The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a Washington, D.C.–based think tank founded in 1910 by Andrew Carnegie, focused on international affairs. Under President Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, who took the role in 2023, the organization expanded its AI governance work, including an AI Governance Lab and co-leadership of the California Frontier AI Policy Working Group.
Overview
- Founded: 1910 (by Andrew Carnegie)
- Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
- President: Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar (from 2023)
Carnegie's traditional focus areas are strategic stability, arms control, and global governance.
AI governance work
Under Cuéllar's leadership, Carnegie expanded its AI policy work to include AI governance research and convening, engagement with US, EU, and Chinese AI governance forums, and senior fellowship programs on AI policy.
Cuéllar co-led the academic-policy working group that produced the California Report on Frontier AI Policy (June 2025). Scott R. Singer of Carnegie served as lead writer alongside CRFM's Bommasani.
Carnegie's established research on arms control, international-organization design, and nuclear-era precedents carries over into AI governance discussion. Arms-control frameworks inform thinking about AI capability thresholds, compute governance, and international coordination. International-organization design research bears on OGI-style governance proposals. Nuclear-era analogies such as test bans and non-proliferation recur in AI discourse.
Carnegie China
Carnegie China is the Endowment's East Asia-based research center, with its office in Singapore; its director is Damien Ma, who holds the Maurice R. Greenberg Director's Chair (Source: carnegieendowment.org). In September 2026 it published "Who's Ahead in the Global AI Talent Race?" by Ma and Binyi Yang, presented as AI Talent v3.0, a continuation of the Global AI Talent Tracker run by MacroPolo until that think tank ceased operations in 2025. Based on the 10,280 of 25,677 unique NeurIPS 2025 authors (40%) with complete career histories, it found 40.6% of the 2025 cohort working in China and 34.2% in the United States, against 27.1% and 46.4% for the 2022 cohort, and ranked Peking University and Tsinghua University first and second among institutions (Who's Ahead in the Global AI Talent Race? (Ma and Yang, Carnegie China, 2026)). See AI Talent Flows.
Positioning among think tanks
Carnegie is an establishment Washington think tank with a focus on international affairs. Relative to peers, it has a more narrowly international focus than Brookings, whose work spans broader domestic policy; a softer security framing and broader global-governance scope than CSIS, which is national-security-first; and a more policy-engaged, less quantitative approach than the research-centric RAND. Compared with AI-specific think tanks such as GovAI and CSET, it brings broader institutional reach with less technical depth. Cuéllar's AI-specific expansion brings Carnegie's international-affairs work into AI governance discussions.
Relationships
- led-by: Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar.
- supports: The California Report on Frontier AI Policy — Singer as lead writer.
- related: Brookings Institution AI Initiative / Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) / Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) / RAND Corporation — DC think-tank ecosystem.
- related: Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI) — AI-specific peer.
- related: AI Race Dynamics / Superintelligence Strategy (Hendrycks, Schmidt, Wang) — international-affairs framings of AI.
- related: Who's Ahead in the Global AI Talent Race? (Ma and Yang, Carnegie China, 2026) — Carnegie China AI Talent v3.0 study (2026)
- related: Damien Ma, Binyi Yang, MacroPolo