Economic Security Is Now Driven by Science and Technology
National power and sovereign capabilities are increasingly shaped by AI, biotechnology, computing, materials and the institutional capacity to turn science into usable capability.
Policymakers often discuss economic security through the language of supply chains, critical minerals, subsidies, tariffs, procurement and trade diversification. Those issues are important, but they miss a larger strategic point.
The competition among advanced economies is increasingly about who can organize science, technology and talent into strategic capability.
Semiconductors are one example. Leadership in advanced chips is not simply the result of market forces or low-cost manufacturing. It depends on accumulated capabilities in materials science, process engineering, advanced equipment, design, fabrication, packaging, talent and supplier ecosystems. In an AI-driven economy, these capabilities now sit at the centre of data centres, cloud infrastructure, secure systems and next-generation industrial applications.
Battery technologies and advanced manufacturing tell a similar story. Competitive advantage comes not only from access to inputs, but from the ability to combine research, engineering, scale-up, standards, production know-how and industrial learning. Over time, these accumulated capabilities become strategic assets.
The lesson is not that every country can lead in every critical technology. It is that economic security increasingly depends on accumulated technological capability. Markets matter. But so do S&T institutions, standards, procurement, talent systems, research depth, patient capital and the ability to move from discovery to deployment.
This is where institutional architecture becomes decisive.
The United States’ DARPA is worth examining for that reason. Its current and recent portfolio shows how technological uncertainty can be structured in areas likely to shape future economic and security advantage.
In artificial intelligence, the emphasis is not simply on larger models or faster adoption. It is on interpretability, control, robustness and assurance. Programs such as AI Forge, Artificial Intelligence Quantified, DICE and SABER are focused on a practical problem: advanced AI will be most consequential in environments where failure is costly — cyber operations, infrastructure, logistics, scientific discovery and decision-making under uncertainty.
The key question is shifting from whether AI can perform a task to whether it can be understood, tested, secured and deployed reliably in contested or high-stakes settings.
Biotechnology shows a similar pattern. DARPA’s biological portfolio works at the intersection of biology, AI and engineering, including biological threat assessment, medical countermeasures, sensors, supply-chain resilience and novel manufacturing opportunities. Its work on protein sequencing and synthetic biology reflects a broader shift: biology is becoming a platform technology.
Its applications now extend well beyond health into food, materials, sensing, manufacturing and environmental resilience. The ability to measure, engineer and secure biological systems is becoming a source of economic and strategic advantage.
The point is not simply that DARPA funds ambitious research. It is that it defines hard problems, recruits expert program leadership, accepts technical risk and creates pathways from research to usable capability.
DARPA’s work on low-energy computing reinforces the same point. AI is not only a software race. It is also an energy, hardware, materials and systems-integration race. The economics of advanced computing will depend not only on algorithms and data, but also on chips, electricity, cooling, supply chains and new computing architectures.
Its current and recent portfolio is useful because it shows where the economic-security frontier is moving: AI assurance, bioengineering, cyber resilience, advanced computing, critical technologies and the institutional mechanisms that connect them.
Economic security is becoming less about protecting the existing economy and more about building the technological foundations of the next one.