Stanford Hoover Institution launches Tech Futures Lab to anticipate strategic surprises from AI

When the Chinese AI company DeepSeek released its open-source AI model in January 2025, it stunned both Washington and Wall Street: Nasdaq dropped 3%, and Nvidia saw 17% of its market value wiped out in a single day — the largest one-day loss at that point in U.S. stock market history. But inside Stanford's computer science labs, researchers had seen China's growing technological advantage coming for months.

"That was a powerful lesson that surprises are not surprises to everybody," said Amy Zegart, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, at the inaugural retreat of the new Tech Futures Lab, which she co-launched this year as part of the Technology Policy Accelerator program to help leaders better anticipate technological disruption.

A Cross-Disciplinary Approach

At the group's first convening, held June 23 and 24, security experts, technologists, and scholars from a wide range of disciplines discussed "strategic technological surprises" — developments that can significantly invalidate core assumptions, alter a strategic domain, and demand a large-scale response. DeepSeek, which defied expectations about how quickly and cheaply powerful AI models can be built, was a case in point.

Zegart emphasized that no single expert can see the whole field, which is where the Tech Futures Lab comes in.

"Anticipating strategic surprise starts by bringing together people who are watchers in different areas," said Zegart, the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow.

Leadership and Expertise

Co-leading the Tech Futures Lab is Herbert Lin, a leading expert in cyber policy and security. Maria Langan Riekhof, a Hoover Institution distinguished visiting fellow, will also play a leadership role, bringing more than 30 years of experience supporting policymakers at the highest level of U.S. government in senior roles at the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

As Lin and Riekhof argued in the lab's first publication, the surprise of DeepSeek revealed:

• A lack of communication among policymakers, researchers in academia, and industry
• A failure of imagination about how new technologies can upend power dynamics

"We have to learn to scan for weak signals and think expansively and creatively — not just about what's likely, but what's plausible," said Riekhof in her opening remarks.

Avoiding an 'AI 9/11'

The lab's inaugural event opened with a conversation between Condoleezza Rice, director of the Hoover Institution and former U.S. secretary of state; John Hennessy, president emeritus of Stanford and chairman of Alphabet; and Arati Prabhakar, former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Rice, who was national security adviser on September 11, 2001, shared three lessons learned from the attacks that have direct implications for the national security risks posed by technology today:

1. Failure of imagination: While intelligence agencies had detected activity on channels they were monitoring, "It never occurred to us that it might be people driving airplanes into buildings. We didn't know what we were looking for."
2. Gaps in information sharing between agencies
3. No playbook for the day after, leaving officials scrambling to respond to an unprecedented crisis

While these lessons illustrate how to prevent an "AI 9/11," Rice said, AI is advancing at a speed and scale that risks outpacing government response.

"By the time you've built out that structure, the technologies are in another time zone," Rice said.

The Human Element and Global Competition

Prabhakar stressed that AI is "simply raw power." The threat, she said, lies also in the people using it.

"When we talk about AI today, I find overwhelmingly we only talk about what's happening inside the large language model or inside the technology. Everything that happens with AI is the consequence of human choices," Prabhakar added.

Human calculus is only part of the challenge. Another issue is ensuring the U.S. maintains a global advantage, a point Hennessy made. He underscored the importance of continual investment in research universities, which have been at the forefront of knowledge production and innovation. Undercutting those institutions, he warned, would mean forfeiting technological leadership to adversaries like China. He also pointed out that compared to past periods of technological disruption — such as the introduction of microprocessors or the internet — AI is advancing at a much faster pace.

Another difficulty, Rice said, is that development is happening in private companies, putting it beyond the traditional reach of government oversight.

"This is not something I've seen before, where the most powerful tools are being created outside of the realm of the government," Rice said.