Over the winter break, 22 students and faculty affiliated with the Yale Jackson School’s Schmidt Program on Artificial Intelligence, Emerging Technologies, and National Power took a four-day trip to Silicon Valley, where they examined the cutting-edge developments in AI and implications for global affairs.

The trip, which was co-sponsored by the Blue Center for Global Strategic Assessment, was led by Schmidt Program Director Ted Wittenstein, along with Professor Jing Tsu and Blue Center Executive Director Phil Kaplan.

Students met with tech leaders and Yale alumni at top frontier AI companies, including Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir Technologies, and Skydio – interacting with their trust, safety, policy, and regulatory teams.

“Engaging with these companies up close is a critical experience for our future technical and policy leaders at Yale,” noted Wittenstein. “Many of our alumni have gone on to excel in this space, and we were delighted to have some of them as our hosts. There is tremendous value in facilitating dialogue among the law, technology, policy, and business leaders who are grappling with AI-related challenges from different vantage points.”

The group also met with leading AI researchers and analysts at the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit, as well as UC Berkeley’s Risk and Security Lab and Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence. In addition, the students attended the Next Frontier Seminar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where they presented key findings from their trip. The week culminated in a reception with the Yale Club of San Francisco.

Dan Kent, a student in the Jackson School’s MPP program, made valuable connections between their coursework and the latest developments in the tech policy space.

“Before the trip, I didn’t realize just how much national and even global policy is being made here in Silicon Valley, far from the halls of power in Washington, D.C. From disrupting foreign influence operations to building safe AI models and investing in compute capacity, it’s critical that government and companies at the bleeding edge of technology partner so the United States can remain the global leader in this domain,” Kent said.

Jing Tsu, a Yale faculty expert in Chinese intellectual history, took part in the trip as well. “It was wonderful to see our students engage so thoughtfully with the tech industry,” Tsu said. “Hats off to the Schmidt Program for making possible such a needed interface—what a fantastic opportunity for them to begin shape a future that is inevitably theirs.”

See additional photos from the trip on the Jackson School’s Instagram account.