USA and Israel National AI Strategy: Comparative Analysis
Introduction
Nearly 70 years ago, in July 1956, academics gathered for a summer workshop at Dartmouth to explore how an emerging technology called “digital computers” could be used to perform tasks once conducted by a human. Dartmouth mathematics professor John McCarthy convened this conclave with the goal, “to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” (McCarthy 1956) It was at this conference that the term “Artificial Intelligence” was born.?
In the ensuing decades, the field of AI languished in the halls of academia, failing to live up to the hype of robots promised by science fiction. In just the past decade, however, advances in computing power, algorithms, and the exponential growth in digital data have enabled AI systems to seriously compete with humans, whether it’s beating the world champion at Go in 2016, flying fighter jets that beat human pilots in 2020, or enabling anyone to write a world-class novel in with ChatGPT in 2023. (Buchanan and Imbrie 2022; Lawler 2020) The world of AI is rapidly approaching the one foretold by IJ Good, one of the original godfathers of AI present at the Dartmouth conference: “Let an ultra-intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever.” (Connolly 2015)
The rapid advance of AI systems in the past years has caused alarm in the halls of power from company boardrooms to the high offices of state. Nations around the world are formulating national AI strategies as a centerpiece of their national competitiveness for the 21st century. The US established a National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI) in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018. The NSCAI views, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies [as holding the] promise to be the most powerful tools in generations for expanding knowledge, increasing prosperity, and enriching the human experience.” (Schmidt 2021) The Israeli national strategy frames the development of AI in terms of a global arms race for technological superiority which will be essential to the state’s economic and national security. (Ben-Israel and Matania 2019) Perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin put it most succinctly, back in 2017, “Whoever rules this sphere [artificial intelligence] will be the ruler of the world.” (Vincent 2017)
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate how two leading AI powers: the United States and Israel, are developing their national strategies toward AI and how the implementations of these strategies have evolved since they were both conceived almost 5 years ago. The United States, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, the digital computer, the internet, and the smartphone; is looking to maintain its preeminent position while fending off rivals like China. Israel, a far smaller nation, seeks to play to its comparative advantages and focus its AI efforts in key sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, cybersecurity, transportation, and the digitalization of government. While differing significantly in scale and resources, the U.S. and Israeli national AI strategies reveal a shared recognition that leadership in AI is a vital imperative for security and prosperity in the 21st century.
Israel’s Rise as a Cyber Nation
In 2009, Dan Senor and Paul Singer wrote a book called “Startup Nation” which described the unique culture, mindset, and institutions that allowed Israel to become a major tech player in the world economy. A small nation adrift amongst a sea of enemies and with no natural resources to speak of, Israel focused on the one resource that it could rely on: the innovation and tenacity of its people. The late Shimon Peres wrote “Israel bred creativity proportionate not to the size of our country, but to the dangers we faced… Israel’s only option has been to pursue quality based on creativity.” (Senor and Singer 2009) Israel’s technological superiority is the basis for its survival amongst the quantitative advantage of its enemies. Over the decades, innovations brought on by military necessity migrated into civilian industries like aerospace, internet, and in particular, cybersecurity. In the past 30 years, Israel has produced more startups per capita than any other country other than the United States. (Kramer 2023; Senor and Singer 2009)
Senor and Singer paint a picture of an IDF in which young brash officers invent tools and tactics on the fly. “As usual in the Israeli military, the tactical innovation came from the bottom up—from individual tank commanders and their officers. It probably never occurred to these soldiers that they should ask their higher-ups to solve the problem, or that they might not have the authority to act on their own. Nor did they see anything strange in their taking responsibility for inventing, adopting, and disseminating new tactics in real-time, on the fly.” (Senor and Singer 2009) Contrary to the authors' representation, Israel's journey to becoming a first-rate technological power, particularly in the field of cyber technology, was far more top-down and centrally directed. This stands in contrast to the decentralized, anti-establishment culture of 1970s San Francisco that gave birth to Silicon Valley in America.
