Technology Policy
ORF America is focused on examining the implications of emerging technologies on a variety of policy challenges. Ongoing efforts involve the evolution of cybersecurity norms and capacity in the developing world, as well as strengthening cooperation between the United States and its partners on emerging technologies such as 5G telecommunications and semiconductors.
Experts:
By Andreas Kuehn and Tara Chawla
The AI buildout is not simply a race for more advanced accelerators, but an infrastructure-centered contest to turn technology, energy, and capital into usable computing capacity. The decisive measure will not be announced spending or planned capacity, but how quickly those commitments become reliable, operational computing capacity.
By Andreas Kuehn and Cauvery Ganapathy
While the integration of AI offers benefits for the optimization of energy systems through grid management, renewable energy integration, predictive maintenance, and accurate forecasting of alternative forms of energy, its energy-intensive nature could also negatively impact the countries and ecosystems seeking to adopt it.
By Dhruva Jaishankar and Jeffrey D. Bean
Earlier this month, India was among the first countries to receive expanded access to Anthropic's Claude Mythos large language model, but the White House decision to block all foreign access to Anthropic’s new Mythos and Fable models via export control elevates concerns regarding reliability of U.S. partnership and AI dependency.
By Rohan Sharma
The United States’ and India’s commitments are clear: pro-innovation regulation, joint next-generation data centers, and cooperation on advanced compute. But agreements do not operationalize themselves. What is needed is not another forum, but an interface. A jointly staffed mechanism, anchored in implementation agencies, becomes the only viable bridge.
By Rohan Sharma
The effectiveness of U.S.-India AI cooperation will be measured not by the number of joint statements issued, but by whether both countries can build systems that are trusted, interoperable, and deployable across borders.
By Jeffrey D. Bean
If the U.S. government can facilitate practical, targeted bilateral engagements for mining and processing under the banner of Pax Silica and FORGE, these could support derisking semiconductor, AI, and critical mineral supply chains provided key Global South actors are engaged effectively and equitably.
By Manish Thakre
As local governments increasingly rely on private vendors, building institutional capacity is essential to ensure AI technologies serve the public interest. Decisions about what AI systems to buy, and under what conditions, determine to what extent these systems benefit citizens or produce harmful outcomes.
By Jeffrey D. Bean
The AI Impact Summit underscored India’s commitment to be seen as a leader for technology deployment to the Global South. In this way, India is attempting to serve as a bridge between the leading technology manufacturing countries and the societies where applied technology may have the biggest impact on quality of life, in areas like healthcare, education, and agriculture
By Katherine Salinas
As AI rapidly transforms the landscape of research and knowledge production, think tanks face an existential question: what is their role when AI agents can conduct research at speeds no human could match?
By Krishnaveni Palanivelu
Cybersecurity must be treated as a shared economic security challenge. By aligning standards, strengthening cooperation, and embedding cyber resilience into trade, infrastructure, and foreign policy, democracies like the United States and India can better protect their digital foundations and sustain long-term economic stability.
By Jeffrey D. Bean
The success of Pax Silica as a tangible platform for the United States and U.S. allies and partners to secure supply chains and retain or regain advantages in technology will be a massive diplomatic and commercial undertaking. Sustained political will seems uncertain.
By Katherine Salinas
The middleware approach presents the fewest First Amendment complications of any regulatory option. Rather than restricting speech or compelling specific viewpoints, it simply requires transparency and user choice.
By Jeffrey D. Bean
While largely domestically orientated, Trump’s AI Action Plan has significant implications for U.S. allies and partners, both in terms of commercial engagement and national security considerations.
By Jeffrey D. Bean
Given the deep disagreements on responsible state behavior in cyberspace among different states, the 2021-2025 UN OEWG achieving consensus represents a significant breakthrough. That said, the agreement reflected at least five positive developments in global cyber governance.
By Elsa Debargue and Jeffrey D. Bean
The Pall Mall Process is a work in progress, and only time will tell if it proves durable and successful. However, it does hint at a potential turning point in current cyber governance efforts by adapting to the realities of a decentralized, privatized, and often invisible marketplace of digital intrusion.
By Katherine Salinas
The repercussions of unregulated AI are unfolding in real time, with potentially life-altering consequences for millions of people.
By Jeffrey D. Bean
All in all, the United States’ oscillating policy on AI diffusion reflects an ongoing struggle in how best to simultaneously retain U.S. leadership in semiconductors and advance compute for AI at both a market level and in national defense applications, while blocking adversaries’ access to advanced AI chips and the capability to manufacture them.
By Jeffrey D. Bean and Andreas Kuehn
Looking ahead, as the Department of Defense strives to incorporate and utilize more AI chips, it will need to secure access to leading nodes for edge chips and the confidence in pathways to use greater allocations of secure cloud services for advanced computing.
By Jeffrey D. Bean
The United States must sustain its own domestic and international policy effort to ensure critical mineral supply, which will be vital for its defense, energy, and technological future.
By Katherine Salinas
Implementing effective regulations and guidelines that consider the impact on astronomical observation and preserving the natural night sky is essential.
