Ben Buchanan

Ben Buchanan is the Dmitri Alperovitch Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where he is an expert in the intersection of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and statecraft.

From 2021 to 2025, Buchanan served in the Biden White House, including as White House Special Advisor for Artificial Intelligence, where he coordinated the Biden Administration’s AI policy. He also served as Director for Technology and National Security on the National Security Council and held key roles at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In these roles, he helped craft major AI policy deliverables, including two Executive Orders on AI, the National Security Memorandum on AI, and the United Nations General Assembly resolution on AI.

Before his White House service, Buchanan was Director of the CyberAI Project at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where he was also a Senior Faculty Fellow and Assistant Teaching Professor at the Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Buchanan is the author of three books: The New Fire: War, Peace, and Democracy in the Age of AI (MIT Press, 2022), The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics (Harvard University Press, 2020), and The Cybersecurity Dilemma (Oxford University Press, 2017). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, War on the Rocks, and Lawfare.

He earned his Ph.D. in War Studies as a Marshall Scholar at King’s College London, following master’s and undergraduate degrees from Georgetown University.