Issue Campaigns

What is the future of the DoD-Silicon Valley relationship?

The U.S. Department of Defense has prioritized strengthening its relationship with Silicon Valley—but is it succeeding, and how would we know? Foretell explores this topic as part of its first Issue Campaign, a research offering where we rely on stakeholder judgment to break complex policy issues down into forecastable questions and then leverage the wisdom of the crowd to forecast those questions.

Read stakeholder perspectives Submit forecasts and see crowd results

Mapping the future of the DoD-Silicon Valley relationship

Through stakeholder interviews, we identified two measures of the state of the DoD-Silicon Valley relationship (outcome measures), six factors that will shape that relationship, and 19 forecastable metrics for the factors and outcome measures. Click on each factor and outcome measure to see a comparison of the stakeholders' and crowd's forecasts. Where applicable, we also highlight disagreements between the stakeholders who expect the DoD-Silicon Valley relationship will improve over the next five years (improve cohort) and the stakeholders who expect it will stay the same or worsen (same/worse cohort), and with which cohort the crowd agrees.

Factors

Outcome Measures

China military aggression

China tech capabilities

Strength of U.S. tech sector

U.S. distrust of military / government

U.S. political polarization

Silicon Valley protests

Transactions

Contracts between DoD and Silicon Valley

Personnel

DoD access to talent developed within the U.S tech sector

Legend

Positive relationship. Stakeholders expect an increase would improve relationship and decrease would harm it.

Divided. Stakeholders are divided on how changes would affect the relationship.

Negative relationship. Stakeholders expect an increase would harm relationship and a decrease would improve it.

How are we collecting and synthesizing expert and crowd judgments?
Learn more about our methodology.

Participating stakeholders*

Catherine Aiken, CSET

Anthony Bak, Palantir

Jason Brown, Google; formerly U.S. Air Force, Joint Artificial Intelligence Center

Michael Brown, Defense Innovation Unit

Miles Brundage, OpenAI

Bess Dopkeen, House Committee on Armed Services; formerly Department of Defense

Ed Felten, Princeton

Melissa Flagg, Flagg Consulting and Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center; formerly CSET, Department of Defense

Michael Horowitz, University of Pennsylvania; formerly Department of Defense

Nicholas Joseph, Anthropic

Josh Marcuse, Google; formerly Defense Innovation Board

Igor Mikolic-Torreira, CSET; formerly Department of Defense

Enrique Oti, Second Front Systems; formerly U.S. Air Force, Defense Innovation Unit

Scott Phoenix, Vicarious

Jack Poulson, Tech Inquiry

James Ryseff, RAND; formerly Google, Microsoft

Jack Shanahan, Retired U.S. Air Force, Joint Artificial Intelligence Center

Trae Stephens, Anduril Industries, Founders Fund

Danielle Tarraf, RAND

*Three participating stakeholders requested anonymity.

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