Jonathan Elliott

Jonathan Elliott is an Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), where his work focuses on the responsible adoption of frontier artificial intelligence and autonomous systems for national security. He also serves as Head of Program Management at Helsing, Europe's largest VC-backed defense and AI company. Jonathan brings more than two decades of experience in unmanned systems, autonomy, and AI, spanning senior government leadership, federally funded research, and systems engineering.

Jonathan most recently served as the Deputy Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer for Enterprise, where he led the Department of War's adoption of frontier AI and worked to put transformative capabilities directly into the hands of warfighters through rapid experimentation. He launched GenAI.mil, deploying frontier AI models to more than three million uniformed and civilian members of the Department, and led the development of Autonomy.mil to accelerate the sharing of data and models across the Department's autonomy ecosystem. Earlier, as the founding Director of the AI Rapid Capabilities Cell (AIRCC), he pioneered the Department's partnerships with leading U.S. frontier AI labs, and as Director of AI Assessment and Assurance within the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), he built the tools and best practices to ensure that AI is operationally effective, trustworthy, and aligned with warfighter needs.

Before entering government, Jonathan was a Principal Project Lead at MITRE, where he directed the development of AI assurance methodologies and helped stand up the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), the predecessor to the CDAO. As a founding contributor to the JAIC, he worked with Department of Defense leadership to identify and solve the highest-impact challenges facing the enterprise's AI efforts. He also served as Chief Engineer for Autonomy and AI Test Technology at the Test Resource Management Center (TRMC), where he architected the framework for the test and evaluation of AI now implemented across the CDAO.

A 2025 NextGen National Security Fellow with CNAS, Jonathan is a licensed Professional Engineer (PE) and certified Project Management Professional (PMP). He holds a Master of Science and a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland.