Born in Sweden and raised in Southern California, Elias is a journalist, editor and researcher working on issues of security and technology. For the past 12 years, he worked in Washington D.C. as a journalist. He spent eight years with the magazine Foreign Policy as a writer and editor before leaving for the Brookings Institution, where he worked with the AI and Emerging Technologies Initiative.

Most recently, Elias was the senior editor at CyberScoop, a trade publication covering cybersecurity. He is interested in questions of AI governance, security and technology, the geopolitics of technology and industrial policy issues regarding high-technology. Elias completed his undergraduate degree at Harvard University, where he was the managing editor of The Harvard Crimson, the college's daily newspaper.