By Katherine Salinas
While banning TikTok might seem like an easy answer, it highlights a broader problem — the gap between data protection regulations, knowledge gaps among legislators, and the larger digital divide in American public policy.
By Anneleen Roggeman
How are international institutions prioritizing cyber capacity and its potential contributions to global development and multilateral partnerships?
By Andreas Kuehn and Jeffrey D. Bean
What costs and risks need to be taken into account when geopolitics are causing shifts in global supply chains for semiconductors?
By Jeffrey D. Bean
While the CHIPS & Science Act of 2022 has boosted the United States' leadership in semiconductor technology, it has considerably lagged in doing so for STEM research. The reason? A lack of appropriated money, meaning the money is there but it has not been allocated yet.
By Andreas Kuehn
With the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election taking place in less than 2 months, a recap of the Biden administration's efforts to achieve a "latticework" of international partnerships with like-minded allies is necessary as we look to the future of trade and technology cooperation.
By Andreas Schumacher
The invention of the semiconductor chip has led to its integration in modern societies, economies, militaries, and consumer goods, and they are getting smaller by the day. However, does this diversity in chips constitute the need for a different perspective on policies?
By Satvik Pendyala
The revival of the Quad has yet to see success in international trade or more specifically rebalancing global supply chains. Could a Quad Technology Trade Agreement be the solution to the Quad's predicament while also increasing multilateral cooperation in the Indo-Pacific?
By Anneleen Roggeman
Earlier this month, member states of the UN Ad Hoc Committee on Cybercrime agreed to adopt the first global convention against cybercrime after three years of negotiations. The convention will be presented to the UN General Assembly in September, ratifying its legitimacy in 40 countries.
By Dhruva Jaishankar and Ylli Bajraktari
The United States and India now have a major opportunity to cooperate more closely on AI. But they must move beyond the rhetoric of shared values to building shared infrastructure.
By Sujai Shivakumar, Hideki Tomoshige, and Jeffrey D. Bean
India is positioning itself as an increasingly important node in the global semiconductor ecosystem, building on its established strengths in chip design and deep pool of STEM talent. These efforts come at a time when global semiconductor supply chains remain highly concentrated, creating opportunities for India to contribute to diversification and resilience.
By Andreas Kuehn
Technology alliances are emerging as the decisive arena of AI competition, where leadership depends less on model breakthroughs than on the global diffusion of trusted infrastructure, standards, and ecosystems.
Special Report
Produced by the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) and ORF America
Edited Volume
By Elie Alhajjar, Raj Shekhar, Divyansh Kaushik, Honson Tran, Megha Shrivastava, Zeena Nisar, Ingrid Erickson, Urmi Tat, Resham Sethi, Priyanshu Gupta, Katelyn Radack, Mandeep Rai, Neeraj Jain, Vaibhav Garg, Jatin Patni, and Wm. Matthew Kennedy
Editors: Andreas Kuehn and Anulekha Nandi
By Linda Nhon and Andreas Kuehn
Trump 2.0’s overall policy directions in critical and emerging technologies will likely hew to common expectations. The details, however, of what technologies the new administration will prioritise and how actions, such as tariffs and export controls for example, will affect the United States’ (US) innovation and technology leadership remains underexplored.
Contribution from the Cyberspace Cooperation Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation America in the context of the seventh substantive session of the Open-ended Working Group on security of and in the use of information and communications technologies 2021-2025 (March 2024).
By Jeffrey D. Bean and Stephen Ezell
The United States has taken several key steps that we advocated. Foremost was passing the CHIPS and Science Act with bipartisan Congressional support in August 2022, which included appropriations of $52.7 billion for the CHIPS Act.
By Andreas Kuehn and Trisha Ray
To examine the policies and their challenges, this chapter draws from in-depth, expert interviews with current and former government officials, trade associations, industry decision-makers, and technology experts, as well as a systematic document analysis of publicly available government and corporate documents.
By Andreas Kuehn & Alexandra Paulus
Governments and industry have become increasingly aware of the security risk that software supply chains can cause if not managed properly.
Increased malicious cyber activities by criminals and state actors undermine the technical security of digital systems and threaten the industrial, social, and economic systems that rely on them.
Special Report
By Abagail Lawson
By Andreas Kuehn
Supply chain breakdowns and disruptions through cyber or other means can have
significant regional and global effects.
By Andreas Kuehn
The industry has for long been criticized for not paying sufficient attention to the cybersecurity of its products.
By Mchael Depp
The digitalization of national intelligence systems has made it possible for NATO to more effectively support Ukraine’s efforts with intelligence sharing.
By Andreas Kuehn
The global surge in demand for critical materials has given rise to new geopolitics.
By Andreas Kuehn & Sven Herpig
The EU must define what it understands as active cyber defence and how it relates to other cyber policy issues.
By Dr. Andreas Kuehn & Vaibhav Garg
A centralized, prescriptive approach may struggle with scalability, device diversity, and deployment complexity.
Originally published in Digital Frontiers, Observer Research Foundation
By Dr. Andreas Kuehn and Jan-Peter Kleinhans
Originally published in Digital Frontiers, Observer Research Foundation
By Dr. Andreas Kuehn
