Indian Strategic Studies: 03/29/25

29 March 2025

India Is Taking On The Challenge To Save Himalayan Glaciers – OpEd

Bonani Roychoudhury

“If steps are not taken to restore the Himalayan glaciers, the source of our perennial rivers, the next Maha Kumbh after 144 years may be held on sand as the sacred rivers of India may dry up,” said the Magsaysay award winner and education-reformist Sonam Wangchuk. Having campaigned globally for glacier preservation, he has been at the forefront in India highlighting the issue in the ‘Year of Glaciers’.

In fact in an open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Wangchuk exhorted that India should take the lead as the Himalayas have the third largest deposit of ice and snow on Earth after the Arctic and Antarctica, fetching it the name ‘Third Pole’. “India needs to take a lead in glacier preservation as we have the Himalayas, and our sacred rivers such as the Ganga and Yamuna come out of them,” Wangchuk said. Stating that he is an admirer of the environment initiatives taken by Prime Minister Modi, especially the ‘Mission LiFE’ campaign, Wangchuk urged PM Modi to set up a commission to assess the state of Himalayan glaciers.

‘Glacier Preservation’, the theme for World Water Day 2025, is highlighting the vital role glaciers play in preserving freshwater supplies worldwide and the pressing need for conservation efforts in the face of climate change. Further, the United Nations has declared 2025 as the ‘International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation’ while commemorating March 21st as the annual ‘World Day for Glaciers’. The aim is to raise global awareness about glaciers, snow, and ice in the climate system and the water-cycle and also mitigate the water availability challenge especially for agriculture both in the hills and the North Indian plains.

Uzbekistan’s Evolving Northern Afghanistan Strategy

Hamza Boltaev and Islomkhon Gafarov

Afghan-Uzbek relations are expected to reach to a new high in 2025. Last year, the two countries stated aims to increase bilateral trade turnover to $3 billion. The planned construction of an Uzbek trade center, covering an area of 220 square meters, in Mazar-i-Sharif along with an effort for intensifying the implementation of the Trans-Afghan transport corridor might further solidify bilateral pragmatic cooperation between the two neighbors.

Over the last three years, Uzbekistan has pursued a proactive foreign policy toward Taliban-led Afghanistan based on its own strategic interests. Tashkent’s long-lasting obsession with a security-oriented approach has been traded for a pragmatic, economy-first foreign policy in relation to Kabul. Adopting a flexible and multivector approach to its Afghan policy might incur potential reputational risks for Uzbekistan’s international image. However, the current geopolitical reality and the historical links between Afghanistan and Central Asia underscore the significance of the country for Uzbekistan’s foreign policy priorities.

Islamic State Is Evolving, But Has The World Taken Its Eyes Off The Ball? – Analysis

Kian Sharifi

US-backed forces declared in 2019 that the Islamic State (IS) group had been destroyed. But as the past few years have shown, that only marked the end of its quasi-state that controlled territory in Iraq and Syria — not the threat it continues to present.

The extremist group is demonstrating resilience and experiencing a resurgence in other parts of the world — and its operational capabilities are evolving.

Since January 2024, IS has claimed a series of high-profile attacks across the world, from Iran and Russia to Germany and the United States.

“IS remains a persistent global security threat and the deadliest terrorist organization in the world,” Adrian Shtuni, a security specialist and head of the Washington-based Shtuni Consulting, told RFE/RL.

“Now the organization relies primarily on a dynamic network of regional affiliates who operate independently,” he said.

What Is The Current State Of IS?

The vision and aspirations of IS have not changed, but since its territorial defeat in 2019, the extremist group has undergone a radical structural and operational evolution, analysts say.

China remains top military and cyber threat to US, intelligence report says

China remains the United States’ top military and cyber threat, according to a new report by US intelligence agencies that said Beijing was making “steady but uneven” progress on capabilities it could use to capture Taiwan.

China has the ability to hit the United States with conventional weapons, compromise US infrastructure through cyber-attacks, and target its assets in space, as well as seeking to displace the US as the top AI power by 2030, the Annual Threat Assessment by the intelligence community said.

Russia, along with Iran, North Korea and China, seeks to challenge the US through deliberate campaigns to gain an advantage, with Moscow’s war in Ukraine having afforded it a “wealth of lessons regarding combat against western weapons and intelligence in a large-scale war”, said the report published on Tuesday.

