Key Takeaways:
- The U.S. and its allies should consider using a layered approach to technology alliances in areas like quantum artificial intelligence to deliver collective benefits.
- Research institutions will play a key role in establishing joint initiatives across the artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, and quantum computing fields.
- The pursuit of national interests and collective allied interests are not mutually exclusive, and building strategic, technical alliances in quantum can serve as a neutral, steadfast vehicle for cooperation.
- The research layer of strategic technological alliances represents an emerging strategy for building trust and cooperation, and synchronizing research developments for AI-based defensive software and network monitoring tools can help reinforce known vulnerabilities.
- The connection between quantum and AI depicts how taking different components from each field and combining them can lead to significant improvements, and the path toward achieving practical quantum computing may occur through continued experimentation with how the two fields can help one another.
Introduction to Strategic Technology Alliances
By designating an opportunity and space to create risk-taking environments based on scientific rigor, joint research projects in emerging technology can help speed up operational uses of new capabilities. These collaborative cultures, in which status quo challenges and uncertainties can be tested, evaluated, and instantiated through different contexts, can result in more innovative tools, risk mitigation solutions, and technology transfer. The U.S. and its allies should consider using a layered approach to technology alliances in areas like quantum artificial intelligence to deliver collective benefits that are difficult to realize in isolation. Amid the concerns and enthusiasm for the memorandum of understanding known as the Technology Prosperity Deal signed in September between the United States and the United Kingdom, the introduction of a layered approach to tech alliances in quantum AI can strengthen the shared prosperity and security of like-minded nations and build the self-confidence needed to deter adversary influence in an increasingly competitive landscape.
The Role of Research in Strategic Technology Alliances
The research layer of strategic technological alliances represents an emerging strategy for building trust and cooperation. In September 2024, a partnership agreement was formed between military science and technology organizations from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), The U.K. Ministry of Defence’s Science and Technology Laboratory, and the Canadian Department of National Defence’s Research and Development Canada. This agreement demonstrates an original approach with a trilateral international partnership. The effort is designed to both reduce duplication efforts for high-tech research and create interoperable cyber capabilities for cooperation among allies. Synchronizing research developments for AI-based defensive software and network monitoring tools helps to reinforce known vulnerabilities. This is particularly important during a period when both the U.S. and Canada have been targeted by Chinese state-sponsored actors, like the recent Salt Typhoon cyber espionage infiltration across critical telecommunications infrastructure, with a cluster of activity also observed in the U.K.
AI Middle Powers and the Art of Interdependency
Numerous opportunities exist for the U.S. and its allies to work together throughout the AI stack in ways that create a balance and provide key nodes of control in areas of comparative advantage like application development, AI science, research, and startup innovation. Through more strategic political will for technology leadership, the EU can solidify its strengths in critical areas of technology supply chains and academic research as well as reform its weaknesses like the inadequate financial and social bases needed to establish adequate competiveness. For example, by concentrating on adoption and deployment, the U.K. can also seek out open-source strategies to scale AI when appropriate, to prioritize more cost-effective adoption, and reduce unnecessary foreign technology dependencies. On the other hand, allies should not remain too focused on how the inability to train frontier AI could symbolize a lack of competitiveness. Instead, they could view the broader picture for how its current internal strengths in areas like quantum technology can ultimately help advance the artificial intelligence landscape in ways that are still receiving little attention.
Quantum AI: Realities, Expectations, and Challenges
The future between quantum and AI is made up of complementary, and co-existing relationships that can enhance one another in a reciprocal way. The connection between quantum and AI depicts how taking different components from each field and combining them can lead to significant improvements – and that the path toward achieving practical quantum computing may occur through continued experimentation with how the two fields can help one another. Proponents of QAI suggest that with improved quantum hardware, quantum AI models may altogether replace classical systems since they can tackle complexity more efficiently at cheaper cost in terms of energy with scale. This viewpoint also conveys how grand scientific challenges will require integrating quantum technology and artificial intelligence and using these synergistic relationships to their full advantages over time, which is known as quantum accelerated supercomputing.
The Strategic Technology Alliance Trifecta
Three main approaches to strategic technology alliances are emerging: technology development, risk mitigation, and technology transfer. The first two approaches are founded upon a robust research layer between government partners, while the latter is based on a connective layer that enables private sector-led innovation to be transferred to government purposes as needed. The DARPA trilateral partnership for cybersecurity can be categorized as a technological development approach, with the U.K. AI Security Institute (AISI) and U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) representing the risk mitigation side. Currently, the AISI and CAISI are not engaged strategically, but part of CAISI’s newly redefined role is to represent U.S. interests internationally.
Policy Recommendations
In spite of the fluctuations caused by political disenchantment and the damage inflicted from weaponizing economic choke points, the ability for allies to work together toward neutral, science-led technological progress can build trust, empowerment, and confidence. To achieve this, several policy recommendations can be made. First, remain open to international cooperation on AI and quantum security. Formalizing a research information network between the U.K. AI Security Institute and U.S. CAISI could help set the precedent for future research exchange on risk mitigation for quantum. Second, build strategic partnerships for quantum and QAI programs at the university level in allied countries. In addition to intergovernmental research lab-based partnerships for emerging technology, other research collaboration structures can be utilized for a more multifaceted approach to strategic research. Third, create a research coordination mechanism for QAI. Coordinating government research efforts for specific QAI projects may require an intergovernmental committee made up of relevant domestic counterparts to establish plans. Finally, avoid duplicating research efforts across all levels of defense. As Europeans take on more leadership within NATO, the United States should refer to already established intelligence-sharing tools, technology, and procedures.
