Organisation
Wadhwani AI Center
The AI programme of the CSIS think tank, analysing AI through a national-security lens — export controls, US–China competition, defence adoption and governance.
The Wadhwani AI Center is the artificial-intelligence programme of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a long-established bipartisan foreign-policy think tank in Washington. It was launched in April 2023 — originally as the Wadhwani Center for AI and Advanced Technologies — with a $5m commitment from the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and CSIS trustee Romesh Wadhwani, and it studies the policy implications of AI through a national-security lens: how the technology reshapes geopolitics and economic competitiveness, how the US Department of Defense and intelligence agencies might adopt it responsibly, and how AI should be governed amid intensifying US–China rivalry. Its founding director, Gregory C. Allen — a former official at the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center — made the centre one of the most-cited voices on semiconductor policy, and its detailed reading of the US controls on advanced-chip exports to China became a standard reference in that debate. In November 2025 Aalok Mehta, who had worked on AI policy at Google, OpenAI and the White House, was named director. Like its peers in the DC think-tank world, its output is research, testimony and analysis rather than products, and its influence runs through the policymakers and officials who draw on it.
- Category
- Policy, governance & think tanks
- Founded
- 2023
- HQ
- Washington, DC, US
- Funding
- Launched with a $5m commitment from CSIS trustee Romesh Wadhwani (2023)
- Key people
- Aalok Mehta