Released ahead of testimony before the Senate intelligence committee by Donald Trump’s intelligence chiefs, the report said China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) probably planned to use large language models to create fake news, imitate personas and enable attack networks.

“China’s military is fielding advanced capabilities, including hypersonic weapons, stealth aircraft, advanced submarines, stronger space and cyberwarfare assets and a larger arsenal of nuclear weapons,” the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told the committee, labeling Beijing Washington’s “most capable strategic competitor”.

Countering the Digital Silk Road: Indonesia

Vivek Chilukuri and Ruby Scanlon

The Importance of Indonesia

In the escalating U.S.-China technology competition, there is no region more important than Southeast Asia, and there is no country within it more important than Indonesia.

The reasons are abundant. Indonesia boasts the largest economy—including the largest digital economy—in Southeast Asia. It has plentiful energy and mineral resources—for example, it is the world’s top producer of nickel, an essential component for electric vehicles. Indonesia’s middle class of 52 million is young, growing, and tech-forward, and the country’s 17,000 islands strategically stretch from the Pacific Ocean to the Strait of Malacca, a choke point through which 25 percent of all global trade shipments pass.1 Indonesia is also a relatively stable democracy—and the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy—with a growing, if uneven, global voice.

Despite increased outreach from Washington and Beijing, Jakarta has long pursued a policy of strategic autonomy paired with active regional leadership through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Its foreign policy embraces the principle of bebas dan aktif (“independent and active”) with an approach former President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono once distilled as having “a million friends and zero enemies.”

America Needs a Strategy Against China’s Manufacturing Dominance

Gary Roughead

The Trump administration’s pending executive order to bolster U.S. shipbuilding is well past due. While noting China’s unfair trade practices in the maritime and logistics sectors, the executive order also bluntly and accurately attributes our diminished maritime standing to decades of neglect.

Some of the order’s measures—intended to restore our maritime capacity and erode China’s maritime and logistic dominance—have already raised concerns about potentially disrupting global trade and supply chains. That may ultimately be the case. But it is critical that the United States mitigate those concerns and prevent China from continuing to expand its footprint in the many sectors vital to U.S. interests.

How China Overtook the United States

China is the world’s second-largest economy and America’s primary economic competitor. We can cry foul, but we enabled China’s rapid and extraordinary transformation.

Uncharted territory: deep-sea mining and the underwater domain

Darshana M. Baruah

On 15 February 2025 China and Cook Islands signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in which they agreed to collaborate to research and potentially extract the latter’s seabed critical minerals. While it signals Beijing’s growing interest in the South Pacific (and Pacific Islands states’ expanding options for international partnership), the MoU is also the latest example of a broader trend: states’ growing interest in deep-sea mining and the commercial potential of the underwater domain.

Developments in deep-sea mining are important because they are likely to play a part in establishing precedents (in terms of norms and legal frameworks) for undersea commercial activities more broadly. Moreover, these developments will have military implications – especially in terms of the possible ‘dual-use’ nature of some activities related to seabed exploration. And while at present deep-sea mining is viewed primarily in terms of its potential environmental impact, states could benefit from treating it as a foreign-policy issue and recognising its significance for national security.

New partners, new opportunities

The China–Cook Islands MoU outlines the two countries’ plans to collaborate on a range of activities related to research and exploration of the latter’s seabed mineral resources, including capacity building, technology transfer and logistics. It also foresees cooperation on efforts to understand the environmental impacts of deep-sea mining on marine ecosystems.

China has been intensifying its information war against Japan’s Achilles’ heel – Okinawa.

Maiko Ichihara

Late last year, when several thousand Okinawans protested the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl by an American soldier stationed in their island prefecture, the People’s Daily, a major Chinese state media outlet, spun the story. Okinawans, it reported, were demanding a complete revision of the Japan-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement, the rules that govern U.S. military bases in Japan.

What the newspaper neglected to tell its readers was that the changes sought by the protesters were aimed specifically at preventing sexual assaults. Indeed, the crime that sparked the protests was given only a token mention, leaving the impression that it was the Japan-U.S. alliance itself that Okinawans opposed.

