Buckeye broadband supports cspan as public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. Virginia senator mark warner compared u. S. National security threats from china to russias invasion of ukraine during a conversation with punch bowl news. He also talks about the risk of Artificial Intelligence, misinformation in the 2024 election, and the temporary government funding bill. Please welcome punch bowl news founder and ceo, anna palmer. [applause] good morning, good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us in person and on the live feed. I am thrilled to be here for the popup conversation with senator mark warner, the democrat from virginia. We will be focusing on National Security, the news of the day, no shortage of that, and what is happening in congress right now. Our senior congressional reporter will join me on stage to comoderate that conversation a big thank you to those partnering with us to make this conversation possible. Afterwards, i will be joined by henry brooks from Collins Aerospace. As always, you can find punch bowl news on all social media at punchbowlnews, and with that, lets welcome the senator and andrew to the stage. [applause] anna thank you so much. All right. We have plenty to get to and appreciate your coming this morning on a very, very busy time at the capital. Andrew Congress Passed a bill to fund the government for 45 days and it did not include any aid for ukraine. You were outspoken on that on saturday, but the outcome was much better than a Government Shutdown, you said, especially for someone like you, who represents so many federal workers in the state of virginia. There are accelerated conversations on capitol hill about getting a larger scale ukraine package through. What are your expectations for that and how confident are you that that will get done here . Sen. Warner thank you, andrew, thank you, anna. Saturday was about as bizarre a day as i have had. Down the rabbit hole, up and down and down is up was the description. If you stepped back for a moment and look three days earlier, over 75 of the house had voted to keep ukraine aid. In the senate, there were only six senators that might have gone up, so the notion that 75 , 80 of both bodies wanted ukraine aid so badly, and the opponents were opposed that they were willing to go above the democrat requests for spending and more than double the disaster aid, which is kind of a telling coming, number one. There was a problem i think the administration, and i said to the chairman of the intelligence committee, and i dont have 100 clarity of the 132 billion dollars we have already appropriated. How much of that was left . There was a journalist story this morning about 5 billion, another one about 1. 9 billion, and that made the case harder for how immediate the needs were. I do believe the 45 days will be shaky, and it was a little weird coming on sunday, coming home to virginia and getting attaboys. Getting one of those for keeping the government open, the baseline has fallen a little bit. Its crazy, if you are thinking from a National Security standpoint, that we would take this moment and potentially walk away three things there is an ad out you have probably seen about republicans for ukraine, that makes clear the point that the Ukrainian Military has done what we and nato, america, nato, were planning to do for 60 years. They have eliminated 50 of russias military capacity, and they have taken the second most powerful in the world and made it the second most powerful military in ukraine, without the cost of a single American Life or nato one. Second, when we have to reaffirm our alliances and see an expanded nato, to somehow send a signal that we are not going to be there, like the slovakian elections on saturday and the polish elections coming up, that makes no sense at all. And the part that i scratch my head because i hear morehouse guys than senate guys saying, we dont care about putting in ukraine, but we are terrified about president xi in china. They do not understand the connection that if boudin is successful in ukraine, that is a total green light for xi in china. If you dont get that, you float geopolitics 10 flunked geopolitics 101. China is our ultimate longterm potential adversary, and technology is more than tanks and guns in 2023 its ai and quantum computing, but it also is traditional military. I think we will find the dollars. There was enormous bipartisan interest in getting that done, and the big question will become i know you are quickly looking at the 47 other questions the question will be, in the whole for your slug, or a oneyear slug . Anna what we have heard from Senate Minority leader Mitch Mcconnell is that the majority of the money is being spent here in the u. S. , not going over as foreign aid. We are not just cutting checks to ukraine and saying here, have it, figure it out, but it is helping the u. S. Industrial base. Can you talk about that, and do you think it resonates with your democrats or republicans . Sen. Warner mr. Mcconnell has been a strong on this as any of us. I want to give him appropriate credit for that. The 62 billion dollar plus on the security side, the vast majority of it is going to American Companies and increasing our production lines. Some of these things like. 155 millimeters shells, we needed to produce capacity, but frankly, the American Defense industry, and the administration got grilled about making sure these were out of our reserves, not of our current stock. We were bleeding into a little bit of that by category, but i think senator mcconnells statement is right. One thing we need more is clarity. Some of the things that were in this package, it falls on my side of the budget, the intel side. Making clear accounting will be helpful as we go into this next battle. Andrew i want to shift gears to innovation at the department of defense. Can you talk about how the dod can use