CFR Named One of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2026

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has been named to Fast Company’s 2026 Most Innovative Companies list, ranking tenth in the media and news category. CFR is the sole think tank included in the full list of approximately seven hundred companies recognized across industries, alongside organizations such as Anthropic, Google, Nvidia, and the New York Times.

CFR was recognized for its China Open Source Observatory, a flagship project of the China Strategy Initiative that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to digitize, translate, and analyze ten thousand previously unavailable Chinese government texts. The project fills a critical gap in U.S. China policy research by making influential hard-copy materials from the Chinese Communist Party accessible to scholars, policymakers, journalists, and the public, supporting rigorous analysis of the People’s Republic of China.

The observatory is led by CFR’s Rush Doshi, C.V. Starr senior fellow for Asia studies and director of the China Strategy Initiative, and Tanner Greer, deputy director of the observatory. The project involved engineers from Anthropic and Google to optimize large language models for Chinese‑language translation and achieved what it describes as near‑perfect accuracy, including in military affairs and diplomacy topics. The translated texts will be freely available in an open, searchable format, enabling broad public access and discoverability through AI‑enabled research tools. The first one thousand volumes are expected to be released this spring.

CFR’s inclusion in Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list underscores the Council’s growing role as a leader at the intersection of foreign policy expertise and digital innovation.

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