Okinawa bears a disproportionate burden for the alliance, with 70 percent of U.S. bases in Japan located on the islands. That makes the prefecture both strategically important and vulnerable. China’s goal is to drive a wedge between Okinawa and mainland Japan, in order to destabilize the Japan-U.S. alliance and weaken Japan’s security posture.

Navigating AI Rivalry And Cooperation: China-Europe Relations In The Digital Age – OpEd

Simon Hutagalung

The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping worldwide economic dynamics, and the interplay among China and Europe provides each promising possibilities and extremely good challenges in this hastily developing area. At the coronary heart of this dating lies a twin fact: the potential for groundbreaking collaboration in research, agency applications, and international desired-putting, counterbalanced thru excessive competition, differing regulatory philosophies, and strategic countrywide security issues.

The thesis of this discourse is that, even as AI can be a powerful catalyst for monetary boom and innovation in every area, it additionally necessitates careful navigation of divergent priorities and ethical frameworks on the way to forging a sustainable and collectively beneficial partnership.

In contemporary years, the surge in AI development has underscored the precise strengths of both China and Europe. Europe is renowned for its deep information in essential AI studies, boasting a legacy of academic excellence and theoretical contributions that have underpinned many contemporary-day AI technology. In assessment, China has rapidly emerged as an international powerhouse in AI, driven with the aid of big government investments, a large domestic market, and an outstanding potential for the fast utility and scaling of AI solutions.

Three sensitive messages from Yemen strike Signal chat unpacked and explained

Bernd Debusmann Jr

A discussion by high-ranking US security officials about US air strikes on Yemen has been published in full by the Atlantic magazine.

The group chat on the Signal app mistakenly included the Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.

After holding back some excerpts of the chat in an earlier article, he decided on Wednesday to publish almost the entire exchange after senior officials insisted there was no classified information shared in the group.

Those statements "have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions", Goldberg wrote.

The messages, however, need some unpicking. Here are three of them with some analysis.

Timetable for the attack

These messages provide details of the US military's plan for the Yemen strikes - described as a "package", a military term which refers to a set of aircraft, weapons systems and intelligence gathering devices that will participate in an operation.

"The idea this wasn't classified information at the time is inconceivable," Glenn Gerstell, the former general counsel of the National Security Agency (NSA), told the BBC.

Tammy Wynette’s Choice (March 21, 2025)

Richard Haass

Welcome to Home & Away—or what Michael Gordon of the New York Times refers to as “Home Alone.” And welcome to the second day of spring, which officially began yesterday, March 20.

Standing by Your Man

It is not every day you come across Tammy Wynette and Ukraine in the same sentence, but let me explain why today is the day. Tammy Wynette, as many of you will recall, is closely identified with the 1968 country music classic: “Stand by Your Man.” Which raises one of this week’s central questions: Who will Donald Trump stand by? Vladimir Putin or Volodymyr Zelenskyy? Much depends on the answer.

The past week has left matters up in the air. President Trump had an extended phone call with Putin on Tuesday, followed by a phone conversation with Zelenskyy a day later. The ostensible purpose of the call with Putin was to elicit his support for the full, unconditional 30-day ceasefire that Washington and Kyiv had put on the table last week. Putin showed no interest in this proposal, instead suggesting his readiness to embrace a temporary mutual prohibition on attacking energy infrastructure.

Read TIME’s Latest Interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

Simon Shuster

President Volodymyr Zelensky has not talked much about his meeting at the White House since it ended in acrimony on Feb. 28. He never expected to find himself arguing with Donald Trump on television that day, and he knew the dangers of making the situation worse by discussing it openly afterward. But on March 21, about three weeks after the drama in the Oval Office, he agreed to talk about it in an interview with TIME.

At the front of his mind going into that meeting, he says, was the peace process President Trump had initiated. He wanted to ensure that Trump understood what terms Ukraine could accept and what it would find too humiliating after more than three years of all-out war with Russia. He also wanted to make Trump understand that Vladimir Putin cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith. “But, well, the conversation went in another direction,” he told TIME in his office in Kyiv.

The full story of the Oval Office meeting, what led up to it, and how Zelensky sees the endgame in this war, appears on the cover of the latest issue of the magazine.

What follows is a partial transcript of the conversation, in which Zelensky spoke his native Ukrainian. It has been translated, condensed and edited for clarity by TIME.

