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.
Anyway, they're great experts on the topics that we're going to talk about today. So, I want to start with Brett. Let's start with Cisco. Why the areas that you're involved with? You're in venture capital. You're in advanced technology, defense technology. You're working with us. 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. 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, bring you into the White House situation room, October 1st, 2024, and we had Iran launch 200 ballistic missiles 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 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 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 casualties and likely a massive regional war. And so I was in the room with the president and everybody and just total silence and it was the first time in a situation like that I actually said a prayer because you're completely dependent on technology working. And fortunately, when that window opens up, about a 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 lot of lives were saved and actually stopped what could have been a much larger war. But I just, those speeds are going to increase. You add AI to the mix, the decision cycles of 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 going to be very difficult to do. And so I just, and by the way, Cisco, a lot of that technology that allowed all those militaries to work together, a lot of that is Cisco. So I think there's nothing but working with great American companies 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 a moment that really stuck in my mind and I'm really proud, Chuck, to be working with you and so many others.
We certainly enjoy working with you and you've been very helpful. So Anne, let's do a 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 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 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 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 as a force for good around the world and ensuring that the technology that underpins our commerce, our national security is built reflecting that openness 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 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 talking about guardrails 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 the definition of winning tends to vary country by country, right? And this was the big debate 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, in America, we're winning in terms of having the most advanced models on reasoning, in terms of breakthroughs, certainly in building out the infrastructure around the country, largely closed models. 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 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 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 a great point. Brett, I'll come to you on this because 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 we're doing these things and you had TK up here earlier. We built a great partnership in the Middle East and you've been involved in helping us there. But 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?
