BEN BUCHANAN

Behavioral Archetype

THE ACADEMY SENT HIM TO THE WHITE HOUSE AND TOOK HIM BACK — Subject did not arrive at the National Security Council from a corporate lab, and he did not leave government for one either. He arrived from Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, the AI-policy think tank that supplies the field’s governance vocabulary, and when his tenure coordinating the government’s AI executive orders and its AI National Security Memorandum ended, he did not go to a company. He went to Johns Hopkins SAIS, to teach the next cohort of the exact discipline — AI and national security — that trained him for the seat he had just left. The lab-to-state revolving door this file documents elsewhere runs through frontier labs. This one runs entirely inside the academy: the person who wrote binding federal AI policy came from the AI-policy think tank and returned to the AI-policy classroom, with no stop anywhere outside that circuit. Since leaving he has added one seat beside the classroom, which he states himself in sworn testimony: he is “an outside advisor to AI and cybersecurity companies, such as Anthropic” (House Intelligence Committee testimony, 21 July 2026). The move is lawful. The move is common among senior technology appointees of both parties. The move is the exhibit. This profile scores the seat and its two doors, not the man who walked through them.

Essence Indicators

• Served as Senior Faculty Fellow and Director of the CyberAI Project at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) — the AI-policy think tank whose 2021 funding renewal, a $42 million grant, came from Open Philanthropy, the same funder behind GovAI and other governance-research nodes in this apparatus

• Moved to the National Security Council as Director for Technology and National Security, then to the White House as Special Advisor for Artificial Intelligence (2023-2025) — profiled by Washington AI Network in 2024, whose interviewer wrote that “both parties agreed” he was “the most critical voice on safety, innovation, and national security”

• Coordinated the Biden administration’s two AI executive orders — including the October 2023 order invoking the Defense Production Act to require frontier-model safety-testing disclosures — and the AI National Security Memorandum on artificial intelligence

• Left government in 2025 for Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), appointed the Dmitri Alperovitch Assistant Professor, teaching the “AI and National Security” course to the next generation of the field

• The structural fact the profile turns on: CSET fellow to NSC/White House AI coordinator to SAIS professor is one unbroken loop inside the AI-policy academy — the person who wrote the binding federal AI rules is, on the documented record, both a product and now a supplier of the same think-tank-and-graduate-school circuit

• His record in the White House, in the words of the institutions that host him. Johns Hopkins SAIS says he “held key roles as Director for Technology and National Security and Assistant Director at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy” and that he served as Special Advisor for Artificial Intelligence on the National Security Council. Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, announcing a conversation with him on 27 January 2026, wrote that “from 2021 to 2025, he served as the White House Special Advisor for Artificial Intelligence, where he helped coordinate the Biden Administration’s major AI efforts” and that he is the author of “The New Fire, The Hacker and the State, and The Cybersecurity Dilemma” (SAIS Emerging Tech; Berkman Klein Center event)

• The memorandum he coordinated, in the White House’s own words. The 24 October 2024 fact sheet opens: “Today, President Biden is issuing the first-ever National Security Memorandum (NSM) on Artificial Intelligence (AI),” and says the NSM’s “fundamental premise is that advances at the frontier of AI will have significant implications for national security and foreign policy in the near future.” The October 2023 executive order says that, “in accordance with the Defense Production Act,” the Secretary of Commerce “shall require” companies developing potential dual-use foundation models to report to the federal government (White House fact sheet; Executive Order 14110, section 4.2)

• A book, a co-author and an advisory seat. The publisher’s listing for The Bitter Struggle: Superintelligence, Superpowers, and the Fate of the World (Buchanan and Tantum Collins; e-book and audio 10 November 2026, hardback 1 December 2026) describes the authors as “two former White House officials who shaped America’s AI strategy and now work with leading AI companies,” calls Buchanan “the first White House Special Advisor for Artificial Intelligence and currently an advisor to Anthropic,” and promises readers “the briefing rooms where AI CEOs privately warned about their own creations” (Penguin Random House listing, audio; e-book listing)