Europe Needs a Complete Strategic Reboot

Kishore Mahbubani

Two statements by European leaders put side by side capture the essence of the European dilemma today. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel famously said in 2012, “If Europe today accounts for just over 7 percent of the world’s population, produces around 25 percent of global GDP, and has to finance 50 percent of global social spending, then it’s obvious that it will have to work very hard to maintain its prosperity and way of life.” More recently, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said, “Right now, 500 million Europeans are begging 300 million Americans for protection from 140 million Russians who have been unable to overcome 50 million Ukrainians for three years.”

When European leaders “bravely” decided to stand up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they also promised their people, more implicitly than explicitly: “Please don’t worry. You won’t have to make personal sacrifices. If necessary, we will borrow from future generations. We won’t cut your benefits. We won’t raise your taxes.” Just as importantly, the Europeans felt courageous because they assumed that under no circumstances would the United States ever abandon Europe. It was an assumption that showed how naive Europe’s leaders had become. They had forgotten a cardinal rule of geopolitics: Never plan against best-case scenarios; always plan against worst-case scenarios. To be fair, the person who highlighted this geopolitical naivete to me was Henry Kissinger, in a one-on-one conversation I had with him in October 2022.

America Is Listing in a Gathering Storm

James Kitfield

Geopolitical storm clouds are gathering at the far reaches of Pax Americana, and yet there is remarkably little sign that the U.S. government or the American people have awoken to the mounting dangers. The threat posed by China and Russia and their rogue nation allies rated only passing mention in last year’s presidential campaign, for instance, which in typical fashion revolved around domestic issues such as the economy and inflation. Asked to choose among five issues in an NBC exit poll, only 4 percent of the voters surveyed during last year’s presidential election named foreign policy as a priority.

President Donald Trump has talked a lot about restoring strong U.S. leadership in an increasingly unstable world, but in its first two months, his administration has mostly sown chaos at home and doubt abroad about the reliability of the United States as an ally.

How DeepSeek has changed artificial intelligence and what it means for Europe

AuthorsBertin Martens

Introduction: enter DeepSeek

The start of 2025 was marked by several major announcements related to artificial intelligence. The release of the DeepSeek (2025) AI model on 22 January blew a trillion-dollar hole in the stock market 1 , on the basis that China’s DeepSeek would substantially undercut American AI giants. DeepSeek was soon followed by many copy-cat small and cheap AI models. Markets concluded somewhat prematurely that DeepSeek broke the AI model scaling law and would undermine the rationale for heavy investment in AI computing infrastructure.

But can small AI models really perform as well as big models, without access to huge quantities of the expensive Nvidia AI processor chips that dominate the sector? Big-tech AI firms were not impressed by this market turbulence and doubled down on their AI infrastructure spending 2 . Just a week before the DeepSeek release, OpenAI and Oracle announced a $100 billion to $500 billion AI infrastructure investment – dubbed Stargate – to catch up with big-tech firms 3 . Two weeks later, the European Union announced its own €200 billion AI investment initiative 4 .

This Policy Brief aims to go beyond the DeepSeek hype. It analyses innovations in AI models over the past half year and examines the economic implications for AI companies and policymakers, in particular in the EU. It argues that DeepSeek is innovative, but in line with model evolution over the past half year – not an unexpected revolution. It still fits into the ‘transformer’ generative AI or large language model (LLM) paradigm of the last eight years (Vaswani et al, 2017).

Asia Must Unite to Survive Trump 2.0

LEE JONG-WHA

US President Donald Trump has raised the specter of economic and geopolitical turmoil in Asia. While individual countries have few options for pushing back against Trump’s transactional diplomacy, protectionist trade policies, and erratic decision-making, a unified region has a fighting chance.

The challenges are formidable. Trump’s crude, bullying approach to long-term allies is casting serious doubt on the viability of America’s decades-old security commitments, on which many Asian countries depend. Worse, America’s treaty allies (Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines) and its strategic partner (Taiwan) fear that Trump could actively undermine their security, such as by offering concessions to China or North Korea.

