Anna Ashton is Co-Founder of Ashton Intelligence and Principal of Ashton Analytics, the firm’s geopolitical-risk and market-intelligence practice. She also plays a leading role in Ashton Intelligence’s AI model training and evaluation services, combining subject-matter expertise, analytical rigor, teaching experience, and structured quality assessment.

She helps businesses, investors, and policy stakeholders understand how U.S.–China relations, trade and tariff policy, critical minerals, advanced-technology competition, industrial policy, investment restrictions, supply chains, and economic-security policy affect strategy and operations.

Anna’s career spans intelligence, government, law, business advocacy, geopolitical risk, consulting, and higher education. She began her professional career as a China political-military analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency, producing assessments and briefings for senior U.S. defense policymakers—including the Vice President and Secretary of Defense—and supporting U.S. military forces.

She subsequently worked across nearly every major dimension of the U.S.–China economic relationship. At the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, she worked to attract and retain Asian foreign investment in Arkansas. At the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, she analyzed China and international trade policy, represented business interests before government, and developed programs examining investment, regulation, trade, and export controls. At the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission, she planned hearings, briefed congressional offices, supported official China travel, and authored research and annual-report material for Congress.

Anna later practiced international trade law at Perkins Coie and spent more than six years at the U.S.–China Business Council, ultimately serving as Vice President of Government Affairs. She led the Council’s U.S. government-affairs work, developed advocacy strategies, briefed companies on policy and regulatory developments, and represented the organization publicly. At the Asia Society Policy Institute, she conducted trade, investment, and critical-minerals research. She later joined Eurasia Group, where she directed China commercial-affairs and U.S.–China analysis and served as interim head of the China research practice, with responsibility for personnel, budgets, production oversight, and international client briefings.

Education and training are another important part of Anna’s work. She previously taught at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and now teaches at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Earlier in her career, she taught in Nanjing, China, as a Wellesley–Yenching Graduate Teaching Fellow and served as a teaching assistant in East Asian studies at the University of Colorado. Her experience designing curriculum, teaching complex material, briefing executives, and communicating across specialist and non-specialist audiences informs both Ashton Intelligence’s human learning work and its broader AI model training and evaluation capability.

Anna also performs AI evaluation, expert review, model-response quality assurance, and expert-level training-data work. Her work includes evaluating sophisticated AI-generated legal and consulting products for factual correctness, analytical completeness, evidentiary support, sourcing, presentation, and adherence to scope. She has developed a structured evaluation methodology that distinguishes facts, legal rules, inferences, predictions, advocacy, and recommendations and tests conclusions against an independently reconstructed evidence base.

This work supports a broader Ashton Intelligence capability in AI model training and evaluation services, including expert review, annotation, evaluation design, quality assurance, domain-specific assessment, and the development of high-quality training and evaluation data for advanced AI systems.

An experienced international speaker and media commentator, Anna has addressed business, policy, academic, and public audiences on U.S.–China relations, trade, technology, critical minerals, and geopolitical risk. Her speaking and media record includes MEDays in Tangier, Bloomberg, the National Committee on U.S.–China Relations, CSIS, the Wilson Center, Washington International Trade Association, and industry forums.

Anna remains active in international policy dialogue. She is a member of the National Committee on U.S.–China Relations, has participated in multiyear U.S.–Canada and U.S.–China policy dialogues, and in 2023 led the U.S. delegation to the twentieth China–U.S. Young Scholars Dialogue in Beijing.

She holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, where she earned a certificate in World Trade Organization studies; an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Colorado Boulder; and a B.A. in Chinese Studies from Wellesley College. She has advanced professional proficiency in Mandarin Chinese.