ChinaTalk

WarTalk: Pressing the War Button: Iran, Cuba, and Rubio 2028

The Manhattan Project, Take Two

What's Broken About China's Economy + The Cost of Keeping China Out | Meg Rithmire

WarTalk: Kofman on Starlink + What Ukraine Can Teach the U.S. Military

Modern warfare in Ukraine demonstrates that mass precision and pervasive ISR have fundamentally altered the battlefield, rendering traditional notions of nighttime dominance and operational surprise obsolete. The throttling of Starshield connectivity has significantly hampered Ukrainian long-range strike operations, hi...

The MATCH Act and China’s DUV Imports

Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) lithography serves as a critical strategic choke point in the U.S.-China AI competition, as it remains the most difficult semiconductor manufacturing technology for China to indigenize. Guest Nick Brown, co-founder of the Center for Technology and Statecraft, highlights a significant "cannonball-...

Drone Dominance | Travis Metz - DIU Acting Director

The U.S. defense sector faces an urgent need to scale the production of small, autonomous unmanned aerial systems to maintain a competitive edge against peer adversaries. DIU’s "Drone Dominance" program addresses this by utilizing rapid "gauntlet" competitions to identify capable vendors and establish a resilient domes...

Why a Chinese AI Lab’s Product Lead Thinks AGI is “Inevitable” | Richard Bian

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence mirrors an "age of discovery," where developers navigate uncharted waters to uncover the potential of AGI. While frontier models face scrutiny, the open-source ecosystem provides a vital mechanism for defense and collaborative innovation. Richard Sukambian, Head of Product...

From Posting to Policy: Saif Khan on DUV and the AI Balance

The Center for Technology and Statecraft aims to fill a critical research gap in the AI policy ecosystem by prioritizing empirically grounded, technical analysis over reactive commentary. A central focus involves understanding the physical AI supply chain, particularly the strategic importance of DUV immersion lithogra...

Matt Yglesias + Jerusalem Demsas + Jordan Crossover Pod

AI is fundamentally altering the landscape of political governance and economic development in both the United States and China. While AI tools offer potential for streamlining legislative analysis and identifying corruption in procurement, they simultaneously threaten the traditional development ladder by automating e...

AGI Believers: Kevin Roose on the Race

The pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) functions less like a standard technological development and more like a high-stakes ideological movement driven by a small, intensely competitive group of visionaries. These leaders, including figures from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind, operate with a conviction r...

Data is the Hard Part | Building AI Tools for the Military

Data serves as the linchpin for military AI, yet it remains inherently imperfect and requires alignment with specific mission use cases to be effective. Bharat Patel, Accenture’s AI and data lead for its defense portfolio and a former federal acquisition official, emphasizes that achieving autonomy in defense requires ...

WarTalk: AutoWarCom + Project Meridian

The Pentagon’s proposed "Autonomous Warfare Command" risks creating bureaucratic bloat rather than the intended operational speed. Centralizing autonomous weapons procurement under a new four-star command threatens to disconnect these systems from the tactical units that require them, potentially repeating past failure...

Section 301 and the Spice Man who Sued Trump Over Them

China's Economy is Broken | Logan Wright

China’s economic miracle has shattered, as the financial system that once fueled rapid growth now constrains development through inefficient capital allocation and debt-laden state-owned enterprises. Logan Wright, partner at Rhodium Group, argues that the country’s reliance on massive credit expansion—which added a thi...

WarTalk: Potemkin Pacific, Midterm Budget Woes

The US military faces a severe strategic mismatch as the pivot to the Indo-Pacific is undermined by the persistent deployment of naval assets to the Middle East. This resource strain, combined with a looming defense budget contraction, threatens the financial stability of defense tech startups and forces a shift away f...

Julian Gewirtz on Trump-Xi Summit, AI, and Mao Dead Fifty Years Ago!

The upcoming US-China summit serves as a stage for symbolic optics rather than substantive policy, highlighting the volatile nature of the current superpower rivalry. This relationship operates on a "K-shaped" trajectory, where high-level diplomatic engagement masks deepening structural competition and adversarial acti...

Can AI Beat the Pentagon’s Bureaucracy?

The U-2 spy plane program serves as a critical framework for understanding modern AI integration within the national security apparatus. Beyond the technological breakthrough of high-altitude imagery, the U-2’s success relied on radical acquisition reform, rapid experimentation, and the creation of new intelligence ana...

WarTalk: PLA, 2027, Nukes, and the Pivot to Asia Pirouette

The 2027 milestone for the People's Liberation Army represents a strategic capability target rather than a predetermined date for a Taiwan invasion. While the PLA aims to modernize its forces to achieve decisive victory and strategic counterbalance, systemic corruption—particularly within the Rocket Force—remains a sig...

ModelTalk: Pacing the Frontier

AI safety and frontier model regulation have reached a critical inflection point, driven by incidents like the Hugging Face hack that transformed abstract risk theories into tangible security concerns. The current reliance on voluntary, ad-hoc evaluations by organizations like METR is inadequate for managing the system...

WarTalk: 9.11, Death of the Army, So Long Dan Driscoll