technology working on technology that was developed over decades and for scenarios and hopefully you never have this scenario that we're watching unfold in real time. And if those missiles hit, you're going to have thousands of uh casualties and likely a massive regional war.
And so I was in the room with the president and everybody and just total silence and I it was the first time in a in a situation like that I actually said a prayer because you were completely you're completely dependent on technology working and fortunately when that window opens up about three minute window where missile interceptors engage the whole screen turns white you don't know what's happening the defense has worked and a a lot of lives were saved and actually stop what could have been a a much larger war. But I just those the speeds are going to increase. You add AI to the mix, the decision cycles of uh machine decision making. And let's hope we can keep machines out of that kinetic kind of pulling the trigger type decision. But if you look at it as this is going, that's gonna be very difficult to do. And so I I just I want it. And by the way, Cisco, a lot of that technology that allowed all those militaries to work together, uh, a lot of that is Cisco. So I I think there's nothing but working with great American companies to make sure to make sure that on this life and death dimension, war and peace dimension of everything we're talking about in this room that we stay ahead, the United States stays ahead, our partners stay ahead, our partnerships. It is so important because this is coming so fast. So that was just one example of of a moment that really stuck in my mind and I'm really proud Chuck to be working with you and uh and so many others.
We we certainly enjoy working with you and you've been very helpful. So Anne, let's uh let's similar question. Deputy National Security Adviser, cyber security, you and I knew each other really well at that time. How are you applying all that to what you're doing today?
So, you know, similar to Brett, I spent 15 years in the intelligence community and in that I ran both offensive and defensive operations, right? I led our hacking units and then I was responsible for standing up our cyber security mission. When I came to the White House, what I was struck by pretty quickly was how geopolitics played out in tech and cyberspace. You know, three quick examples, Russia, China, and Iran. The evening before Russia invaded Ukraine, the Russian intelligence services conducted a cyber attack on an American commercial satellite company that was providing secure comms to the Ukrainian military and was successful. They would have disabled any chance for the Ukrainians to communicate securely. You know, Starlink stepped in and served as a backup. You know, China, we had many conversations about the Chinese have the largest hacking operations of any service in the world and they've successfully compromised telecoms around the world, pipelines and water systems. And the telecoms are often for espionage. The pipelines and water systems we believe are to strategically turn off or disable those capabilities during a period of crisis or conflict to put to put pressure on a society or frankly just to buy time because American service members deploy at the same airports and ports we all use. And if you can just disable those systems for a couple of days in the context of a crisis around Taiwan, China's bought enough time to be successful. And then finally, Iran, right? No surprise that when Iran was brutally countering domestic protests, the first step they did was turn off their internet, right? Both to hide their tracks and and to prevent demonstrators from communicating. And it was no surprise as well that when we served in the White House and were grappling with these kinds of issues, one of the set of options we were often looking at was how do we turn back on the internet, right? What can we do working with often companies around the world to ensure that people who are fighting for liberty can get their voices out. So watching that geopolitics play out and to Brett's point, you know, I'm a I'm a child of refugees. My parents raised me to be deeply grateful for American freedoms and for the opportunity to rebuild lives here. My family is like millions of American families. I believe in America's a force for good around the world and ensuring that the technology that underpins our commerce, our national security is built reflecting that openness um is something that's really important to me and I think as we've had conversations around kind of the role of AI empowering a new generation of cyber attacks, I firmly believe that AI will be fundamental in fighting those at machine speed. It's become a machine and machine fight and I think the data models and frankly the global visibility that Cisco has is really unique to that fight.
So Anne, this AI competition, I mean what you just described would suggest that it is a race. It's a massive race going on and I it struck me we talked about adversaries. G2 was talking about adversaries I think in one of our maybe one of the interviews we did this morning and how they're using AI and they're not being cautious. You know, we're we're talking about guard rails and risks and we're worried we're thinking about what are the implications of how we use it and they can just keep trying and trying and trying until they find something. So this global AI race, it really is a race, isn't it?
You know, it's an interesting question because it uh the definition of winning tends to vary country by country, right? And this was the big debate uh in the Biden White House and transferred over to the Trump White House in terms of how do we win? And I think what we've seen is if you look across, you know, three different countries, three different approaches to winning, you know, on the on in terms of in America, you know, we we're winning in terms of having the most advanced models on reasoning, in terms of breakthroughs, um certainly in building out the infrastructure around the country, largely closed models. Um I think when you look at China, China's, you know, often seven to eight months behind, but really scaling on applications. You know their AI plus national plan is focused on industrials and a manufacturing and then when you look at India it's often small language models focused on what that country needs like for example language models that work across 20 different dialects, you know, 20 different languages, 100 different dialects, enabling a country to actually communicate. I think the interesting space to watch is in the key drivers of our economy and national security is the world running on American tech. So in the space and the space I watch that I'm I think most concerned about is the space of embodied AI because China has so much manufacturing data and expertise and converting that into robots is clearly an area that they're working to scale. So between America and its partners focusing on that and gaining the data simulating it so we can generate models to drive robots will be key.
