With technology advancing at a breakneck pace, a growing contingent of philanthropic funders are supporting efforts aiming to ensure these developments are implemented in ways that both benefit mankind and reduce potential harms. Some funders, for instance, are backing AI regulation and safety, while others fund privacy in the digital age. Others still are focused on the more long-term consequences of technology, including the future of the labor market and existential concerns regarding AI sentience.
Less common are grants specifically awarded to address the dangers that advanced technology — including malicious digital tech and other threats like bioweapons — can pose to national security. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, however, is bucking the trend. Last month, it awarded $10 million in exploratory grants to institutions working at the intersection of national security and technology. The goal is to make sure society can take advantage of emerging technology, while also limiting the harm it can do.
“There’s a lot happening on the beneficial side of the conversation, and we think it’s important to make sure that conversation is balanced with the security implications of these technologies, where there has been less philanthropic support,” said Eli Sugarman, Hewlett’s director of special programs. “That means we also need the top national security and technology experts making sure that emerging technologies are not causing widespread societal harms.”
According to Sugarman, Hewlett is especially focused on the potential ways that malicious actors can use AI to attack the nation’s critical infrastructure, how AI can be used to degrade our information ecosystem, biosynthesis and biosecurity issues, and quantum decryption.
Who’s getting Hewlett’s national security and tech grants?
As is its usual practice, Hewlett spread the wealth among a fairly wide array of brainy outfits studying these emergent threats, with an eye toward field-building.
Two recipients — the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Vanderbilt University Institute for National Security — have received $2.5 million each. The grant to the Hoover Institution will support the development of a Tech Futures Lab to help anticipate potential strategic technological surprises and strengthen the nation’s resilience through better planning and risk management. The grant to Vanderbilt will support research by its Wicked Problems Lab, including an initiative that will help build resilience against new forms of synthetic information warfare, such as deepfakes, disinformation and astroturfing.
The remaining $5 million was divided among 11 other organizations working to protect people and systems from cyber threats, scams and other technology-driven dangers. Grantees include the AI Now Institute, the Aspen Institute, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Institute for Security and Technology and Sentinel Bio.
These grants build on Hewlett’s earlier work around conflict resolution, cyber security and nuclear security, Sugarman said, noting that the final years of Hewlett’s Cyber Initiative, which was launched in 2014 and concluded in 2023, included work around the intersection of AI and cybersecurity. These new grants draw from the lessons the foundation gleaned from this work.
Anticipating and preparing for technological surprises
Established last year, the Hoover Institution’s Technology Policy Accelerator conducts research to aid government and business leaders in gaining a better understanding of emerging technology and its geopolitical implications. One of the accelerator’s initiatives is the Tech Futures Lab, which launched a few weeks ago and is being developed with Hewlett’s grant.
According to Amy Zegart, senior policy fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Tech Futures Lab emerged from the realization that the U.S. intelligence community needed to know more about the intersection of technology and economic and national security competition. The catalyst for this was Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s release last year of a chatbot with similar capabilities as leading U.S. platforms, but on a smaller budget and with less computing power. That came as a surprise to the U.S. intelligence community and has been described as a “Sputnik moment” in the global race to develop AI.
“The idea [behind the Tech Futures Lab] was: What can we do harnessing the technological expertise at Stanford and among people in [Silicon] Valley to better anticipate DeepSeek-like events that are even more consequential to help protect the nation?” Zegart said.
The lab is bringing together a wide range of thinkers (including people outside STEM fields), such as scientists, inventors, social scientists, government leaders, investors, historians and psychologists. The lab also marks the first collaboration between the Hoover Institution and the Stanford School of Engineering.
“The idea of these conversations is they’re going to feed into war games that we’re going to hold with these scenarios, with private sector leaders,” Zegart said. “So we’re thinking about, are there technological surprises that are so transformational that the United States could not catch up, that it would be economically devastating or militarily devastating or socially devastating for us? And if there are, can we identify what to look for? What are the indicators that we should be tracking?”
