As vice president and director of RAND Global and Emerging Risks, Matan Chorev oversees research on some of the most consequential challenges facing the United States and the world. That portfolio ranges from the rapid advance of artificial intelligence to growing biological threats to intensifying geopolitical competition.
Chorev has spent his career working on U.S. national security strategy and diplomacy, in government as well as at policy research organizations. He most recently served as Principal Deputy Director of the State Department’s policy planning staff.
How do you define the mission and mandate of RAND Global and Emerging Risks?
We take a lot of inspiration from RAND’s founding era, immediately after World War II. The contours of the post-war international order were uncertain, and the implications of nuclear weapons were still unclear. That required some foundational analysis and planning to develop the strategies, doctrines, and capabilities that would help policymakers navigate an international landscape they had not confronted before.
We’re at a similar inflection point today. The world as we knew it in the post–Cold War era no longer exists. Many of the assumptions that animated U.S. foreign policy and national security no longer hold. The nature of the emerging order is at best hazy. Meanwhile, AI is reshaping every aspect of how we live, work, fight, and compete. And so our mission is to help decisionmakers understand, anticipate, and navigate a world that is again undergoing rapid transformation.
AI is reshaping every aspect of how we live, work, fight, and compete.
How do you see AI challenging some of those global assumptions?
We have to be careful here. There’s a tendency to argue that everything we know about the world goes away overnight, and that’s never the case.
But I think there will be some significant discontinuities. One widely held assumption is that we are moving into an era in which many states will have the power and capacity to pursue strategic autonomy. That means they will have more freedom of action, more diverse relationships, fewer strategic dependencies, and more influence.
My colleague Salman Ahmed and I asked whether and how the rapid advance of AI might challenge that assumption. By mapping the capabilities that states will need to leverage AI to enhance their national power and influence, we showed that AI is likely to frustrate ambitions for strategic autonomy.
Major powers like the United States and China will find it harder than they hoped to translate advantages in AI into geopolitical dominance. They’ll still depend on external players for key resources, inputs, markets, and more. Emerging powers, meanwhile, will find that the gap between them and the great powers will grow, rather than shrink, since none of them possesses the combination of inputs—chips, compute, capital, talent, and energy—needed to develop frontier AI.
The implications of this will require states large and small to rethink their national security and diplomatic strategies.
