Publications

In a survey of 1,000 U.S. researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), 13 percent said that their labs had lost researchers to other countries as a result of NIH funding changes, while 14 percent reported that immigration policies forced scientists, students, and postdocs to turn down offers to work in NIH-supported labs.

China has become an increasingly capable competitor in the global biopharmaceutical industry. To remain competitive, the United States should double down on policies to ensure that it offers the world’s leading environment to support private sector life sciences innovation.

The GUARD Act would effectively ban minors from AI companions through broad age-verification requirements, raising concerns about free speech, privacy, parental authority, and the growing patchwork of state regulations. Instead, policymakers should focus on transparency, stronger parental controls, and other targeted safeguards that protect children without cutting them off from beneficial AI tools.

Rather than creating a new funding program for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, Congress should incorporate its funding into the reauthorization of the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program. This approach would preserve critical cybersecurity services while improving coordination between the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Center for Internet Security.

While ITIF believes that the New Draft Merger Guidelines have many features that will significantly improve merger enforcement in Europe, there remain a number of areas where the guidelines can and should be substantially improved.

Adversarial AI distillation poses a growing threat to U.S. technological leadership, national security, and AI safety by enabling foreign actors to extract the capabilities of frontier models without authorization. Policymakers should strengthen legal and technical defenses against industrial-scale model theft while ensuring any response preserves legitimate AI research, innovation, and the responsible use of distillation.

The Trump administration has imposed tariffs on semiconductor imports on national security grounds under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act. These tariffs would raise ICT prices and thereby lower ICT consumption and capital stocks, which would reduce economic growth and lower Americans’ living standards.

Regulatory interventions should be calibrated to the nature and magnitude of the harm they address, should not restrict beneficial uses of AI in pursuit of harms that existing law already addresses, and should preserve the open information environment that has underpinned both technological innovation and European cultural production

ITIF supports applicants seeking to vacate a Fifth Circuit stay that allowed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to immediately enforce Texas’s App Store Accountability Act, a law requiring app stores to implement age-verification and parental consent restrictions.

Experts believe that in 2026, smart devices, including smart watches, fitness trackers, and digital assistants, will trigger one-third of all emergency calls.