Beginning in April 2009, Cohen aided delegations focused on connecting technology executives with local stakeholders in Iraq, Russia, Mexico, Congo, and Syria.

"[32] Wired wrote that "The New York–based think tank and tech incubator aims to build products that use Google's massive infrastructure and engineering muscle not to advance the best possibilities of the Internet but to fix the worst of it: surveillance, extremist indoctrination, censorship.

"[34] In June 2022, Cohen addressed the UN Security Council, warning that Russian cyberattacks, disinformation and other forms of information warfare being waged in Ukraine are a “crystal ball” for future problems elsewhere.

"[35][36][37] In a July 2012 email to members of Clinton's team Cohen reportedly sent to Clinton said: “My team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from.”[38] According to the Washington Post's David Ignatius, the concept of "techno-democracy" was first articulated in detail in a November (2020) article in Foreign Affairs, which Cohen co-authored with Richard Fontaine.

[47] Cohen's latest book is Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House was published in 2024 and is a New York Times Bestseller.

The book examines the postpresidential lives of seven chief executives (Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush).

If some chapters of Life After Power suggest anthologized history, his postpresidential portraits of Mr. Carter and, especially, Mr. Bush, make this book that rarity—a highly readable sequel that confirms the promise of the author’s earlier work.

It covers the assassinations everyone knows, Lincoln and Kennedy, those some may not, Garfield and McKinley, and what happened when presidents died from natural causes: Harrison, Taylor, Harding, Roosevelt.

"[50] The New Digital Age: Re-shaping the Future of People, Nations and Business[51] co-authored with Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, was a New York Times bestseller.

[52] The book considers the geopolitical future when 5 billion additional people come online, and the presumed terrorism, war, identity theft, conflict and altered relations between nations that the authors say will result.

[55]Another critical review by Evgeny Morozov in The New Republic stated: Schmidt and Cohen dispatch their quirky examples in such large doses that readers unfamiliar with the latest literature on technology and new media might accidentally find them innovative and persuasive.

It is nice to be told that innovators at the MIT Media Lab are planning to distribute tablets to children in Ethiopia, but why not tell us that this project follows in the steps of One Laptop Per Child, one of the most high-profile failures of technological utopianism in the last decade?

Absent such disclosure, the Ethiopian tablet project looks much more promising—and revolutionary—than it actually is ... Just a modicum of research could have saved this exercise in irresponsible futurology, but living in the future, Cohen and Schmidt do not much care about the present, which leads them likely to overstate their own originality ...

[58] He and co-author Eric Schmidt published "The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution" in the Wall Street Journal in 2013,[59] and a 2012 article for The Washington Post, entitled "Technology Can Be Harnessed to Fight Drug Cartels in Mexico," which grew out of a trip the two took to Ciudad Juárez.