Brett Horvath

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

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, 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.

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 Brett co-led 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. The 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, US Senate Intelligence Committee staff ask Brett to brief them on research around potential political collaboration between US and Russian actors. Brett realized that many public and private sector institutions were struggling to come to terms with rapidly evolving narrative and technological threats. Through Guardians.ai, Brett 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 that generated hypotheses, analyzed data, and provided research threads packaged for journalists, investigators, and policy makers to help accelerate understanding around information warfare.

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.