Between 2017 and 2022, my work at SRI International moved through internal seedlings, proposals, program formation, multi-institution teams, formal methods, cryptography, hardware architecture, and attempts at transition. The public record divides that work into named projects. My memory is less neatly segmented. One project supplied a collaborator, tool, or failed approach that changed the next. The institution existed in the overlap. M
That overlap is the promise of an independent nonprofit research institute. It has no single captive product line. It can join government missions, university ideas, company engineering, and internal technical traditions. But the absence of a captive product business also means there may be no automatic payer for the spaces between awards.
The project ledger is visible. The institutional ledger is not.
The unit of analysis here is the performer institution: what SRI retained, recombined, or lost across separate awards. Article 6 examines the other side of the same programs—the temporary network and common clock created by DARPA. A successful program can coexist with weak host continuity, or a durable host can retain capability after the sponsor-created network dissolves.
Three programs, one local arc
SRI’s archived biography lists my public roles in three DARPA programs: PRISM under RACE, EMPHASIZE under SIEVE, and FARSIDE under DPRIVE, as well as an Air Force quantum project. The agency pages define distinct missions. RACE pursued resilient, privacy-preserving communication. SIEVE pursued more expressive and efficient zero-knowledge proofs. DPRIVE pursued hardware and software capable of reducing the enormous overhead of fully homomorphic encryption. D
On paper, these are separate boxes. Technically, they share methods and people. Secure computation raises questions about cryptographic assumptions, systems interfaces, verification, hardware cost, adversarial behavior, and usability. A researcher or toolchain that crosses programs can make the later work possible. A proposal process can also force every inherited asset to appear newly invented because only the new task is chargeable.
That is the central ambiguity of project-funded institutions. Projects are how ambitious work becomes accountable. They give a sponsor a defined objective, budget, schedule, and right to demand evidence. Yet if every minute and asset must attach to a current task, the institution has difficulty maintaining the state that makes the next ambitious task credible.
Chargeability is not merely an accounting rule
Chargeability begins as fiscal discipline: labor billed to a sponsor should advance the work that sponsor bought. That is necessary. The systemic effect appears when nearly all technical labor must remain chargeable nearly all the time.
Then proposal fit becomes a survival criterion. A researcher asks not only “What problem matters?” but “Which open solicitation can carry this person next quarter?” A manager asks not only “Which capability should we build?” but “Which funded line can absorb its maintenance?” Internal seed funding helps, but short seedlings may optimize for proposal readiness rather than for the uncertain period needed to discover whether a new direction is real.
This argument rests partly on firsthand interpretation, not a published SRI-wide chargeability dataset. It should be tested, not universalized. Relevant evidence would include the share and duration of internal funding, staff time between projects, reuse of technical infrastructure, turnover at funding cliffs, and the fate of groups whose work remained strong but temporarily lacked a matching solicitation. M A
A technical case: from program research to public artifact
RACE makes the handoff visible. DARPA’s public program record states that the work sought a distributed messaging system resistant to large-scale compromise and grounded in rigorous security or realistic statistical arguments. The page also records a later event: in August 2024, DARPA released proof-of-concept code so others could experiment with the complete system or its components. That release is evidence of afterlife beyond a final report. It does not establish broad deployment, maintenance, or the preservation of the original team. D
The same research line contributed to a different transition path. SRI’s 2022 spinout announcement says that Confidencial.io drew on technologies rooted in the DARPA Brandeis and RACE programs and was launching a beta product with seed financing. A public research program, a nonprofit institute, and a startup each performed a different function. None alone was the complete pipeline.
The research program could pay for new security mechanisms and system prototypes. SRI could assemble people and intellectual property across work. The startup could focus on integration with existing business applications, customers, procurement, support, and product survival. Transition required changing the technical form: the announcement describes using current cryptographic standards rather than requiring customers to adopt every original research primitive.
This is not proof that every transition should become a company. It demonstrates that “technology transfer” is not a signature at the end of a project. It is a new institution accepting a different set of obligations.
PARC arrived after my SRI tenure
Xerox announced the donation of PARC to SRI in April 2023, after I had left SRI. SRI’s current history describes PARC as part of the institution. I can analyze the transaction as an alumnus and observer; I cannot describe its internal integration firsthand. D
That boundary is especially important in a series about institutional memory. Prior experience with SRI can illuminate questions to ask—how teams are funded, what shared services exist, how internal work is protected—but it cannot answer what current PARC and SRI staff actually experienced. Those answers require documents and interviews.
The strongest counterargument
Project competition may be the feature, not the bug. It prevents stagnant groups from claiming permanent support. It forces researchers to explain relevance, compare approaches, meet milestones, and assemble new teams. A nonprofit institute insulated from sponsor demand could become an expensive guild.
The answer is not to abolish competition. It is to stop making one mechanism purchase three different things without naming them. Competitive projects buy goal-directed work. They do not reliably buy institutional memory, and they are poorly suited to buying shared capability whose users are future programs not yet defined.
A better compact would expose the layers:
- Sponsors competitively select and evaluate projects.
- Institutes receive bounded capability funding for demonstrably reused people, tools, data, and facilities.
- Capability funding expires or recompetes when external review finds no reuse, learning, or mission value.
- Transition receives its own owner and budget rather than being implied by a final demonstration.
This design preserves hard tests without forcing each new project to rebuild the institution it assumes.
Five different verdicts
- Scientific success: The public programs generated papers, formal methods, cryptographic constructions, and open technical work; importance varies by result.
- Technical success: RACE, SIEVE, and DPRIVE demanded systems, verified implementations, or hardware-software integration beyond papers alone.
- Transition success: Public code and the Confidencial.io spinout show two distinct transition mechanisms, neither equivalent to universal adoption.
- Institutional success: SRI provided a durable host across overlapping projects, while the amount of capability retained between them remains the core empirical question.
- Public-value success: Government sponsorship created reusable knowledge and artifacts, but preservation and diffusion depend on licensing, maintenance, openness, and successor institutions.
What the successor must learn
The successor laboratory should maintain a cross-project state ledger. For every completed program, it should record which people remain, which tools are maintained, which negative results are searchable, which artifacts are independently usable, which relationships persist, and who owns the next transition decision.
That ledger should not guarantee survival. It should make destruction visible. A project can properly end while a valuable capability continues; a project can meet every milestone while leaving nothing usable behind.
The open question for SRI colleagues and sponsors is precise: which later result depended on institutional state that no sponsor had explicitly paid to preserve, and which supposedly reusable asset was never actually used again?