Prime Minister Netanyahu approached retired Major General Isaac Ben-Israel in 2010 to help draft a national strategy for Israel that would launch the nation into becoming a global power in cybersecurity. MG Ben-Israel was previously the head of Israeli military R&D and was instrumental in establishing Israel’s elite cyber units. Professor Eviatar Matania, first director of the Israeli National Cyber Bureau recalled, “The tipping point of Israel’s journey to become a cyber-power was a visit by then prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Unit 8200 in 2010. Netanyahu was astonished by what he heard from the soldiers. He understood that the new world of cyber posed an extraordinary risk to Israel, as the country would be vulnerable to attacks from anywhere in the world.” (Matania and Rapaport 2022) The “National Cyber Initiative” established a new governance body, the National Cyber Bureau in the Office of the Prime Minister to coordinate cybersecurity policy amongst government, military, academia, and industry. (Housen-Couriel 2017) Matania further noted that “The national cyber system that I headed was the first of its kind in the world. There was an in-depth government understanding that in order to build a world-leading national ecosystem, it was not enough to wait for the free market to do its thing. Large budgets were invested in academia and industry and in building dedicated cyber defense capabilities.” (Matania and Rapaport 2022)
The key differentiator of this policy was that it was far more comprehensive than just establishing cybersecurity information-sharing policies such as the Information Sharing and Advisory Centers (ISAC) coordinated by DHS in the United States. Ben-Israel’s report would be transformed in August 2011 into Resolution 3611 “Advancing National Cyberspace Capabilities.” Ben-Israel explicitly recommended that the new National Cyber Bureau with the full authority of the Prime Minister’s office coordinate with the IDF and the Israeli education ministry to establish cybersecurity talent for elite cyber units and later on for the private sector. This would further be supported by the government-funded cyber research centers at major universities like Tel Aviv University, Technion, Ben Gurion, and Hebrew University. (Housen-Couriel 2017; Antebi 2021)
?In practice, Israel has established a centralized pipeline for its youth to engage in cyber operations to support the nation. As early as 15 years old, Israeli students who show talent are sent to special cyber training programs called “Magshimiim” where they learn coding and hacking tools so that when they are drafted into the IDF at 18 they are already to prepared to serve. (Estrin 2017) In the IDF, they will go on to serve in cyber units like 8200, where they further hone their skills and advance state-of-the-art tools. Once their 3-year commitment is over, many go on to get their degrees in cyber at Israel’s dedicated research centers, transferring what they have learned to the academic field and eventually private hi-tech companies. The real-world experience they get serving in the IDF combined with the academics of these university programs makes these graduates highly sought after by major tech companies. IBM, Intel, Google, and Microsoft, amongst others all have cybersecurity and other high-tech research centers in Israel because of this concentration of talent. (Antebi 2021) The National Cyber Bureau and Israeli Innovation Authority have policies to encourage the organic growth of cyber startups by veterans of the country's elite military technology units, leveraging their expertise to develop innovations for the global cybersecurity market. (Antebi 2021) Matania estimates that as much as 40% of global cybersecurity R/D investment is now going to Israel because of the quality of the talent and innovations. Cybersecurity technology now represents 15% of Israel’s total exports. As Metania explains, “In cyber… Israel is a global powerhouse in absolute numbers” with every third cyber unicorn (a startup valued over $1 billion) in the world now being founded in Israel. (Matania and Rapaport 2022)?
Israel’s cybersecurity expertise has also created a diplomatic advantage as other states who may not be inclined to publicly do business with Israel seek out Israeli know-how to shore up their own defenses. The Atlantic Council reports that the UAE has been receiving assistance from Israel to build up the cyber defense of its critical infrastructure since 2007. Saudi Arabia also reportedly received secret technical assistance from Israel during the 2012 Saudi Aramco hack by Iran. (Dagres 2021) The signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020 now allows states like UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco to openly sign deals with Israel, allowing Israeli cyber incident response teams into these formerly hostile powers. Matania explains that “When Israel signs a cyber-defense alliance with Cyprus and Greece, it does not necessarily need Cyprus or Greece to upgrade its cyber defense – but in return, for defense, we get payback in other areas. Israel has become synonymous with cyber, so much so that today, we are relying on cyber in the international arena.” (Matania and Rapaport 2022)
From Cyber Nation to AI Nation: Israel’s attempt to become a leading AI power?
