Accelerating Democratic AI Leadership by Reforming the US Extraterritorial Surveillance Regime

Whether frontier AI is developed and governed by democracies or by autocracies is among the most consequential questions for how the technology turns out. A world where advanced AI capability and the compute behind it sit largely within democratic nations—and where a coalition of responsible actors meaningfully participate in global AI governance conversations—is far likelier to produce AI that is developed safely and accountably. For the United States, this aligns with multiple objectives: to build compute at scale as quickly as possible (including by partnering with allies); and to diffuse American AI throughout the world, keeping the global AI ecosystem anchored to American infrastructure rather than China’s.

But regulatory obstacles have worn down allies’ trust. Allied democracies are increasingly reluctant to route their data and compute through US-controlled providers because of the surveillance exposure created by US law—chiefly FISA Section 702 and the CLOUD Act. The result is a growing movement around “sovereign” compute and data localization among the very partners the US should most want to export its AI stack to. To allies, the risk of foreign surveillance potentially outweighs any benefits from chip or model access.

This pushes partners toward fragmentation and toward hedging with non-US suppliers, weakening exactly the coalition that would keep advanced AI within democracies. This produces a tension the US treats as a hard tradeoff. Its national security and law-enforcement communities have legitimate interests in cross-border data access and foreign-intelligence collection. Yet the regulatory framework is now a major obstacle to the very diffusion strategy that has become a flagship US initiative. A need for a new regime has emerged, one that balances legitimate security needs with building trust and assurance within allies to get them to trust the US AI stack.

Drawing on the existing legal and policy literature and on interviews with relevant stakeholders, the project will map allied concerns about surveillance and the hindrance of the diffusion strategy. It will design and propose a new regime that preserves core US security and law-enforcement equities while keeping the US AI stack attractive to key allies and partners. The work will aim to result in concrete recommendations for US policymakers and for allied “AI middle powers” weighing how to integrate and ensure relevance in the advantage of advanced AI.

This project advances AI safety by strengthening the conditions under which transformative AI is most likely to be developed and governed responsibly. By identifying a regime that removes the trust bottleneck to allied integration, this work increases the likelihood that advanced AI is developed and governed within democracies rather than autocracies, and that a wider set of responsible actors is brought into global AI governance.

Mentees will support by performing background research (literature reviews, expert/stakeholder interviews), assisting with brainstorming policy proposals, as well as potentially drafting memos or public-facing pieces if the research results in these.

Need-to-have:

• Strong analytical, research, and writing skills
• Comfort doing independent desk research
• Familiarity with AI safety/governance literature
• Knowledge of/interest in geopolitics of AI, middle power strategy

Nice-to-have:

• Experience with legal analysis (e.g. a law degree or some amount of legal training)
• Familiarity with middle power government(s) and political dynamics
• Experience conducting stakeholder interviews or expert outreach
• Experience presenting to/educating policymakers
• Prior relevant publications

None; but mentees should have decent overlap with US East Coast time zone and availability for calls during this time.