A 24-page strategy document issued in August 2026 by the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, released August 17, 2026. It satisfies the statutory requirement at 42 U.S.C. 19221 (§ 10612 of the CHIPS and Science Act, Pub. L. 117-167) for a strategy on economic security, science, research and innovation supporting the National Security Strategy, submitted after the transmission of each NSS. The document states that it supports and enables the 2025 National Security Strategy and complements National Science and Technology Memorandum 5 (NSTM-5) on FY2028 research and development budget priorities: NSTM-5 sets the priorities, and the strategy provides organizing guidance for federally funded R&D (Source: whitehouse.gov).
The strategy is scoped to science and technology competition "as it relates to military capabilities, homeland defense and resilience, and other direct intersections with national security."
Structure
Four postures organize the document, one per pillar: focused, resilient, agile, and secure. Implementation runs through five named means — building the S&T workforce, enhancing R&D infrastructure, targeting federal R&D funding, fostering partnerships with non-federal stakeholders, and leveraging ally and partner capabilities.
The framing section groups the challenge into geopolitical, technology, and legal/policy/structural factors. Among the technology factors it records that "for some rapidly evolving technologies, there remains significant uncertainty about the implications for national security and timelines on which they will materialize" — the premise on which Pillar 2's transformative-technology element rests.
AI and autonomy as a battlefield priority
Pillar 1 restates from the NSS three priority areas for U.S. battlefield dominance and power projection: undersea (submarine survivability and anti-submarine warfare), space (superiority from very low-Earth orbit through cislunar space), and AI and autonomy ("competitive advantage in the rapidly evolving area of military and other national security applications of AI and autonomy"). Air, long-range strike, and C5ISR are listed as further areas critical to battlefield dominance.
Twelve key enabling technologies are named for prioritized leadership and application: advanced manufacturing and materials; AI and autonomy; communications and networking; directed energy; future computing technologies; hypersonics and advanced missile technologies; information management and cybersecurity; nuclear energy; positioning, navigation, and timing; semiconductors and microelectronics; sensing and signature management; and space technologies.
Artificial general intelligence as a transformative-technology category
Pillar 2 distinguishes resilience to present risks from resilience to technology transformation, stating that the aim "cannot mean halting technological progress" but instead leading in "potentially transformative emerging technologies, where the national security implications and timelines remain uncertain." Three areas are named:
- Artificial intelligence and autonomy — "where approaching or achieving artificial general intelligence could present fundamentally new opportunities and threats";
- Biotechnology — novel human health and performance applications, and adversary development of engineered bioweapons;
- Quantum information technologies — future breakthroughs in sensing, communications, computing and information security.
The AI clause places approaching or achieving AGI in a dedicated risk category within a U.S. national-security strategy document. See AGI Timelines, AI and National Security.
Homeland defense and resilience applications
Pillar 1's homeland element lists border security at land, air and maritime approaches; survivable and credible nuclear deterrent forces; a next-generation missile defense shield under the Golden Dome for America initiative; protection of critical data, networks, assets and infrastructure against cyberattack and espionage; and countering biological weapon threats.
Pillar 2 cites the AI Action Plan's call for an AI Information Sharing and Analysis Center, led by the Department of Homeland Security, to share AI-security threat information and intelligence across critical infrastructure sectors. Its national resilience architecture section names AI-enabled biosurveillance to identify and characterize novel-agent bioattacks and disease outbreaks, and AI-driven anomaly detection to secure operational technology and industrial control systems alongside cyber-physical threat modeling. The redundancy argument is illustrated by the nuclear triad, with the stated goal being "not imperviousness, which is rarely affordable, but graceful degradation."
Supply-chain protection instruments are named by name: the Federal Communications Commission's Covered List, the Bureau of Industry and Security's Information and Communications Technology and Services Program, and the Federal Acquisition Security Council.
Innovation pace and acquisition
Pillar 3 directs agencies toward rapid R&D funding mechanisms, short-turnaround innovation challenge competitions, streamlined patenting and commercialization pathways for federally funded researchers, and contract language permitting project managers to "fail fast" and pivot. It calls for updating or removing burdensome regulations, streamlining waiver and exemption authorities for testing and evaluation, using advisory boards for advice rather than as mechanisms imposing de facto requirements, and accelerating security clearance processing.
Acquisition reform cites Executive Order 14265 on modernizing defense acquisitions, Executive Order 14369 on American space superiority (directing the Department of Commerce and NASA), and Executive Order 14383 establishing an America First arms transfer strategy. The document refers throughout to the "Department of War." It directs use of Other Transaction Authorities and milestone-based fixed-cost contracting with competing participants and performance-based down-select.
Research security, investment screening, and export controls
Pillar 4 builds on National Security Presidential Memorandum 33 (NSPM-33). Named measures include tracking direct and indirect recipients of federal research funding; prohibiting fundamental research funding to high-risk entities, including companies on the section 1260H list of Chinese military companies operating in the United States; risk-based review criteria and a shareable information repository; universal research security reporting forms to reduce regulatory burden; automated research-security vetting of proposals and continuous monitoring; counter-intelligence support to research centers; and cybersecurity guidelines for researchers and institutions. The FBI-led Quantum Information Science and Technology Counterintelligence Protection Team is given as a model of field-specific security practice.
On export controls the strategy is two-directional: updating controls to keep pace with emerging risks while eliminating or streamlining outdated ones. It cites the Bureau of Industry and Security's January 2026 interim final rule streamlining drone export controls to allies with strong export-control regimes, directed under Executive Order 14307, and raises possible reforms to U.S. implementation of the Missile Technology Control Regime. It also directs continued prioritization of the Data Security Program established in May 2025 under the emergency declared by Executive Order 13873, on the ground that unlawful export of Americans' sensitive data threatens national security when foreign actors use it "to conduct malign operations against the United States or to train certain AI capabilities." See Export Controls (AI).
Appendices
Appendix A updates OSTP's list of critical and emerging technology areas relevant to national security. The AI and autonomy entry enumerates: perception, recognition and sensor fusion; planning, reasoning and decision-making; robotics and embodied intelligence; foundation models, including large language, multimodal and world systems; multi-agent systems and swarm intelligence; autonomous systems for surface, air, maritime, space and cyber domains; autonomous command and control; autonomous agent identification and authentication; interpretability and control; adversarial robustness and AI security; techniques enabling next-generation systems such as continual learning; and distributed and privacy-preserving machine learning.
Appendix B maps the fourteen CET areas against the strategy's priority national security needs. AI and autonomy is the only area marked across every column — space/air/long-range strike, undersea, national-security AI and autonomy, border security, nuclear deterrence and missile defense, cyber defense, biological-weapon defense, and leading in transformative emerging technology. Quantum information technologies carries parenthetical marks, indicating implications the document says have yet to emerge.
Provenance
Fetched in full from the canonical whitehouse.gov upload path, 24 pages including both appendices.
An earlier partial capture, limited to the first twelve pages, supported a note that the phrases "sensor fusion," "foundation models" and "autonomous command and control" did not appear in the strategy's own text and were the reporter's gloss. The full capture shows the opposite: all three are enumerated subfields of the AI and autonomy entry in Appendix A. The characterization in press coverage is supported by the document, and the earlier note is corrected here.
Relationships
- depends-on: AI and National Security — the strategy is the governing organizing document for federally funded national-security AI R&D.
- supports: AGI Timelines — records AGI as a national-security planning category with uncertain timelines.
- related: Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), DHS — Department of Homeland Security (AI Deployer), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Export Controls (AI), Agentic AI.