The extraordinary success of Israel’s rise as a cyber power led Prime Minister Netanyahu to recall Prof. Ben-Israel and Prof. Eviatar Matania to co-author a new report entitled “National Initiative for Secured Intelligent Systems” in 2019. The authors explicitly state in their opening letter to PM Netanyahu that the goal of the AI initiative is, “To place Israel in the top five countries in the world in the core technological areas, which serve this vision, within five years.” (Ben-Israel and Matania 2019 p.11) Ben-Israel and Matania urge Netanyahu to declare AI as a major strategic priority just as was done with cyber in 2010 and allocate budgetary resources accordingly. A key recommendation of the report is to establish a new AI directorate similar to the success of the National Cyber Directorate in the Office of the Prime Minister to oversee national AI policy implementation. The authors see AI as a cornerstone of Israel’s future “techno-security strength” where national power is “directly affected by the ability to collect, process and use data, whether for purposes of intelligence, defense or offense.” (Ben-Israel and Matania 2019 p.19)
The strategy takes an expansive view of AI and underlying enabling technologies such as IoT, sensors, robotics, data science, distributed, specialized high-performance computing, and even quantum computing. Taken together, the authors describe them collectively as a strategy for developing “intelligent systems.” The strategy further emphasizes the need for enhanced cyber security when trusting such intelligent systems to run entirely on their own. “Massive entry into the field of intelligent systems will further intensify this phenomenon, not only due to our increasing reliance on computers but also because some artificial intelligence technologies are consciously built on self-altering algorithms, thus we lose (consciously) some of our control over machines.” (Ben-Israel and Matania 2019 p.10) A key pillar of the strategy builds on Israel’s advantage in cybersecurity towards a strategy not just of AI but one for “secured intelligent systems” and hence the formal name of the report. (Ben-Israel and Matania 2019)
The strategy outlines four national flagship projects in areas where Israel has relative strengths to drive ecosystem development and meet critical needs. In healthcare, the report advocates for virtual doctor visits and an AI triage system to ease hospital overcrowding by intelligently determining patient priorities. For agriculture, it proposes using computer vision for early pest and disease detection in crops, feeding into a larger precision agriculture system optimizing resources like water and fertilizer. The transportation project focuses on an AI traffic management system to reduce congestion by coordinating signals based on real-time traffic flows. On security, a national emergency response AI is envisioned to predict needs and coordinate resources during disasters using data integration. This would support a broader government digitalization initiative where ministry intelligent systems communicate to overcome Israel’s notorious bureaucracy. (Ben-Israel and Matania 2019)
The flagship projects advocated in the strategy are solid initiatives in which Israel can build upon long-standing advantages and help establish itself as a market leader in these areas, especially intelligent medicine and precision agriculture. Israeli farmers' research in the 1950s into how to grow crops in a desert climate with little water led to the development of innovations such as drip irrigation, which uses a fraction of the water necessary for crops. Drip irrigation is now supporting farmers throughout the developing world and the further development of precision agriculture may serve as a significant soft power advantage when coordinating with nations in Africa or Latin America. (Hasbara 2021) The intelligent ER triaging system combined with a virtual doctor would significantly expand healthcare access, especially for the poor in the United States, who often use the ER as primary care due to lack of coverage. If patients could see a virtual doctor at home to get a diagnosis, it would significantly free up ER availability for real emergencies. Israel can further build upon its centralized medical databases and genomics work to advance the field of precision medicine where medicines are explicitly engineered for the patient given their DNA. (Johnson et al. 2021)
