I went to DC for Eric Schmidt’s AI Expo and all I got was Covid (and a close-up glimpse of the future of war)

When I tested positive for Covid the day after returning from Washington, DC with a fever and cold symptoms, I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, I had been attending The AI Expo for National Competitiveness, hosted by ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), which was attended by thousands of government, academic and private sector professionals.

Here’s how I described the crowded on-the-ground scene in Fortune:

“Drones buzz overhead, piercing the human hum in the crowded Walter E. Washington Convention Center. On the ground, tech executives, uniformed Army officers, policy wonks, and politicians compete for attention as swarms of people move throughout the vast space. There are pitches about “next generation of warfighters,” and panels about winning the “AI innovation race.” There are job seekers and dignitaries. And at the center of it all, there is Eric Schmidt.”

I apologize to anyone I infected last week — after being infected myself. The AI Expo served up Schmidt’s worldview, which sees artificial intelligence, business, geopolitics, and national defense as interconnected forces reshaping America’s global strategy (which will be chock-full of drones and robots if he gets his way). But I also dressed up for a gala event hosted by Tammy Haddad’s Washington AI Network, with sponsors including OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, as well as a speech from U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

I sat at a table sponsored by IBM, and had some really interesting chats with a few IBM policy and comms folks (again, I am so sorry if anyone got Covid because of me!). [An aside: I can only assume I was seated at the table because of a new feature story I wrote for the annual Fortune 500 issue that came out last week: You can check out “Inside IBM’s rebound: Can CEO Arvind Krishna bring the tech company back to its former glory?” online or pick it up on the newsstand.]

DC wants to win the AI “race” against China

Anyway, clearly no one was defending against Covid at Schmidt’s AI Expo — myself included. Instead, everyone was focused on defending US AI supremacy against China. As I said in last Thursday’s Fortune Eye on AI newsletter, In this universe, discussions about AI were less about increasing productivity or displacing jobs, and more about technological supremacy and national survival. Winning the AI “race” against China was front and center. Public-private partnerships are not just desirable in this universe—they’re essential to help the U.S. maintain an edge in AI, cyber, and intelligence systems.

It was days before Elon Musk’s infamous falling-out with Trump, but I heard no references to Elon Musk and DOGE’s “move fast and break things” mode of implementing AI tools into the IRS or the Veterans Administration. There were no discussions about AI models and copyright concerns. No one was hand-wringing about Anthropic’s new model blackmailing its way out of being shut down.

From my Eye on AI column:

“Instead, at the AI Expo, senior leaders from the U.S. military talked about how the recent Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian air bases are prime examples of how rapidly AI is changing the battlefield. Federal procurement experts discussed how to accelerate the Pentagon’s notoriously slow acquisition process to keep pace with commercial AI advances. OpenAI touted its o3 reasoning model, now deployed on a secure government supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

At the gala, Lutnick made the stakes explicit: “We must win the AI race, the quantum race—these are not things that are open for discussion.” To that end, he added, the Trump administration is focused on building another terawatt of power to support the massive AI data centers sprouting up across the country. “We are very, very, very bullish on AI,” he said.

The audience—packed with D.C.-based policymakers and lobbyists from Big AI—applauded. Washington may not be a tech town, but if this week was any indication, Silicon Valley and the nation’s capital are learning to speak the same language.”

Big AI’s embrace of defense contracts

I’m not the only one pointing out how Big Tech and Big AI’s embrace of government contracts, particularly in defense, is becoming mainstream.

Nathan Benaich

, general partner of Air Street Capital, and founder of

Air Street Press

, said as much in his latest Guide to AI Substack post. Here he writes about Meta’s latest moves as an example:

”Meta is undergoing a dramatic shift, albeit outside the lab. In a move that would've been unthinkable just a few years ago, Meta has partnered with Anduril to co-develop extended reality hardware and software for the U.S. military. The flagship product is EagleEye, a battlefield AR headset that fuses Meta’s Reality Labs and Llama models with Anduril’s Lattice defense platform. Silicon Valley’s most consumer-facing, metaverse-obsessed company is now explicitly building military gear.

What was once taboo (Big Tech’s open embrace of defense) is rapidly becoming normalized. The partnership also marks a détente between Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer Luckey, signaling a realignment of AI-native leadership around national security imperatives.”

Then there is the new reporting from Bloomberg that Meta is in talks to in talks to make a multibillion-dollar investment into AI startup Scale AI. As I wrote last year for Fortune, Scale AI provides human workers and software services that help companies label and test data for AI model training, a critical step in getting AI to be effective.

Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang has been expanding the company’s focus to government and military clients over the past few years. In 2020, Scale built the first systems for government geospatial data, and went on to snag major contracts with the US Department of Defense and other government agencies.

Some of my readers might also recall that Scale AI was the host of a secretive AI security summit that I attended in November 2023, just a couple of days before OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was fired (albeit temporarily).

All to say, a Meta investment in Scale — at that scale — is notable. Not just for Meta’s Big AI efforts, but for its ongoing interest in getting deeper into the DoD.

On the mend, and on the march

I’m fully on the mend from my latest bout with Covid, and to use a war metaphor, I’m glad my troops have done their job and fought hard to keep my symptoms mild.

Forward, march — into another week on the AI front lines.