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.
And at the center of it all, there is Eric Schmidt.
The former Google CEO is the cofounder of the non-profit that organizes the confab, known as the AI+ Expo for National Competitiveness. The Washington DC event, now in its second year, is a fascinating, real world manifestation of the Schmidt worldview, which sees artificial intelligence, business, geopolitics, and national defense as interconnected forces reshaping America’s global strategy.
If it was once the province of futurists and think tank researchers, this worldview is now increasingly the consensus view. From innovations like self-driving robotaxis circulating in multiple U.S. cities to Silicon Valley defense startups snagging large government contracts, evidence of change—and of the stakes involved—are everywhere.
The AI+ Expo, hosted by Schmidt’s Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), is ground zero for the stakeholders of this new world order: Thousands of Washington insiders, military brass, tech executives, policymakers, students, and curious professionals are drawn together under one stars and stripes-style banner—to ensure America leads the AI age. It’s a kind of AI county fair, albeit one where Lockheed Martin stages demos, defense tech companies hand out swag, Condoleezza Rice takes the stage, and protesters outside chant “No tech for genocide” during Schmidt’s keynote. The event is free to attend, and lines to enter stretch around the block. The only thing missing? GPU corn dogs on a stick, perhaps.
A geopolitical vision for the future of AI
Soft lobbying is omnipresent at the event. Tesla, for instance, offers self-driving tech demos just as the company prepares to launch its first robotaxi service in Austin and as Elon Musk pushes lawmakers on autonomous vehicle regulations.
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.
The Expo is about building a community that brings private sector, academia and government into one place, said Ylli Bajraktari, president and CEO of SCSP and Schmidt’s co-founder, who previously served as chief of staff to National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and joined the Department of Defense in 2010. “Washington is not a tech city, but yet, this is a city where [tech and AI] policies are being developed,” he said.
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.
What if Eric Schmidt could build his own military?
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?”
Even student attendees well-versed in wargaming, like Luke Miller, a rising sophomore studying international relations at the College of William and Mary and a member of a wargames club, said that today’s era of AI and national security is “supposed to be a sobering moment.” For a country like Ukraine to deploy drones to attack Russian air bases — as they did with great effect just days before the conference— “is something we should definitely be concerned about going forward,” he said.
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.”
