Prospect Illustration/State Department Photo
Many Obama officials said no to serving Trump, but McGurk stayed on in the State Department.
The artificial-intelligence company Primer Technologies started in San Francisco, and by 2019 had opened an office in Washington to keep apace with new business. But it needed government fixers to keep growing.
In April 2020, Primer brought Brett McGurk onto its board. A senior adviser in the past three U.S. presidencies, McGurk knew the software products that national-security agencies might want. He helped the company through the pandemic. Primer’s founder described his perspective as “invaluable.” Even Gen. David Petraeus was impressed by the hire. “That is a lot of talent on one board,” he posted. “Be careful that it doesn’t achieve critical mass and set off a chain reaction! 🙂”
Today, McGurk is running Biden’s Middle East policy, and Primer is winning multimillion-dollar contracts and aggressively hiring new employees with security clearances. The fact that the Silicon Valley startup chose to hire McGurk for “strategic advice” is a case study in how former officials sign up to advance corporate agendas while simultaneously holding other roles that influence policy.
Primer is part of a new school of artificial-intelligence companies that build software known as “no-code AI.” The goal is for machines to replicate and accelerate the work of analysts sitting at rows of desks and skimming through heaps of material. A program that can sift through data quickly has a huge appeal, especially to governments. But the shortcuts offered by Primer, with techniques that rely on mass surveillance, pose serious ethical and legal concerns.
“Awesome technology,” he tweeted. Months later, Primer won its largest public contract from the Defense Department to date.
One of its tools can “identify terrorist events” within a set of documents. Another, it says, can monitor emergencies in real time: “In the middle of a PR crisis or a riot, understand the who, what, when, and where with real-time summarization and entity extraction to help you make important decisions.” Ethics watchdogs and human rights advocates are concerned that this tool could be used against vulnerable groups like immigrants or activists. For example, it could track participants in Black Lives Matter protests. It might be even more dangerous in the hands of an autocratic government, like the United Arab Emirates, whose sovereign fund has invested heavily in Primer. Even worse: AI makes mistakes and can reveal unconscious bias.
The former officials on payroll mask these shortcomings with national-security messaging. Some 15 to 20 percent of Primer’s 150 employees were poached from the Pentagon or intelligence agencies. Three-quarters of its business is related to national security. Recent job listings seek “cleared” engineers to work with “intelligence and military customers.” That the CIA-backed venture group In-Q-Tel initially invested in the startup, and is a customer, suggests that Primer is already an important company.
Having McGurk on board helped Primer with publicity. For years, he had regularly appeared on TV, participated in policy discussions as a researcher of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and lectured at Stanford. Soon, McGurk was plugging the company. “Awesome technology: Machine generated briefings—with maps, timelines, connections b/w people and organizations, key quotes, associated events—to immediately contextualize any breaking news. Puts a world-class analytical team inside my laptop,” he tweeted last May. Months later, in October, Primer won its largest public contract from the Defense Department to date.
McGurk joined the Biden administration as the White House coordinator for the Middle East in January 2021. By then, he had served on Primer’s board for less than a year and earned $100,000. (The payout came in the form of options that Primer bought back from him.)
“He considered it a good product. Additionally, he has no other private sector work at all,” said a White House spokesperson. A representative for Primer initially replied to the Prospect, but then stopped answering inquiries and did not respond to detailed questions.
Daphne Eviatar of Amnesty International says that when a Silicon Valley firm hires former officials, it helps the companies more than the public: “It raises a lot of questions of whose interests are being served. The military, partly driven by business interests, often thinks there is a technological fix to their challenges.”
By sorting through data, Primer’s software can summarize information. I’m not a robot but I decided to do the same for McGurk. His experience serving both parties since 9/11 was undoubtedly beneficial to the company. He clerked for Republican-appointed Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and co-authored a Federalist Society brief early in his career. McGurk was then instrumental to the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the legal framework that enabled the Coalition Provisional Authority.
I also uncovered some warts. He wrote an article as a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, the ultra-hawkish Cold War group that neocons relaunched in 2004 to advocate for an even bigger war on terrorism. An Atlantic story from that time described McGurk as “one of the real stars of the occupation.” Harvard’s website later misquoted this, saying the magazine had called him “‘one of the heroes’ of the CPA period.” He’d like to be associated with the “surge” in Iraq, but is better known for describing his “blue balls” in a series of risqué emails with a reporter, all written on his State Department account. It contributed to McGurk withdrawing his bid to be ambassador to Iraq in 2012.
Many Obama officials and career civil servants said no to serving Trump, but McGurk stayed on as the top official overseeing the anti-ISIS coalition in the State Department. He resigned in 2018 when Trump withdrew most U.S. troops from Syria. McGurk went on to teach a single class each semester at Stanford at $200,000 a year. He enlisted student researchers to help him write a book for Penguin Random House, but now its publication is postponed indefinitely. It was originally called Three Presidents, Three Wars, but ended up with a more sanguine title, Command: Inside the Oval Office With Three Presidents, and the Wartime Decisions That Changed the World.
Progressives have criticized McGurk’s appointment to the Biden White House because of his closeness to leaders of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. An Emirati sovereign fund’s investment in Primer also raises the potential of a conflict of interest. A White House spokesperson emphasized that the investment came before he joined Primer and that he did not contact foreign governments on the company’s behalf.
All indications suggest that the Biden administration will massively invest in AI for national security. Recently, an advisory commission to the Defense Department recommended the adoption of machine-learning technology that is strikingly similar to Primer’s.
Meanwhile McGurk’s colleagues at Primer were celebrating. One venture capitalist who invested in the AI company tweeted congratulations and called McGurk a “super smart valuable national asset.” Maybe they were excited about a potential new customer at the highest level. “I wish we had some of these tools early in the ISIS war,” McGurk had said last October. “They’re available now.”