Meanwhile, Trump’s aggressive efforts to reshape the global trading system, including by pressuring foreign firms to move their manufacturing to the United States, have disrupted world markets and generated considerable policy uncertainty. This threatens to undermine growth and financial stability in Asian economies, particularly those running large trade surpluses with the US – such as China, India, Japan, South Korea, and the ASEAN countries.

Europe and the Next World Order

SIGMAR GABRIEL and PETER EITEL

President Donald Trump’s radical changes to US foreign policy have led many to suspect that he wants to align America more with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the long term. The expectation now is that the United States, China, and Russia will carve up the world among themselves, as the victors of World War II did at the 1945 Yalta Conference. As Trump abandons America’s 80-year-old commitment to preserving a rules- and law-based international order, the world is heading back to the age of “might makes right.” Yet because Trump sees all diplomacy as transactional, he is surrendering America’s main power multiplier: its ability to form and lead alliances.

Securing Critical Raw Materials: A Smarter Path for the United States

Dr. Patrick Schröder

As the global race for critical raw materials heats up, the United States finds itself navigating an increasingly complex geopolitical terrain. The Trump administration is pursuing access to Ukrainian mineral reserves through a joint minerals deal still under bilateral negotiation, running parallel with U.S.–Russia ceasefire talks, underscoring the high geopolitical stakes tied to these critical resources.

The Trump administration has also revisited the idea of securing resources in Greenland, a move that has unsettled European allies and stirred unease across the Atlantic, further signaling that the race for critical materials could be escalating.

These resources, such as lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, and more, are vital for powering clean energy systems, building the hardware for artificial intelligence, and developing defense technologies. But there is a catch: sourcing these materials from unstable regions risks pulling the United States into volatile political situations and potentially triggering new geopolitical tensions with unpredictable consequences.

Critical Raw Materials and European Defence

James Hackett, Ester Sabatino, Matthew Bint, Dzaky Naradichiantama, Michael Gjerstad, Jonathan Bentham, Johannes R. Fischbach, Louis Bearn & Yurri Clavilier

Security of supply issues are of growing concern for defence policymakers. This relates to components, platforms and munitions, but also to the raw materials that are used in manufacturing processes. In recent years, NATO and the European Union have released lists of the raw materials they deem critical, both for defence purposes as well as for broader industrial and technological resilience, as have several European nations.

NATO has stated that the availability and secure supply of these critical materials is important for ‘NATO’s technological edge and operational readiness’. These concerns are not new, but they have been exacerbated by geopolitics, technology-modernisation imperatives and initiatives across Europe to pursue energy-transition plans.

Western states’ potential adversaries have, in some cases, a near-monopoly on the supply of vital materials that either are used in current defence platforms or are necessary to power European digital and industrial development and energy-transition ambitions. This is a result of economic and political choices taken by Western states. Mines and processing facilities, for instance, were closed as cheaper alternatives were sourced abroad and as environmental concerns strengthened at home.

21st Century: The Asian Century – Analysis

Matija Šerić

Every era has its rulers who manage to impose power and influence. Antiquity was dominated by Ancient Greece and Rome. The Byzantine and Frankish Kingdoms ruled the Middle Ages. Later, the British Empire took over, making the 19th century known as the British Imperial Century. In the 20th century, Washington established absolute dominance, earning it the title of the American Century, characterized by Pax Americana.

Considering current demographic, social, economic, cultural, and political trends, everything points to the possibility that the 21st century could become the Asian Century. In fact, the Asian Century has already begun—we are only waiting for a decisive breakthrough that could lead to the global dominance of Asian powers. Pax Asiatica is a reality in both the near and distant future.

Excellent Starting Conditions

The Asian continent is naturally endowed both geographically and demographically. Asia is the largest continent by area (44.5 million square kilometers) and has the highest population in the world—4.8 billion people—making up 60% of the global population. It stretches from its westernmost point in Asia Minor to its easternmost point in the Diomede Islands (Russia), from its southernmost point on Rota Island (Mariana Islands) to its northernmost point at Cape Chelyuskin in Russia.