On the other side of the coin, the Tech Futures Lab also wants to explore opportunities that could be unlocked by technology and what the U.S. needs to be able to seize them. The lab also wants crucial actors in the private sector to develop muscle memory about what to do in moments of crisis.
Perhaps even more importantly, the government is not designed to answer questions about where the nation is ahead and where it is behind in technology. There’s no department or unit to do so, as evidenced by the reaction to DeepSeek. “They have to have expertise from outside secret agencies. They have to know what’s happening in our labs, in our companies, in our society,” Zegart said. “And so this is something that we can provide that serves not just the private sector, but the United States more broadly.”
How Hewlett’s funding to advance biosecurity
Digital tech and AI isn’t the only focus of Hewlett’s recent exploratory grants. Another area is biosecurity, which involves policies and practices to protect against the “deliberate misuse of biology to cause harm.”
Technological advances have had a significant impact on biosecurity. Innovation in synthetic biology, for instance, has made it easier to create new pathogens, which raises concerns around bioterrorism, environmental damage, and even ethical dilemmas.
One of Hewlett’s grantees in this area is Sentinel Bio, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring pandemics become a thing of the past within our lifetimes. Part of that includes determining where the biggest threats and worst pandemics are likely to come from.
“We learned that the most concerning are those that are engineered and are likely created through a mix of new technologies, like AI, and new forms of science, like synthetic biology,” said Claire Qureshi, Sentinel Bio’s CEO.
The combination of new computational tools, easier access to synthetic biology and the way AI is being integrated into workflows is making people in biosecurity very nervous, Qureshi said.
Sentinel’s work can be divided into three major categories. The first is prevention, which means ensuring that science isn’t misused. Biotech governance is, according to Qureshi, the most neglected part of the field and the most impactful place for Sentinel Bio to be. The second category is detection, which means making sure that there are surveillance and early warning systems in place in case a novel pathogen is released. And the third category is countermeasures that can work against any virus. This includes PPE for health workers and bio hardening to make indoor environments pathogen resistant through ventilation and ultraviolet lights.
Qureshi also pointed out that there is a lot of hyperbole around AI. “I think all of us are trying… to figure out where we are in that continuum based on what we’re reading and thinking about, and Sentinel is really trying to be empirically grounded in testing and developing… the methodological foundation to take us out of all the hyperbole and narrative, and into ground-truthing what is actually happening with these intersecting fields right now.”
The grant from Hewlett, alongside other capital Sentinel has raised, will be used to connect what they’re seeing at the model level with what is actually possible in a lab.
Qureshi noted that the biosecurity space needs to be operating at a much bigger scale. Beyond greater philanthropic investment, the field also needs international cooperation and an influx of talented people coming in to keep up with the pace of technological changes.
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What lies ahead for Hewlett’s technology grantmaking?
“This is an incredibly timely set of issues for Hewlett to focus on,” Sugarman said. “While the exploratory grants we just announced focus on the security issues associated with emerging technologies, our other, larger programs will also be doing important [work] at the intersection of AI and their respective fields.”
Hewlett is exploring the potential for other grantmaking focused in this space. According to Sugarman, the foundation will look at the impact of the work it’s supporting, other funders’ interest in partnering with Hewlett, and how technology is developing to inform its future grantmaking.
For Qureshi, having Hewlett involved in this type of work is “incredibly valuable.” “They’re such a credible player,” she said. “They understand emerging technologies wonderfully and can be supportive of both science and security work.”
As advanced technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous — and its downsides become all the more clear — philanthropy faces the task of evolving its role in influencing how that technology is used. Hewlett’s work here is one example of an established funder committing money to build that field, but these problems will need much more attention from a wider array of grantmakers for philanthropy’s commitments to really pay off — and even then, there are a lot of unknowns.
Sugarman said, “The rapid advance of these technologies holds remarkable promise for human flourishing — our challenge as funders is to help make sure they develop in positive directions, and that we pay attention to the potential harms they could cause, too.”