As Israel approaches the end of its 5-year plan, it remains unclear how to measure if it achieved its goal of becoming a world leader in AI as the strategy does not provide its own metrics. (Ben-Israel and Matania 2019) As of 2022, the Oxford Insights Government AI Readiness Index ranks Israel 20th out of 180 countries, weighed down by a lack of specific AI governing institutions and its own cloud infrastructure which is vital to building modern AI systems. (Oxford Insights 2022) The Stanford Human AI Project ranked Israel 9th in 2021 in the overall vibrancy of its national AI ecosystem. Israel leads in terms of AI talent concentration and relative skills penetration, but it is severely lacking in key metrics like total private investment, journal publications, and patent grants for new AI technologies. (“Global AI Vibrancy Tool” 2023) Judging by these two global standards, Israel has failed in its goal of ranking in the top 5 global nations in AI. Implementation of the National AI Initiative has continued to be hampered by the larger Israeli political turmoil which has failed to pass a budget in 3.5 years and thus cannot allocate the 10 Billion NIS (~$3B) requested in the report. Prof. Ben-Israel lamented that “Naftali Bennett’s government prepared a budget and Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman was prepared to put 1 billion shekels ($291 million) in the budget for AI,” Ben-Israel said. “Then the government [fell] as it always does here in Israel. We have to wait and see if they will put it in the new budget because Yair Lapid’s government has not approved a new budget.” The idea of establishing a dedicated AI Directorate also received significant pushback from the Israeli Innovation Authority and the Council for Higher Education which claimed that such a directorate was redundant and that the National Infrastructure Forum for Research and Development (TELEM) was perfectly sufficient. (Paltieli 2022) Bureaucratic infighting continues to stymie the establishment of a centralized regulatory body for AI like the National Cyber Directorate and this continues to hamper government coordination and regulation. Without budgetary certainty or any central direction from the national government, Israeli AI will be left to grow in an uncoordinated and haphazard way and may fall into an “AI winter” due to bureaucratic paralysis.
The United States of AI
In the waning months of the Obama administration in March 2016, the reigning world champion at the game of Go, Lee Sedol, lost 4-1 against an AI named AlphaGo built by Google DeepMind in a feat that was supposed to be over a decade away. (Moyer 2016) The resounding victory of the AI led to a “Sputnik moment” in both Washington and Beijing about the potential power being unleashed by this new technology. Michael Kanaan, former chair for AI at the US Air Force described the sentiment as, “The moment is now for the West—particularly those nations in a position to significantly affect the development and deployment of AI—to openly engage its populations and policymakers in practical, transparent, and accountable conversations about AI and its related technologies and implications.” (Kanaan 2020 p. 210) Kai-Fu Lee, the famed Chinese AI researcher and entrepreneur remarked, “With AlphaGo … the West appeared poised to continue that [technological] dominance into the age of artificial intelligence. To people here, AlphaGo’s victories were both a challenge and an inspiration. They turned into China’s “Sputnik Moment” for artificial intelligence.” (Lee 2018 p.3)
Just two months after the victory of AlphaGo the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) formed a new subcommittee on Machine Learning and AI in order to coordinate AI efforts across the federal government. Dr. Lynne Parker of the National Science Foundation and Dr. Jason Matheney of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity were selected to co-chair a special task force on AI to define federal strategic priorities for AI R&D, especially those not being addressed in the private sector. (Parker 2016) At this time, AI was still treated as an academic novelty rather than a serious matter of national security. The AI R&D Plan was focused on safety, ethics, making federal data publicly available for research, and setting federal standards for evaluating AI models. (Parker 2016) Ed Felten, Deputy US Chief Technology Officer hosted workshops at the time focused on topics such as “AI for Social Good” and “Legal and Governance Implications for AI.” (Felten 2016)
The shot across the bow came when China, still reeling from its perceived humiliation by the West, issued its “Next Generation AI Development Plan” in July 2017. (Webster 2017) The State Council of China issued a dictum that by 2020 China’s AI technologies would reach “globally advanced levels” and that it would become a significant source of economic growth. By 2025, China’s AI was to reach a “world-leading level and AI becomes the main driving force for China’s industrial upgrading and economic transformation.” (Webster 2017) By 2030, China would become the world’s leading AI innovation center. (Webster 2017) As viewed by officials at the Pentagon this was a naked attempt by China to dominate AI to advance state control and tilt the global balance of power in favor of Beijing. As Michael Kanaan describes in his book T-Minus AI, “By 2030, China intends to dominantly lead all countries in all aspects and related fields of AI. To be the sole leader, the world’s unquestioned and controlling epicenter of AI. Period. That is China’s declared national plan.” (Kanaan 2020 p.xvii) The fear of America losing its technological preeminence in a field it invented was further exacerbated when Russian President Vladimir Putin in September 2017 remarked, “Whoever rules this sphere [artificial intelligence] will be the ruler of the world.” (Vincent 2017) What was simply a matter of academic curiosity just a year prior was set to become the centerpiece of a new 21st-century arms race to dominate the new “strategic high ground of core AI technologies” in the words of Xi Jinping. (Zhou 2018)
