Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt’s second act has been defence. After running Google and then Alphabet for the better part of two decades, the former chief executive chaired the NSCAI — the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence — the body Congress created to assess where the United States stood in the AI race. Its 2021 final report was unambiguous: America was not prepared to defend against or compete with China in AI, and the country needed something on the scale of an Apollo program to catch up. The document became the reference point for much of the Pentagon’s subsequent AI policy.

Schmidt did not stop when the commission wound down. Later in 2021 he founded and now chairs the Special Competitive Studies Project, a think tank that carries the same China-competition argument forward across AI, biotechnology and microelectronics. He has been a persistent public voice warning that the technological balance with Beijing is closer than Washington assumes, while himself maintaining business ties inside China’s AI sector — a tension critics have pointed to repeatedly.

His most direct move into warfare is a drone venture that has cycled through several names — White Stork, Project Eagle, and now Swift Beat — operating through a web of associated companies. It develops cheap, AI-guided drones in three broad families: interceptors aimed at Russian Shahed-type attack drones, medium-range strike UAVs, and FPV kamikaze drones. The systems are built for and supplied to Ukraine, and by late 2025 Ukrainian operators credited the interceptors with more than a thousand downed Shaheds; the strike drones have been reported to reach high autonomous hit rates. The venture has recruited engineers from Apple, SpaceX, Google and government, and marks Schmidt’s shift from advising on autonomous warfare to manufacturing it.