commercial innovation to make sure they have the most uptodate technology and help lower the cost for taxpayers . Sen. Warner great question, andrew. Let me talk first two examples. One is on overhead. I think about this as well from the intel side as well as the dod side. When i first got on the intelligence committee, people think the nro maybe had a picture of me, because i was trying to say, own satellites, lets go commercial. Not as what angus king once described, big fat floating cows in the sky. In a james bond movie, the massive satellites, and we had not thought that through. But now we have space x, we need some competitors there as well. The military, traditional dod side, there is a lot of room for improvement. I remember a guy who had not been in this job, had not been governor i am going to fix this. One of the things i am spending time on is how we put together i dont want to nerd out here how we get all the funders on the private sector side to the capital side. We have a great, new Innovative Company trying to break into dod. How do you become a project of record and get through that dip . One of the things that has fundamentally changed, there used to be a strong universe of funders, but now as we think about National Security being just gunships and planes, but ai and Synthetic Biology and small modular nukes at this point in terms of areas we have to compete with china. It is a broader portfolio and there are a lot more companies who are potentially funders. They can help those Innovative Companies get there. Opportunity great, challenges are great as well. Anna is there an opportunity for a study to examine that dod acquisition model . Changing that process is arduous and difficult. Sen. Warner i am very interested in this, because a lot of those companies are in Northern Virginia or removing their headquarters to Northern Virginia. It has not been lack of innovation, but having a procurement process that moves away from traditional lines, and im wondering if we can use the ic, the intel community, as the tip of the spirit to help protect innovation. This study is a good one. I was more interested in also seeing if we could have the secretaries identify champions. For all the invocations in the procurement process, if we dont have a Capital Stack that has different funding sources, and we have moved lightyears from where we were five years ago, when google said well, maybe we dont want to work with the dod . They dont have any problem working on the ccp and china with the same kind of ai related activities. Everyone across the traditional Tech Community is anxious. Anna we want to talk about ai and china, but before we do we are moving faster, folks. I promise you, i will help be the guide. Sen. Warner we have sevenpoint plans on all of these. [laughter] anna i want to talk about technology and sustainability a little bit. There is talk around updating the technology a little bit, innovation can be helpful there how important do you think this is in terms of finding sustainable technology, the government may be incentivizing dod to move in that direction. Sen. Warner the next speaker will speak to that, but they have done an excellent job. I was out of norfolk yesterday, who were gassed as a potential Government Shutdown and the absurdities of crs. You guys in the Hampton Roads community may be the only group of americans that understand what a cr is, but there are ways we can push and dod can be helpful. It is essential because we need is vent hundreds of dollars a year every year in virginia to raise the dock level because the sea level rises. Colleagues i have would say, we want to protect National Security. I wish they talked of the navy. How do we do this on a sustainability basis . I have been talking with the dod on this. I am in favor of small modular nukes, smrs, and duty is looking strongly at this because what i am seeing as we move towards sustainability, some of the areas we thought might be not onesizefitsall, we have seen the offshore wind industry go into a dramatic decline. We still have our project going off of the coast of virginia, but half the project we cannot make it with the current workers. I have a community in virginia, and a couple of communities and others are pushing back about massive solar fields. Smrs, which are clean and friendly and what i thought were hypocritical of some folks in the environmental community, they never question sailors being on submarines or aircraft carriers that have nukes. I hope this can be pushed, because it is also a composition with china and russia. Andrew majority leader schumer is leading a push in the senate for sometime next year, you held a closeddoor summit with tech and industry stakeholders and we rolled out a feature called the future of cybersecurity sen. Warner and you are talking to the chair of the intel committee. Andrew you are saying Artificial Intelligence could make when he 16 look like childs play. Can you talk about what you mean by that and what is the progress for congress to get something done next year . Sen. Warner i have spent as much time on Artificial Intelligence as anyone in the senate, we have had sessions that are bipartisan, and we know the whos who as well. Secondly, ive never been involved in a subject where the more time i spend on it doesnt equate to the smarter i think i am getting. Everything has been two steps forward, one step back. If you think about this and this has been confirmed by oms tp, something where the premise has radically changed, if we go way, way back in time to last november, sam altman and all the other folks the premise is, who the winner is in ai is those who have the most scale. Who has the most data, who has the most money. In china, large amounts of data, large amount of computing power, lots of the right things. Amazon, they would dominate the field on marked language models. Starting in march, the premise changed, and