Pat Condo, CEO of Seekr Technologies, joins 13th & Park for a wide-ranging conversation on artificial intelligence, national security, and why the next great power competition may be decided not by who builds the smartest AI, but by who builds the most trustworthy one. Drawing on decades of work across defense programs, intelligence, and technology, Condo frames AI as the defining feature of 21st century superpower status, comparing its geopolitical weight to the role nuclear weapons played in shaping the post-World War II world order.
Condo breaks down the core challenge facing AI today: provenance, lineage, and intent. He explains how training data shapes the outputs of AI models, how bias and misinformation get baked in from the start, and why the explosion of open-source models and AI agents, including those originating from China, poses a serious and underappreciated national security risk. He points to 60 million deepfakes generated daily as evidence that the unintended consequences of AI are already here, and warns that the race to build fast is outpacing the effort to build safely.
The conversation explores how Seekr Technologies approaches AI governance the way a financial auditor approaches a balance sheet, tracing assumptions through a system to verify that what comes out can actually be trusted. Condo argues that the solution is not to slow AI down, but to channel it through the right governance frameworks and transparency standards, the same principles that made institutions like the SWIFT financial system reliable at global scale.
Condo also reflects on his own path from the MX missile guidance program at Northrop to Digital Equipment Corporation to founding companies around search and discovery. He closes with a direct message: the debate over AI should not be framed as good versus evil, but as a civilization-scale opportunity that demands urgency, governance, and a commitment to transparency before the chaos of an uncontrolled rollout becomes impossible to reverse.
Chapters 0:00 Intro 1:34 AI as a Civilizational Shift 2:38 Controlling and Validating AI 3:57 Provenance, Lineage, and Intent 5:46 Deepfakes and Hallucinations 8:35 China and the AI Arms Race 9:29 How Seekr Technologies Works 10:49 Ethics, Laws, and Human Oversight 12:55 What Keeps Pat Up at Night 13:49 The Speed of AI Development 15:10 Pat Condo's Background in Tech 16:44 Government and Technology 18:16 Why Every American Should Care 19:27 Closing Thoughts
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