Ryan Arant is the director of the Atlantic Council’s N7 Research Institute, the N7 Initiative’s policy center.  Prior to joining the Atlantic Council, he served in a variety of roles at the U.S. Department of State, most recently as the deputy operational director of the Israel-Gaza Coordination Unit and senior advisor in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.

During the Trump Administration, Arant served at the National Security Council and National Economic Council, where he played key roles in the negotiation of the Abraham Accords agreements and reshaping U.S. economic and security policy toward China.  He also served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy, where he managed U.S. security and defense relationships in the Gulf region. 

Arant has worked in several technology roles outside of government, including as a project manager for AUTHOR – a multidisciplinary team that developed artificial intelligence privacy protection systems in collaboration with the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) – and as a management consultant at Accenture.  He developed a novel technique for evaluating political bias in large language models while studying with the Center for AI Safety. 

Arant is a former Presidential Management Fellow and Columbia University Fellow.  He has been published by the Yale Journal for International Affairs, the Columbia Journal for International Affairs, and a variety of other publications.