It's really it's really a great point, Brett. I'll come to you on this because we we believe there's a big debate, but we believe that we want the world running on US tech at the end of the day when they're when we're doing these things and you had TK up here earlier. We built a great partnership with in the Middle East and you've been involved in helping us there. But how how do you think the US should think about partnerships particularly on the tech front with countries that we may not align from a values perspective even per se but strategically they're super important. How should we think about it?
I a couple things. I have I've never seen an issue jump to the top of the national security agenda as fast as AI and was something that is clearly going to stay there. It is bipartisan. It is. I mean, this really started in like 2022. I mean, Anne was doing it, but it really it got to the where if you're having a a meeting with a president and a head of state, AI is one of the top three issues. I'm looking at TK and you the Middle East conversation completely transformed from the standard issues of energy and extremism and counterterrorism and national security to AI is right at the top. And this gets to your your your point, Chuck, because uh as this kind of leapfrogged and as the technology advanced so rapidly, which has been discussed here on this stage today in recent years, uh we had to think about how to adapt to that and ensure that uh important countries in the world are partnered with us in our ecosystem and we're also protecting our technology and and that can be hard to do. So a lot of conversations again because TK's in the front row but with Saudi Arabia with UAE was really about this uh this conversation uh UAE in particular we had very intensive discussions in the White House and and the Biden years actually led a delegation out early uh to talk about uh access to our technology comes with these safeguards and and this is new because the technology has advanced so rapidly and certain countries are playing in a stratospheric zone that we used to think maybe it's only us and China. And so what we did was we worked through the commerce department. We worked with people again to basically develop certain guard rails about our national security say here's what you need to agree to in order to access certain areas of our technology. And frankly I found those conversations went extremely well and we were able to get done what we had to get done. So um what worries me in Washington sometimes is it's it there is a zero-sum dimension to this conversation in some quarters that well as as you said country X country Y country Z maybe they don't align with us in this area or that area so therefore we're actually not going to allow access to certain parts of our technology stack. The problem with that approach is that those countries are not sitting static. This is this revolution is ongoing. This transformation is ongoing. They are going to be a part of it. They're going to invest in it massively and it's going to be with us or without us. So, it is not zero sum. It's complicated. There's a huge discussion in Washington. Uh, and I think it'll be kind of define some aspects of the national security debate as we look at getting into election seasons. But I'm a big believer in we need partnerships here. Partnerships are key. We cannot win. Uh Anne said you could define how what win is but we cannot we cannot compete without partnerships. Partnerships is America's competitive advantage in the world across every aspect of diplomacy, national security, commerce, trade, it is partnerships and in this uh field it's exactly the same.
Yeah. Thank you Brett. We you and I have been involved in a lot of these discussions in Washington have we not? Um, and let me come back to you and I'm going to I'm going to I want to go down the security front because all the customers we have here in this room and those that are watching online, you've you've been advising even in the last say 14 months, you've been advising governments around the world on issues of cyber security a lot of we we talked about trust. We talked about the impediments to deployment of AI. Just in general what what's your top of-mind guidance to these customers about how they should be thinking about cyber security in today's world?
Absolutely. So, you know, AI fundamentally is a driver of so much innovation you just look at drug discovery right coming up with proteins that nature doesn't have to target specific disease pathways. So we have to be using AI the key is how do we use it safely and in the context of cyber security I think there's really two types of risk risk to think about right one is in the context of you know Anthropic published a report saying China had used AI to automatically and at scale conduct attacks you know I'll be candid for most of the cyber security community we all looked at that and went of course attackers always adopt tech frankly they adopt tech faster than defenders so I thought what was really interesting about that report was that Anthropic actually used their models to find analyze and actually block the attack. Now in that case the attackers were faster. That's what needs to change because so much about cyber security today is manual and painful. I recall after the China compromised a number of American telecoms and I talked to one of the major chief operating officers and said help me understand how they hid for potentially up to three years. And his answer was and we have software-defined networks today. They're changing all the time. So, we have a hard time defining normal. And if we can't define normal, it's really hard to define anomalous. And anomalous is the first step to figuring out what's potentially malicious. AI can change that and do it at speed because you can define what's normal in a network. Alert what's anomalous, but akin to before a sports game. So, you're surging traffic to a particular place or frankly, and I think that's what's unique also about companies like Cisco, you have a global platform. So when an attack technique is done in one place and you're using AI to track that, you can alert to a second telecom, hey, this thing's anomalous. We saw it somewhere else. And I think that's why the open source AI model actually that Cisco released was so interesting because there's this unique data that global companies have about what's globally normal and anomalous that can then serve individual entities to help them then for their particular business refine that. So the AI's role in traditional cyber security is huge in that it's now become a machine on machine fight and human defenders just don't stand a chance.
