Connor Martin

Connor Martin is an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research will focus on whether the U.S. government’s economic security authorities are fit-for-purpose given novel national security risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI). His work will examine the wide attack surface that AI’s upstream and downstream value chain presents to potential U.S. adversaries and will engage with how the evolving strategies of global corporate and financial sponsors may strengthen or weaken the U.S. government’s oversight functions.

From 2023 to 2026, Martin served as a career national security official in the U.S. government where he was deputy director for the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Martin is an expert on the national security implications of cross-border capital flows and on the national security risks posed by frontier technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence and quantum, biotech). As deputy director, he played a leading role in designing the CFIUS Known Investor Program, regularly briefed senior U.S. government leaders and frequently represented the Treasury to the public.

Previously, Martin led government affairs and corporate communications efforts at several leading tech and finance companies, including Gerson Lehrman Group and Coinbase. He has conducted research and analysis with the Special Competitive Studies Project, and he began his career at the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York. Martin is a published author, whose work has appeared in Project Syndicate, the Washington Independent Review of Books, and elsewhere. He is the author of The Silver Fish (2026), a spy novel about the competition between the United States and China over subsea fiber-optic cables off the coast of Africa. Martin holds a BA from Princeton University and an MPA from Columbia University.