For more than seventy years, the strategic balance of naval warfare has depended on one fundamental assumption: deep oceans provide concealment. Nuclear-powered submarines carrying conventional and nuclear weapons have relied on the vast acoustic complexity of the ocean to remain hidden from adversaries. Traditional anti-submarine warfare evolved around sound propagation, passive hydrophones, active sonar pings, magnetic anomaly detection, and increasingly sophisticated acoustic analysis.

The Stanford Emerging Technology Review 2026: Convergence, Competition, and the Coming Technology Realignment

The Stanford Emerging Technology Review 2026 (SETR 2026) is a major strategic technology assessment produced by Stanford University through a collaboration between the School of Engineering, the Hoover Institution, and the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). The report was co-chaired by Condoleezza Rice, Jennifer Widom, and Amy Zegart, with Herbert S. Lin serving as director and editor in chief. 

Redwood Materials has evolved far beyond its original identity as a lithium-ion battery recycling company. Founded by J. B. Straubel, the company is now positioning itself as one of the most strategically important emerging infrastructure firms in the artificial intelligence and advanced energy economy. Straubel’s background uniquely positioned him to build this type of company.

1.  The Shift from Systems to Intelligence Infrastructure

The modern enterprise is no longer defined by separate systems for manufacturing and commerce. It is becoming a single, integrated intelligence organism — one that senses, decides, acts, and learns continuously across every function.

Two historically distinct domains now converge:

The Harvard Gazette article “Why Are Communities Pushing Back Against Data Centers?”  is correct about the central problem now driving community opposition: many data center proposals arrive with too little transparency, large projected demands for electricity and sometimes water, and too few protections to ensure that households and small businesses are not forced to subsidize infrastructure built mainly for hyperscale private users.

The emergence of a new class of artificial intelligence—capable not only of understanding software but actively probing, breaking, and reconstructing it—marks a turning point in the history of cybersecurity. Recent developments surrounding a frontier model developed by Anthropic, widely referred to in reporting as Claude Mythos, illustrate a deliberate and strategic approach: deploy the most advanced offensive-capable AI defensively first, hardening the digital infrastructure of modern society before comparable capabilities proliferate.

Artificial intelligence is being introduced to the public under a comforting premise: safety. OpenAI says it approaches safety by assessing current and future risks and balancing capability development with proactive mitigation, while Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy explicitly frames frontier-model deployment around risk governance and tighter controls as capabilities grow. Those are legitimate concerns. There are real dangers involving fraud, cyber abuse, biosecurity, nonconsensual sexual imagery, and other harms.

SpartansFirst and American Technology Venture Lab

Sponsor (Event 1 of 2):

How Your Venture Can Avoid Failing When You Start Winning

5:30-7:30, Thursday April 23, 2026

Presented in cooperation with Tech North Atlanta

Hosted by Tech North Atlanta at 925 North Point Pkwy Suite 130, Alpharetta, GA 30005

SpartansFirst Enables America’s First Citywide Hear2There Accessibility Initiative in Peachtree Corners, GA

Peachtree Corners is the first U.S. city to roll out Hear2There citywide, expanding accessibility for blind and visually impaired residents and visitors. 

Throughout this series, we have examined a sequence of real issues and real examples. We began with the concurrency discussion in Greenville County and the larger policy question it raises for the Upstate. We then looked at California as a warning case, showing how housing scarcity, delay, and fragmented policy can slowly produce very high housing costs and rising homelessness. We examined Austin as an example of a high-growth region that recognized the importance of housing supply and flexibility.