The Trump Administration and AI
President Trump issued Executive Order 13859 on February 11, 2019, entitled “Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.” President Trump opens the EO that? “The United States is the world leader in AI research and development (R&D) and deployment. Continued American leadership in AI is of paramount importance to maintaining the economic and national security of the United States and to shaping the global evolution of AI in a manner consistent with our Nation's values, policies, and priorities.” (Trump 2019) The EO marked a decisive change in official language regarding AI with a greater focus on its impact on national and economic security as well as verbiage discussing American values such as privacy and civil liberties. A key point of the EO was that “The United States must foster public trust and confidence in AI technologies and protect civil liberties, privacy, and American values in their application in order to fully realize the potential of AI technologies for the American people.” (Trump 2019) This was an explicit rebuttal to Chinese AI systems which focused on ensuring “social harmony” (read: CCP State control) through invasive monitoring and tracking systems of its citizens. (Webster 2017; Ford 2021)?
The policies laid out in the 2019 EO were later codified into the 2020 National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act which established a new National AI Initiative Office in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Dr. Lynne Parker, who chaired the original 2016 AI R&D Plan, was selected to become its first director. Dr. Parker and the NAIIO have worked across the federal government to subsequently craft over 20 AI strategy documents. “Agencies are acting on these reports, and they’re implementing the ideas. The bottom line is that the agencies have built up their capacity and prioritization of AI, and its use in their agencies. They’ve put a lot of thought into how they can best use the technology to advance their missions, and think about how they use AI responsibly to make sure that no harm is going to result from their use,” Parker said. (Heckman 2022)
National Security Commission on AI
In August 2018, Congress authorized a special commission to “evaluate US competitiveness in the area of AI and the means and methods to maintain technological advantage … related to national security and defense.” (NSCAI Charter 2018) The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence was chaired by former Google CEO Erich Schmidt and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work with an explicit focus to develop a national security strategy for AI to compete against rivals like China both economically and militarily. In the expansive 750+ page report, China is called out by name 535 times. Schmidt and Work call out China’s unethical use of AI in their opening letter: “The AI competition is also a values competition. China’s domestic use of AI is a chilling precedent for anyone around the world who cherishes individual liberty. Its employment of AI as a tool of repression and surveillance—at home and, increasingly, abroad—is a powerful counterpoint to how we believe AI should be used. The AI future can be democratic, but we have learned enough about the power of technology to strengthen authoritarianism abroad and fuel extremism at home to know that we must not take for granted that future technology trends will reinforce rather than erode democracy.” (Schmidt 2021) The strategy which Schmidt and Work published is one not just of military dominance but one that champions the necessity of American values for a free society and how promoting these values in the global development of AI standards is a vital national security interest. (Schmidt 2021)
The NSCAI focuses the first half of its report on evaluating how AI will impact the future battlefield and shape national security decision-making in the 21st century. “AI will transform the way war is conducted in every domain from undersea to outer space, as well as in cyberspace and along the electromagnetic spectrum.” (Schmidt 2021) The report describes how AI will automatically link sensors that detect targets to ISR assets which ID them to firing platforms like artillery to neutralize them. AI in this construct will enable sensor fusion and rapidly accelerate the sensor-to-shooter cycle which currently requires passing information between various units and soldiers to prosecute a target. The report discusses the need to maintain a human “on the loop” with these autonomous weapons systems and emphasizes a “human-centric approach” to fighting. (Schmidt 2021) The issue, however, that is not fully addressed in the report, is that these systems can eventually identify and prosecute targets faster than a human or even a team of humans could realistically respond. This is especially true in terms of missile defense where targets are moving at orbital velocities and therefore could require that the system would be entrusted to engage on its own. Subsequent guidance from the 2023 update to DOD instruction 3000.09 enforces that any lethal engagement by an autonomous weapons system must first be authorized by a human commander and that said commander must be able to retain the ability to readily abort the mission. (DOD 2023)
