Eric Schmidt

Biographies

In the Plex

How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

Steven Levy · 2021 ●

Steven Levy's authorized insider account of Google with unprecedented access to executives including Eric Schmidt.

Dogfight

Fred Vogelstein · 2013 ↻

Journalist Vogelstein's account of the Apple-Google rivalry and Schmidt's pivotal role in the smartphone wars.

Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and Google

Internet Biographies series

Corona Brezina · 2013 ↻

Brezina's biography of Google's founders and CEO Schmidt, tracing the company's rise from Stanford to global dominance.

Googled

Ken Auletta · 2010 ↻

New Yorker reporter's deep dive into Google's rise and impact on media and society.

Googled

The End of the World As We Know It

Ken Auletta · 2009 ↻

Ken Auletta's examination of Google's disruptive impact with unprecedented access to Eric Schmidt and executives.

The Google story

Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time

David A. Vise, David Vise, Mark Malseed · 2005 ↻

Pulitzer Prize-winning account of Google's founding and rise, featuring Eric Schmidt as CEO and key executive.

Profile

If you want to understand how Washington thinks about artificial intelligence, you have to understand Eric Schmidt. More than any other single figure, the former Google CEO built the bridge between Silicon Valley and the national-security state — and then walked across it repeatedly. He ran Google from 2001 to 2011, turning a scrappy search company into an advertising and infrastructure colossus, then served as executive chairman through the years when Google became one of the most important AI labs on earth. For developers, that lineage matters: the org that produced TensorFlow, the Transformer, and DeepMind grew up on his watch, even if the research breakthroughs weren’t his.

Since leaving Google’s board in 2019, Schmidt has become something rarer than an executive: an AI policy power broker. He chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, whose 2021 final report warned that the U.S. was not “AI-ready” and could lose a technology race with China — and that report became the de facto blueprint for federal AI strategy, feeding into the CHIPS Act and a wave of defense-AI spending. He now chairs the Special Competitive Studies Project, a think tank that functions as an NSCAI sequel, and he continues to testify before Congress as the elder statesman lawmakers call when they want to know what’s coming.

In March 2025, Schmidt made his most surprising move yet: he became CEO of Relativity Space, the 3D-printing rocket startup, after taking a controlling stake. The bet is not really about rockets — it’s about AI. Schmidt has argued that AI’s power appetite is unsustainable on Earth (he told Congress the U.S. may need 92 additional gigawatts, roughly 92 nuclear plants’ worth), and reporting suggests he wants to launch data centers into orbit. Whether or not that pans out, it captures how he thinks: AI is the master variable, and everything — energy, space, geopolitics — reorganizes around it.

For someone learning AI today, Schmidt is worth studying less as a technologist than as a lens on how capital and power position themselves around the technology you’re building. He is relentlessly bullish — his headline claim is that AI is underhyped, that superintelligence arrives within a decade, and that agentic systems doing “recursive self-improvement” are the real story. He is also a walking conflict of interest, funding, warning about, and investing in the same technology simultaneously. Take his forecasts seriously and his framing skeptically.

Books

The Age of AI: And Our Human Future

With Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher, a philosophical primer on how AI reshapes society, security, and human self-understanding.

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Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit

Kissinger's final book, co-written with Schmidt and Craig Mundie, on how humanity should coexist with machine intelligence.

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How Google Works

With Jonathan Rosenberg, an insider account of building and managing Google in the era of the 'smart creative.'

Trillion Dollar Coach

2019 ○

The management lessons of Bill Campbell, the Silicon Valley mentor who coached Schmidt, Steve Jobs, and others.

The New Digital Age

Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives

2014 ↻

With Jared Cohen, an early (2013) attempt to forecast how connectivity would reshape states, business, and identity.

Key Articles & Papers

NSCAI Final Report 2021 — The 756-page blueprint that shaped U.S. government AI strategy — the single document most responsible for framing AI as a China-competition national-security issue. Superintelligence Strategy 2025 — With Alexandr Wang and Dan Hendrycks, proposes 'Mutual Assured AI Malfunction' (MAIM) — a nuclear-style deterrence framework for superintelligence. Written Testimony to House Energy & Commerce: Converting Energy into Intelligence 2025 — His most cited recent argument that AI's energy demand is the binding constraint on American competitiveness. Written Testimony to House Oversight on AI and National Security 2023 — A concise statement of the Schmidt worldview: win the AI race, invest in compute, and treat China as the pacing threat.

Videos

Controversies

Schmidt’s defining controversy is the conflict between his public warnings and his private portfolio. While chairing the NSCAI and warning that China’s AI ambitions threatened U.S. security, his foundation and connected entities made dozens of AI investments — including, per CNBC and the Tech Transparency Project, reported ties to funds feeding Chinese AI companies via Hillhouse Capital. In 2022, Senator Elizabeth Warren asked the Pentagon to investigate his advisory-board conflicts. No ethics violation was ever established, but ethics experts widely described the arrangement as a serious conflict: he helped write the rules for an industry he was actively betting on.

Critics also object to his outsized, largely self-appointed influence over U.S. AI policy — a private billionaire shaping defense doctrine through think tanks he funds. His MAIM proposal, which contemplates states sabotaging rivals’ AI projects, has drawn its own criticism for potentially normalizing preemptive attacks on data centers rather than reducing risk.

Spotify Podcasts

YouTube