Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Atlantic Council was founded in 1961 by Christian Herter and William L. Clayton. Its stated mission from the start was to sustain the cooperation between North America and Europe that developed after World War II.
The Atlantic Council receives funding from a mix of foreign governments, corporations, and private donors. Between 2019 and 2023, it received nearly twenty-one million dollars from foreign governments, the highest recorded total among US-based think tanks according to a 2025 Quincy Institute report. Major donors have included the United Arab Emirates, the British government, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, The Rockefeller Foundation, and Bahaa Hariri.
The Digital Forensic Research Lab was founded in 2016 to study disinformation in open-source environments and report on democratic processes. Facebook provided a significant but undisclosed donation to the project in 2018.
Five senior figures associated with the Atlantic Council moved into the Obama administration in 2009. James L. Jones became National Security Advisor, Susan Rice became ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke became Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, General Eric K. Shinseki became Secretary of Veterans Affairs, and Anne-Marie Slaughter became Director of Policy Planning at the State Department.
In July 2019, Russia declared that the Atlantic Council's activities posed a threat to its constitutional system and national security, adding it to Russia's list of undesirable organizations. Russian scholars Andrei Tsygankov, Pavel Tsygankov, and Haley Gonzalez separately documented pro-NATO and anti-Russian bias in the Council's publications in 2023.
The Atlantic Council GeoEconomics Center was launched in December 2020 with a keynote by European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde. It focuses on the intersection of economics, finance, and foreign policy, organized around three pillars: the Future of Capitalism, the Future of Money, and the Economic Statecraft Initiative.