Drones buzz overhead, piercing the human hum in the crowded Walter E. Washington Convention Center. On the ground, tech executives, uniformed Army officers, policy wonks, and politicians compete for attention as swarms of people move throughout the vast space.
There are pitches about “next generation of warfighters,” and panels about winning the “AI innovation race.” There are job seekers and dignitaries.
OpenAI is also working the room, touting its o3 reasoning model, newly deployed on a secure government supercomputer at Los Alamos. “The transfer of model weights occurred via highly secured and heavily encrypted hard drives that were hand carried by OpenAI personnel to the Lab,” a company spokesperson told Fortune. “For us, today’s milestone, and this partnership more broadly, represents more than a technical achievement. It signals our shared commitment to American scientific leadership.”
It’s not just about the federal government, either – even state leaders are angling for attention. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves, who is publicizing his state’s AI data center investments and gave a keynote at the Expo told Fortune, “The leaders in this space are here, and I want to be talking to the leaders that are going to make decisions about where they’re making capital investments in the future.”
The Expo is hosted by The Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a nonprofit Schmidt cofounded in 2021 and for which he remains the major funder and chair. SCSP operates as a subsidiary of The Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, the Schmidt family’s private foundation, and is an outgrowth of the now-defunct National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence — the temporary federal advisory body Schmidt also led from 2018 to 2021.
Still, all of this seems really about Schmidt’s vision for the future of AI, which he shared in depth in a highly-publicized TED talk last month. In it, he argued that humans should welcome the advancement of AI because our society will not have enough humans to be productive in the future–while delivering a dire warning about how the race for AI dominance could go wrong as the technology becomes a geopolitically destabilizing force.
He repeated his hypothetical doomsday scenario in his Expo keynote. Schmidt posits an AI competitor who is advancing quickly, and is only about six months behind the U.S. in developing cutting-edge AI. In other international competitions, this could mean a relatively stable balance of power. But the fear is that once a certain level of AI capability is reached, a steep acceleration curve means the other side will never catch up. According to Schmidt, the other side would have to consider bombing their opponent’s data centers to stop them from becoming permanently dominant.
It’s a scenario – with a proposed doctrine called Mutual AI Malfunction that would slow down each side and control progress – that Schmidt introduced alongside co-authors Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher in their 2021 book The Age of AI and Our Human Future.
Schmidt shared a thought exercise about what he would do if he could build the U.S. military completely from scratch – no Pentagon, no bureaucracy, no old, obsolete technology – that would basically resemble a tech company: agile, software-driven, and centered around networked, AI-powered systems.
“I would have two layers of drones,” he said. “I’d have a set of ISR drones [unmanned aerial vehicles used for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions]. Those are ones that are high and they have deep looking cameras, and they watch everything. They’re connected by an AI network, which is presumably designed to be un-jammable. And then I would have essentially bomber drones of one kind or another, the ISR drones would observe, and they would immediately dispatch the bomber.”
With that kind of a defensive system, he added, “it would be essentially impossible to invade a country by land,” and said that he wanted US assets to be protected by defensive “drone swarms,” adding that “there’s an entire set of companies in America that want to build this…many of them are here at our show – I want a small amount of the government’s money to go into that industry.”
Schmidt’s Expo is open to all, and there were those in attendance who would beg to differ with his gung-ho takes on the future of battle. The International Committee of the Red Cross, for example, showcased a booth with thought-provoking, graffiti-style questions like “Does AI make wars better or worse?”
Still, it was Schmidt’s vision of the future of warfare and national security that was front and center at an event “designed to strengthen U.S. and allied competitiveness in critical technologies.”
“Have you all had a chance to go hang out at the drone cage?” he asked the audience, pointing out the young age of many of the competitors. “[They are] beating the much bigger adults,” he said. “This is the future. They’re inventing it with or without us, that’s where we should go.”