Cobalt And Blood: The West’s Green Rush And Congo’s Unfinished Struggle – OpEd

Debashis Chakrabarti

Kinshasa’s streets hum with restless energy, a city suspended between hope and despair. In the east, rebels loot villages, their guns paid for by the minerals that power the world’s electric dreams. Beneath the soil lies a wealth vast enough to rebuild a continent—yet, for over a century, it has been the currency of its destruction.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is not merely a country; it is a parable of modern imperialism. From the severed hands of Leopold’s rubber plantations to Cold War puppet regimes and today’s green energy stampede, the script has changed, but the plot remains the same: wealth flows outward, suffering remains local. The West, quick to denounce China’s economic incursions into Africa, conveniently forgets its own role in scripting this unending tragedy.

From Leopold to Lumumba: A Nation Strangled in Its Cradle

In 1885, the Berlin Conference declared Congo a “free trade” zone under King Leopold II of Belgium. What followed was neither free nor trade but plunder at an industrial scale. By the time the world woke up to the horrors—forced labor, mutilations, and millions dead—Leopold had already rewritten history, selling his colony to Belgium as a “humanitarian” gesture. The new colonial rulers promised reform, but exploitation merely changed hands.

‘It’s so unbelievable': Cyber world stunned over war planners using Signal

Maggie Miller and Dana Nickel

Lawmakers and experts are sounding the alarm after revelations that Cabinet members were using Signal to discuss war plans, saying the encrypted messaging app is still vulnerable to hacking.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published a first-hand account on Monday detailing how he was mistakenly added to a Signal group chat where high-ranking Trump officials were discussing plans to conduct military strikes in Yemen. The Signal conversation included “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing,” Goldberg said, describing the use of the open-source app to map out military strikes as “shocking recklessness.”

“I guess Signal is a few steps above leaving a copy of your war plan at the Chinese Embassy — but it’s far below the standards required for discussing any elements of a war plan,” said Mark Montgomery, senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Elon Musk thinks robots are a $10 trillion business. He’s got some competition from China

John Liu

Spinning bright red handkerchiefs and dancing in step to folk music, more than a dozen human-like robots took to China’s biggest stage in January, making a splashy debut at the annual Lunar New Year gala.

The remarkable performance, watched by more than a billion people, is a high-profile reminder of how far Chinese humanoid robots have come. Over the past two months, videos of the country’s humanoid robots pulling off moves such as bike rides, roundhouse kicks and side flips have blown up the internet, often amplified by state media as a key potential driver of economic growth.

Even though very few of the humanoids are in mass production, competition with Elon Musk’s Tesla, one of the acknowledged frontrunners in the field, is heating up. The promise of an “I, Robot” future, where machines handle household chores and serve as caregivers, has drawn nearly every major tech company in both the United States and China to bet on humanoids or robotics.

Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have invested in American humanoid maker Figure AI. Meanwhile, Meta is planning major investments in humanoids, according to a Bloomberg report last month.

International Approaches to Research on the Information Environment

Samantha Lai

Introduction

Scholars around the world approach research on the information environment differently as a result of significant divergences in countries’ media systems, political environments, and cultures. How can researchers and policymakers who conduct work on a global level incorporate these differences into their work?

In May 2023, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace raised these questions at a symposium on state media, held in collaboration with Meta. The symposium brought together an international group of experts to explore differences in how state media operates and is governed across countries. This compendium collects contributions from workshop participants across the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, who offer a range of perspectives on how researchers, civil society organizations, and governmental bodies govern and research media and its relationship to the information environment.

Crosswalk Analysis for Artificial Intelligence Frameworks

Heather West, Alice Hubbard & Samara Friedman

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a priority for countries and organizations across the world — including ensuring its safety and security. Standards, frameworks, and guidelines around AI safety and security have been evolving rapidly within standards organizations to provide guidance and best practices to evaluate the risk in developing and using different AI models and systems. The maturity of these frameworks is due, in part, to their basis in software risk management frameworks in the cybersecurity space. Some frameworks are macro-level, focusing on governance, policy, and frontier AI risks. Others are much more granular, micro-level frameworks emphasizing the implementation of AI governance within specific organizations through technical standards, process controls, and risk management practices. Both are complementary, with the first setting the vision and the second enabling practical action. But with different organizations working on both macro- and micro-level frameworks, there needs to be alignment. This paper crosswalks some of the existing frameworks and makes recommendations on how additional ones should align.

In this analysis, we review six AI security and risk management frameworks that approach the safety and security of AI in different manners:

1. The Bletchley Declaration

2. The White House Voluntary Commitments and Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence

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