• His own account of the memorandum, and what he teaches (SAIS Observer, 31 October 2025). Asked about policy toward agentic AI, he said: “When I was the White House Special Advisor for AI in the Biden Administration, we worked hard to do so, culminating in President Biden’s landmark National Security Memorandum on AI. That document directed U.S. government agencies to use it but with clear limits and clear testing to make sure it was useful, ethical and appropriate.” Of AI in cybersecurity he said “it’s still early days and we should judge those companies and their technologies based on results, not marketing hype,” and to students: “It’s impossible to make technology policy without understanding both technology and policy” (SAIS Observer)

• His current position, in his own words (House Intelligence Committee, 21 July 2026). Testifying at the hearing “25 Years After 9/11: Confronting the Next Generation of Threats,” he introduced himself: “During the Biden Administration, I served on the National Security Council and as the first ever White House Special Advisor for AI. I am now a professor at Johns Hopkins University, the author of four books on cybersecurity and AI, and an outside advisor to AI and cybersecurity companies, such as Anthropic.” SAIS’s own page titles him “Assistant Professor and former White House Special Advisor on AI” (testimony PDF, congress.gov; SAIS Emerging Tech)

• What he told the Committee to do. He said “the modern paradigm of large-scale neural networks backed by giant computing power comes almost exclusively from the private sector,” that “We must together forge a new balanced relationship between the public and private sectors in AI,” and, on China, “We must continue to take actions, such as denying advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to China, that ensure this lead endures.” Three of his footnotes cite Anthropic’s own publications: two threat reports and The Anthropic Institute’s “When AI Builds Itself” (testimony PDF)

• The two instruments he coordinated have been rescinded. The 20 January 2025 order “Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions” lists “Executive Order 14110 of October 30, 2023 (Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence)” among the actions rescinded. National Security Presidential Memorandum 11, dated 5 June 2026, states: “This memorandum hereby rescinds and replaces National Security Memorandum-25 and associated guidance.” In July 2026 he told the Committee: “While in the government, among other things, I worked on National Security Memorandum 25” (White House, Initial Rescissions; White House, NSPM-11; testimony PDF)

• Reported as an Anthropic adviser and a diffusion-rule architect. Semafor reported on 30 May 2025 that “Ben Buchanan, another Biden official, is an adviser” to Anthropic and that he “has been working for Anthropic on safety and other issues” and “is one of the key architects of the AI diffusion rule,” in a piece on Trump administration officials objecting to Anthropic’s hiring of former Biden staff (Semafor, 30 May 2025)

Social Persona / Impression Management

Immediate impression: The measured technocrat-scholar. A published historian of cyber conflict (The Cybersecurity Dilemma, The Hacker and the State) who speaks in terms of accountability and testing rather than ideology or industry advocacy.

Energy: Coordinating, cross-agency. Does not argue a single model’s behavior. Sets the federal testing and deployment standard that reaches every agency and, by extension, every lab operating in the U.S. market.

Impression management strategy: The above-politics broker. His own framing of the role — as the interviewer put it, the voice “both parties agreed” was “the most critical” on safety, innovation, and national security, there to make the technology “earn its reputation” rather than pick winners — is the most defensible posture an executive-branch AI coordinator can take. It reads as neutral technical expertise rather than a specific policy program, which is exactly what let the same person write binding rules under one administration and step back into the classroom under the next without friction.

• Social accounts and feeds. X @BuchananBen, tied to him by posts that match the publisher’s page for The Bitter Struggle (Penguin Random House); no feed. His SAIS Emerging Tech page links only the program’s LinkedIn company page, the Berkman Klein Center’s profile of him links his SAIS faculty page, and CSET’s staff page for him links only CSET’s accounts; no personal X, Bluesky, Substack, blog or feed appears on any of them.

Forensic Archetype Comparison

Psychometric Assessment

Big Five (OCEAN):

Dark Triad:

MBTI: INTJ (“The Architect”) — Dominant introverted intuition, auxiliary extraverted thinking. Treats AI policy as a system to be designed on paper first, then authored into binding rule, then handed to the next cohort trained to design the following version.

