Brett Horvath, Guardians.ai

Brett Horvath serves as counselor to elected officials, policy makers, Fortune 100 CEO’s, military strategists, and leading scientists as they confront the rapidly evolving landscape of global information warfare.

Brett has worked at the intersection of technology, politics, and risk for over 10 years, including managing come-from behind local elections, creating new organizing tech for national campaigns, designing the first comprehensive search tool to mine Twitter’s entire database in real-time, mapping the geo-politics of cyberwarfare, mapping the geo-politics of cyberwarfare, using machine learning, supercomputing, and non-linear system dynamics to comprehensively model climate risk, briefing dozens of national and international reporters on disinformation, creating new experimental models for tracking influence attacks, designing and organizing original scenario planning games for cohorts of public and private sector leaders, and advising governments around the globe as they confront emerging threats.

Brett is the President of Guardians.ai whose mission is to protect democracies and open markets from information warfare and engineered volatility.

He was also co-founder and Head of Strategy at Scout.ai. Scout’s mission is to anticipate the social impact of technology by combining investigative reporting with near-term science fiction.

In early 2016, Scout.ai launched a three-month investigation into Facebook’s code review process and discovered that two-engineers on the News Feed team could change the result of a presidential election without anyone at the company finding out.

After the 2016 presidential election Scout.ai launched a five-month investigation into what happened and on February 2017 published “The Rise of The Weaponized AI-Propaganda Machine” - one of the first pieces of reporting and analysis to explore the depth of Cambridge Analytica’s global efforts and how they fit into the larger information warfare landscape of Russian botnets, private political networks, and the broader threat to democracy. Scout.ai’s report has now been read over 3 million times and cited in United Nations, academic, and governmental reports about the threat of information warfare.

In June of 2017, a roundtable of bi-partisan national security and foreign policy officials asked Brett to brief them on the evolving information warfare landscape and present research around possible collusion between Russian and US political actors. As a result, the group asked him to brief Senate Intelligence Committee staff on the research around potential US / Russian political collusion. The committee staff indicated that the analysis was helpful and directed over a dozen national reporters who inquired into the issue to speak with Brett on background. In the process, he learned that while committee staff was highly capable, no one working on the Senate Russia investigation had significant technical expertise. Guardians.ai then organized a distributed research collective known as ‘The Justice League’ comprised of over 50 data-scientists, machine learning engineers, policy-makers, political strategists, and forensics specialists coordinating exclusively over encrypted channels. The Justice League generated hypotheses, analyzed data, and provided research threads packaged in a manner that could be accessible to all relevant investigations exclusively through legal, non-coordinated channels.

Brett and his work has been covered in The New York Times, Buzzfeed, The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, MSNBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, Mashable, Politico, Vice, The Daily Beast, The Daily Dot, Gizmodo, The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies Annual ‘Future of Defense’ Assessment, and several academic studies on information warfare.