Great powers were once built on tangible assets: territory, armies, oil, ships and steel. While those still matter, power in today's world also comes from data, knowledge, and algorithms. And, unlike in previous eras, much of that power now sits with private companies, a domain U.S. intelligence agencies weren’t designed to track. FSI Senior Fellow Amy Zegart warns this leaves America open to a technological Pearl Harbor, where a competitor like China leapfrogs the U.S. in the technology race with devastating results for national security. She joins Colin Kahl on World Class to discuss how intelligence agencies can keep up, why frontier AI models need independent testing, and what this summer’s OpenAI–Hugging Face hack says about concentrated corporate power. They also explore how drones are changing the rules of coercion. As Russian drones probe NATO’s skies and U.S. interceptor stockpiles run low, Zegart makes the case for why the spear factory, rather than the tip of the spear, may become a nation's most credible signal of resolve and deterrence.
Amy Zegart is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where she also leads the Technology Policy Accelerator and the Oster National Security Affairs Fellows Program; an associate director and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI; and a professor of political science by courtesy, The author of five books, she specializes in U.S. intelligence, emerging technologies, and national security.
This episode's reading recommendations are "China’s New Economic Weapons" by Evan S. Medeiros and Andrew Polk in the April 2025 edition of Washington Quarterly, and Arms and Influence by Thomas Schelling.
This episode was supported by research using Anthropic Claude. All outputs were reviewed by humans and the final expression was produced by the authors.
If you like what you hear, you can get additional content from scholars at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies by following us on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, and by subscribing to our newsletters and updates.
