"These tools are moving so fast, do we really have the ability to actually maintain and keep up with where this stuff is at?" said Alan Webber. Interview transcript Terry Gerton As countries race to adopt artificial intelligence, the challenge is building capability they actually control without falling behind or over relying on outside providers. You saw some of that in the Anthropic and Fable 5 conversation over the weekend. Alan Weber, Program Vice President for National Security, Defense and Intelligence at IDC, tells us what it takes to get that right. Mr. Weber, thank you so much for joining me today. Alan Webber Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Terry Gerton We have been talking a lot about AI in terms of pilots and experimentation, but this new research suggests that something is changing. Where do you see governments now on the AI development and deployment curve? Alan Webber Wow, they’re really finally beginning now. Let me start with the fact that it’s highly dependent upon levels of government, maturity of the government organization, civilian versus defense, things like that. So overall, if I had to say generally, it’s really towards the fact that it is moving from pilot to actual implementation in certain places. I would still call it spotty, is how I might refer to it. I wouldn’t say it’s broad. I think there’s still a lot of experimentation going on. There’s still a lot of issues with data that we’re dealing with, what the actual models produce, things like that within government, how we actually tune what it is we’re using model-wise and data-wise to the actual needs of government. So I think we’re at a great starting point generally, but we still have a long ways to go. We still have maturity around