Country Activity Tracker: Artificial Intelligence (Center For Security And Emerging Technology, 2023)

CAT, or Country Activity Tracker, is a research tool curated by CSET that offers a wealth of data about artificial intelligence (AI) globally. This data comes from a vast repository known as the Merged Academic Corpus (MAC), which contains details about more than 270 million academic articles worldwide. In CAT, only those articles that are related to AI are utilized.

CSET determines the country of origin for each article by looking at the affiliations of the authors. If an author is associated with an organization in a specific country, that article is attributed to that country.

CAT also provides patent data sourced from 1790 Analytics and Dimensions, encompassing AI-related patents. However, instead of indicating patent ownership, CAT highlights where the patents are filed. For instance, a patent filed in the U.S. patent office is not necessarily owned by an American. CSET is striving to include data regarding the nationality of patent owners in future updates of CAT.

Additionally, CAT uses data from Crunchbase to identify AI-related companies and includes metrics about investments in these companies. The definition of an 'AI company' is not straightforward, but CSET identifies such companies based on specific criteria. These include whether the company description contains AI-related keywords, whether Crunchbase tags it as an AI company, or if it is linked with an AI Publication, AI Patent, or a Top AI Conference Publication as per CSET's Private-sector AI-Related Activity Tracker. CSET aims to encompass a broad range of AI-related companies across the globe. Therefore, some companies may be categorized as AI-related that others may not consider as such. Conversely, some companies perceived as AI-related by others may not meet the criteria set by CSET.

CSET ensures the data in CAT is updated at least quarterly, with plans to provide more frequent updates in the future.