The second half of the report focuses on the strategic economic and technological competitiveness in the field of AI. The report notes that “The human deficit is the government’s most conspicuous AI deficit and the single greatest inhibitor to buying, building, and fielding AI-enabled technologies for national security purposes.” The report urges the creation of a “Digital Services Academy” which would function like the US military service academies to purposely train American youth in the field of AI. Graduates would go on to serve in the US national security establishment similar to the Boren Fellowship used for developing critical language skills amongst those entering federal service. (Schmidt 2021) The report also advocates expanding access to highly skilled visas like the H-1B and O type for those with extraordinary abilities. For the field of AI in particular, the United States is heavily reliant on Chinese researchers at American academic institutions and tech companies. The Paulson Institute’s Marco Polo Project found that while the US accounted for 60% of the world’s top-tier AI talent, the largest share of them were born, raised, and educated in China. The research showed that 56% of Chinese AI researchers go on to emigrate to the USA, which is a major boon for US academia and industry. The issue here, of course, is that Chinese nationals, unless they become naturalized US citizens, are not able to obtain the security clearance necessary to support national security AI projects and thus the US government cannot tap into this wellspring of talent within its own borders. (MarcoPolo 2022)
Lastly, the report notes that the US must secure its microelectronic supply chain as it is currently dominated by China, and the US risks being cut off from this vital economic resource in the event of a crisis. The United States currently enjoys a dominant position in the design of microchips, especially GPUs which are vital to modern deep-learning systems. American chip companies NVIDIA and AMD hold a duopoly in the design of GPUs but they are reliant on foreign manufacturers in China and Taiwan to actually bring their product to market. (Mujtaba 2022) Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) is the primary producer of the chips that power American smartphones, 5G, and AI. The report noted that the recent chip shortage caused by supply chain disruptions in China because of COVID cost a single American car company $2.5 billion - and a full economic blockade would bring the US economy to a halt. (Schmidt 2021) The NSCAI sounded the alarm that TSMC is the lone producer of the world’s most advanced microchips and is staring down the barrel of a Chinese armada just 110 miles across the Taiwan Strait. (Schmidt 2021) The reports’ recommendations spurred the passage of the 2022 CHIPS Act which allocated $50B to build new semiconductor fabs domestically. (White House 2022) TSMC and Intel are both building new fabs in Arizona costing over $40B each and Micron and Samsung have similarly announced new production facilities in the United States. (Reuters 2021; Intel 2021) The goal is that these facilities will be operational between 2024 and 2026 in order to head off the anticipated forcible annexation of Taiwan by China in 2027. (Hawkins 2023)
A Comparative Analysis of National AI Strategies
The strategy put forth by the NSCAI represents the expansive scope of interests of a global superpower while Israel’s National AI initiative is far more narrowly defined. In absolute terms, the US strategy is over 10x the length of the Israeli strategy. While the Israeli initiative paints AI in terms of a global arms race for technological supremacy, the recommendations focus mostly on developing AI for civilian applications which would increase Israeli soft power appeal, especially in agriculture and healthcare. The US strategy in stark contrast spends half the report addressing the use of AI in warfare and for the intelligence community. It is noteworthy that Israel left this aspect of AI out of its strategy given that it was authored by none other than the former head of military research and development. The Israeli strategy only vaguely mentions the need for a national cloud infrastructure to support military and civil governance. (Ben-Israel and Matania 2019) Israel, it should be noted, is at the forefront of deploying AI and robotics on the battlefield and is a key exporter of UAVs. During the May 2021 Operation Guardian of the Walls, the IDF deployed thousands of quadcopter drones to maintain persistent overhead surveillance of the entirety of the Gaza Strip and used computer vision algorithms to automatically detect and pinpoint rocket launchers; feeding this targeting information to orbiting armed drones. (Ahroneim 2021) While the US is mulling such AI-enabled sensor-shooter fusion in its strategy documents, Israel is already doing it on the battlefield.