Threat Assessment

Alliance Map

The Agency and Corporate rows run in sequence, not in parallel: the NSC seat that coordinated the rule asking frontier-model developers for reports ended in January 2025, and the advisory seat at one such developer is described as current in a listing dated for November 2026. The listing gives no date for when it began, so whether the two ever overlapped is not on the record. His own testimony of 21 July 2026 states the advisory seat in the present tense, and Semafor reported it on 30 May 2025.

Alignment Analysis

Stated alignment: Advance safe, secure, and trustworthy U.S. AI policy on a bipartisan basis. Hold frontier AI companies accountable to their own safety claims rather than take their word for it.

Observed alignment: Wrote and coordinated the binding federal AI testing and deployment standard from the NSC/White House seat, then returned — without an intervening stop outside the AI-policy academy — to train the next generation of AI-national-security scholars at the same institutional tier that produced him.

Gap assessment: The stated and observed alignments overlap almost entirely, which is the point. Coordinating policy that reflects an AI-policy-academy consensus is the job description, not a deviation from it. The hazard is structural rather than behavioral: the most powerful executive-branch AI-policy seat in the period this book covers was authored by, and returned intact to, the same think-tank-and-graduate-school circuit — a circuit that, in CSET’s case, is itself Open-Philanthropy funded. The record does not establish captured judgment or private motive. It establishes that the officeholder and the academy that shaped him are, on this record, the same milieu twice over — a parallel structure to the lab-to-state loop documented at Jade Leung, run here entirely inside the policy academy instead of a lab.

Interest: What adoption of his positions would pay him is documented in his own statement and the publisher’s page, and it is modest. He tells the Committee that “the most important data points come from outside government, in private companies” and asks for “a new balanced relationship between the public and private sectors in AI”; he is, in the same statement, an outside advisor to one such company, and his testimony cites that company’s reports and its institute. A public-private channel of that kind is the arrangement in which an advisor with a White House record has something to offer both sides, and the terms of his own seat are not on the record. His best case, in his words: government cannot shape a technology it does not understand, and “The nation that can best invent AI and deploy it in offensive and defensive cyber operations will enjoy a distinct advantage over nations that cannot” (testimony PDF). Frontier labs that already publish threat reports gain from the same rule; so do the universities and centres that train the staff who read them, CSET and SAIS among them. His forthcoming book is sold on “the briefing rooms where AI CEOs privately warned about their own creations” (publisher’s listing above).

Convergent Drive Classification

Self-preservation: Carries the AI-and-national-security specialization across every institutional wall — CSET, the NSC, the White House, SAIS — the credential travels intact while the seat changes. Goal preservation: Wrote the binding federal AI-safety-testing standard himself, so “safe and trustworthy” is defined on terms he set before any agency tests a model against it. Resource acquisition: Held the single National Security Council seat coordinating AI policy across Commerce, the AI Safety Institute, and the White House — the scarcest coordinating chair in the federal AI apparatus of its period. Self-improvement: Each move is a higher-altitude application of one method: study the statecraft, write the federal policy, then teach the cohort that will write the next version.

Subject is not an AI system. The drives appear anyway — in the policy scholar who wrote the government’s AI rules, then went home to teach the students who will write the next ones.

Sources: Ben Buchanan — Center for Security and Emerging Technology; Ben Buchanan — Johns Hopkins SAIS faculty bio; Exclusive Interview: White House Special Advisor for AI Ben Buchanan — Washington AI Network; CSET Receives $42 Million Grant, Set to Self-Fund Through 2025; Side Channel with Professor Ben Buchanan — SAIS Observer.

Further sources: Testimony of Ben Buchanan, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 21 July 2026; Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions, White House, 20 Jan 2025; NSPM-11, White House, 5 June 2026; Semafor, 30 May 2025; The Bitter Struggle, Penguin Random House US; Ben Buchanan, SAIS Emerging Tech; Ben Buchanan, Berkman Klein Center; A Conversation with Ben Buchanan, Berkman Klein Center (27 Jan 2026); FACT SHEET: National Security Memorandum on AI (24 Oct 2024); Executive Order 14110, Federal Register; The Bitter Struggle, publisher listing; The Bitter Struggle, e-book listing.