Strider CEO and Co-Founder Greg Levesque at 47G’s Zero Gravity Summit: “The global tech race is the new arms race.”
At the 47G Zero Gravity Summit in Salt Lake City, Utah, Strider CEO and Co-Founder Greg Levesque spoke to the audience of innovators and leaders about the global tech race exclaiming, “This is the race for the future…and that future is up for grabs.”
In this rapidly evolving geopolitical era, advantage is no longer defined by military power alone. Adversarial nation-states are moving aggressively to secure the commanding heights of critical technologies, while targeting the innovation, talent, data, and supply chains built across industry and academia.
This shift is reshaping economic security and underscores the need for strategic intelligence platforms to protect innovation and stay ahead of state-sponsored risk.
Watch Greg’s full remarks at 47G’s Zero Gravity Summit below, along with key excerpts:
THE TECH RACE IS THE NEW ARMS RACE:
The global competition for frontier technologies is unfolding in real time, and the defining question is who can move fastest and apply breakthroughs at scale.
“We are in the middle of a tech race that is no different than the industrial revolution was 100 plus years ago. It is happening right now. We are living and breathing it every single day…This is the race for the future…and that future is up for grabs…
“[The Chinese Communist Party’s] goal is to achieve the commanding heights of artificial intelligence, quantum technology, biotechnology…the quest is who can most quickly leverage them and apply them at scale.”
THE ESPIONAGE TSUNAMI HITTING INDUSTRY AND ACADEMIA
Adversaries are increasingly targeting the institutions driving innovation, shifting attention from government and toward industry and academia.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re in industry or government or academia. You are in the game. You are at play. National security is not for the government alone. It requires all of us to do it together…
“Our intelligence apparatuses and capabilities are entirely focused on supporting and defending the government. But our adversaries have woken up to this reality that the innovations and the emerging technologies of the future are actually all being developed in industry and academia. That’s the target.
“That is the domain where they are now focusing their resources, their assets, their people and their time…we are witnessing an economic espionage tsunami hitting industry and academia right now. It is not a wave. It’s a tsunami and it’s across the entire Western world.”
INDUSTRY IS ON THE FRONT LINES:
Espionage is no longer just government-versus-government. Industry is now on the front lines, with hundreds of billions of dollars lost each year to technology theft and IP leakage.
“Unlike the espionage games of the past where it was spy versus spy or government versus government, industry is now on the front lines. Companies are engaged in a geopolitical game that will determine the future that we all live in.”
The United States estimates the cost of IP theft at “roughly $250 to $600 billion per year in loss. That’s massive amounts of tech theft and IP leakage…It is giving our adversaries an unfair advantage in grabbing that innovation and leveraging it at scale without all of the time, energy, cost that go into developing those innovations and technologies.
“Germany and Australia have conducted similar studies…$300 billion in Germany [and] a little over 12 and a half billion in Australian dollars. The point of the matter is regardless of how big the number is, this is what is occurring on a daily basis today.
“More importantly, how do we as the Western world compete and win in an environment where nation-states are literally organizing their intelligence and national security apparatuses to target our companies. What it means is we have to come together and view this through a harmonized lens.”
SETTING THE RULES FOR TOMORROW
The global tech race is not simply a race for market share. It is a race to control the data and infrastructure that will define the technical rules of the future.
“We have all seen in the news the announcements of Chinese-backed hackers exfiltrating data out of most U.S. government agencies. This is a global phenomenon that has been happening for a very long time…
“The idea that the Chinese have is to collect the world’s available data, store it domestically in data centers, use that for a whole variety of means. One of them is control…the ability to understand and map us out and target what we are doing in a digital domain…
“By our account, there’s about 250+ AI specific data centers that have been constructed that are going to be the backbone of China’s digital AI system… I talked about the Middle East, how Nvidia and the US are going to countries there and beginning to build out tech stacks. China is doing the same thing in other parts of the world and embedding their own governance construct and control mechanisms into those AI systems.
“That is what I’m talking about when we think about this tech race. It is not simply a race for market share… We are literally in a race for who is going to set the technical rules and infrastructure systems of the future. And that one for me is the core reason why we are doing Strider. The whole point of this is to begin to illuminate that tech race and understand the stakes that are at play…
“Our adversaries are also harvesting data. They are building digital twins of our systems. They are using it for targeting purposes…It’s not about winning a market anymore in some of these domains. It is about setting the stage for tomorrow.”
A NEW MODEL FOR INTELLIGENCE AT SPEED AND SCALE
Strider is helping organizations move from reactive response to proactive intelligence, leveraging AI to surface risk at speed and scale—connecting fragmented signals into a unified view for clearer decision-making.
“Strider is the leading strategic intelligence firm mapping open-source data to adversaries and illuminating those touch points within corporate ecosystems.
“What we’ve begun to do is look at ways that as an intel analyst you can leverage AI to find the needle in the haystack, so to speak, at scale. So, over the last 15 months or so we have been embedding the tradecraft methodology, our understanding for how nation states like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea target our companies, target our society and layering that…into corporate ecosystems…
“It’s a new model for how we can begin to connect those puzzle pieces, the public sector, the private sector and academia and bring them into one unified view. It’s about cognitive orchestration, collaboration with an intelligence analyst and an AI driven machine. And as I said before, [with] speed and scale because at the end of the day, if you are responding to an incident, it means it already happened. It’s out the door. It’s lost. It’s gone.
What we need to do is get into a proactive mindset and have these pieces built in.”
THE CHALLENGE IN FRONT OF US
The Chinese Communist Party conducts espionage against the West using a “whole of society” approach, using all available resources, means, and people to steal intellectual property and technology. Countering it will require the same all-of-society approach.
“New technologies deserve new paradigms, and new paradigms deserve new governance constructs. This is the pattern that has occurred over history time and time again. We are in another one today…
“We think about it in ‘What is my role in a national security response to these threats? How should my business and my organization operate within that context?’ And most importantly, ‘How do we maintain the ideals and innovations that underpin Western society—freedom, openness, scientific collaboration and exchange, all the while being targeted for that exact openness?’
This is the challenge in front of us…I think it is the promise of open-source intelligence, and it is what we are driving towards to achieve and realize at Strider.”