Israel’s distinct advantage in the AI race is that it can build off the well-established tech talent pipeline developed during the cyber boom. The US continues to struggle with national policy regarding K-12 STEM education across 50 states setting their own educational standards and agendas. While the IDF can handpick the best high schoolers ready to engage in cyber operations, the NSA, CYBERCOM, and other cyber agencies must invest years to develop cyber warriors which are often shortly lost to better-paying positions in the private sector. The geographic proximity of Israel also lends itself to fertile cross-pollination between academia, industry, and the military and there is a constant revolving door between these parties. (Antebi 2021) In contrast, the 3000 miles between Washington DC and Silicon Valley is not just a physical gap but contributes to a major cultural divergence and clash of interests. The national security establishment has tried to enlist companies like Google to develop AI for military applications. However, this has faced resistance internally from engineers at these companies on ethical grounds, who have staged walkouts to protest involvement in the US drone program under Project Maven or to build tools for the Border Patrol. (Smith and Browne 2021) Israel can tap into a deeper sense of patriotism where everyone serves in order to ensure the continued existence of the Jewish State. The engineers who build for the top AI companies all served in the IDF and thus have firsthand knowledge of the threats and how such AI systems will benefit their fellow soldiers and citizens.
America’s vast economic resources allow it to invest billions in AI research, infrastructure, and talent development that dwarfs the budget of a small nation like Israel. The US is home to the dominant global cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), GPU designers (Nvidia, AMD), and AI frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch), giving it a major strategic advantage when it comes to access and control over the core technologies powering modern AI. The United States has already inaugurated 11 National AI Institutes while Israel is still working to build out its first one at Ben Gurion University. (National Science Foundation 2021) The US also attracts the top AI researchers and engineers from across the globe to its universities and tech companies, while Israel relies more on cultivating homegrown talent. The US strategy is focused on major geopolitical competition with other potential peer competitors like China while Israel is more concerned with immediate tactical threats like using AI to counter terrorist rocket launchers.
However, the decentralized, federalist model in the US can also be a double-edged sword - allowing vibrant innovation across states but also fragmentation and coordination challenges at the national level. Israel's small size lends itself to closer national coordination when implementing AI strategy. The stability of America's democratic system also enables consistent long-term strategies for AI, contrasted with Israel's more turbulent political situation. The US global diplomatic power allows it to set international standards for AI with allies and partners and counter Chinese attempts to imbue “Chinese characteristics” into global tech standards. (Bloomberg 2022) While the US has far greater resources overall, Israel has proven adept at finding innovative solutions and punching above its weight when it comes to rapidly adapting advanced technologies like AI to defense needs out of necessity.
Conclusions
These national strategies were formulated in the age of AlphGo winning at a single specific game, AlphaFold being able to compete in one aspect of protein discovery, and computer vision being able to identify only the specific objects it was trained on. These strategies were formulated for the age of narrow AI: where the computer can only do exactly what it was trained to do and nothing more. The advent of ChatGPT in early 2023 ushered in a new era of generative AI and the potential for “Artificial General Intelligence” which can accomplish any task. Generative AI like ChatGPT, Claude, and Bard can answer any question from quantum physics to consulting on AI policy to writing new computer code. The world is rapidly entering an age where AI can be an expert on any topic and do so faster than is humanly possible. The national AI strategies are not prepared for this and we as a society most likely are not either. The true question of power and strategy is who will have the resources to build and control these ultra-intelligent machines. When the AI knows all, will they be the ones writing the next AI strategy?
Works Cited
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Parker, Lynne. 2016. “The National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan.”