suddenly you had an llm coming out of the uae for pennies on the dollar. The premise that you had to build everything around a large language model and then attach specific industry applications fundamentally changed. We ought to do something about how the economics has changed, number one. Number two, the question of how you build security, whether you build it in, and these guys have been working so quickly on the arms race that they may not be thinking about security. So that depends on where you go with legislation. I am very much skeptical, having seen congress 0100 record for doing anything on social media, and we have been blown away on anything, and i remember i was so naive last march we have to have a framework with how we deal with Foreign Technology tiktok was one example, but coming on the basis of huawei, i thought, oh my gosh. This would be so easy. Merrily we roll along, sponsoring organizations like yours and others, its hard to push back. For those of you, i say, i told you so. Tiktok still has security risks. I answer your question what does this look like on legislation . I dont think those who are optimistic think we can have holistic legislation, probably too much too quick, but there is a bipartisan concern that we dont want to deplete social media, we will put in the guard rails later. Where do i start . Where can ai have the most dramatic Effect Tomorrow in terms of exponentially greater disruption and greater undermining of institutions . I would argue the two institutions that are the most under threat at the moment,s confidence in our elections, 2016 would be childs play, but the time and scale on which you can create these tools. But as we have seen with democracy alone, they will probably not have enough juice to get through. Another area with just as much if not more does dramatic disruption . Confidence in our public markets. There was a little bit of market disruption, we had a whole seven minutes i could take you through the different ai tools that could undermine confidence in individual stocks. My potential, if we could combine the capitalists with the small the democrats, because those are the two institutions that could be the most undermined this happens at a scale and a speed that which we could never predict. I have a lot of members on both sides, and there are analogies. This is not a perfect one, but weve had weapons of war forever. You shoot somebody with a gun, yeah, but we decided as a society that things like chemical weapons and Nuclear Weapons would carry a higher penalty or have prohibition. Not a perfect analogy, but ai around confidence in public elections and public markets, they could be so much more powerful than traditional disruption, there might be a higher penalty. But how do you prohibit on the front and . Directionally, i think this is where we could put together the notional idea and guardrails, even in a congress that is challenged. Recognizing that we are not doing this on the backend china, in terms of their application in terms of how they use ai on a defensive basis. The big operating premise here, we are not going to do what we did with social media and say, we will figure it out later. Anna andrew, i will give it to you to talk. You broke some news on china this morning. Andrew senator Chuck Schumer is heading to china this week. He is bringing a Bipartisan Group with him. Senator mike crapo is the republican leader on that trip. What do you make of the United States majority leader going to china, and what can we expect the expectations to be coming out of this trip . Sen. Warner i know chuck and mike had both been china hawks, and its important, and i shouldve stated this earlier that when i talk about china, its important as a policymaker that you are clear that your beef is with the ccp, president xi s authoritarian leadership, not the people of china. Because a few dont do that, the ccp will put out on we chat that this is a racist, antichinese approach. I am grateful for them for putting the delegation forward. I think we have to be tough fight about saying china is a great nation, the secondlargest economy in the world. We want to work with you, but you cant keep stealing six hundred Million Dollars in intellectual property each year, you have an authoritarian and surveillance regime that would make orwell blushed. What you have done to the people of hong kong. I think we need to be realistic about russia russia was an ideological and military threat. Never an economic threat. China is investing in a way that we did in the 1960s. 5g, where at one point the winning player, they were also studying the standards setting the standards. We have pushed back, we put a chip spill through, we need to be clear with china that we intend to compete with them on Synthetic Biology, quantum computing, ai, all of these domains, and there are ways we can work together, but we are not going to take our eye off the ball about how china is with a focus that at some point may end up undermining them all of their investment in ai, they have still not released a large language model because they dont trust their people to not ask a question about Something Like tiananmen square. You have a lot of countries that went with belt and road that are frankly with frankly dissatisfied customers. I think it is in awesome time for us to reopen conversations with countries in africa, look at the balance in asia. I hope that will be part of the agenda of that delegation at home as well. Anna we got through many topics we are out of time, but thank you, senator warner, for joining us this morning. [applause] anna and a big thank you to andrew for joining me this morning. Now i would like to welcomes henry brooks, president s of collins error and rtx business Collins Aerospace and rtx business for a fireside chat. Good morning. [applause] anna thank you for flying up. You also have some personal excitement happening wit