ChinaTalk

Jaksot

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  ModelTalk: Pacing the Frontier 15.09.2026 1t 8min

  ModelTalk regulars Nathan Lambert, who writes Interconnects, and writer Jasmine Sun join to work through a week in which Dario asked the industry to slow down and Trump called the whole thing a conspiracy. Why the Hugging Face hack broke through where years of extinction talk didn’t, and how Bernie, Tucker, and Rogan ended up on the same side What “pacing” even means: Nathan’s case that nobody can measure the frontier, and why it still beats “pause” Who gets Slack access: METR’s monopoly on trust, CAISI’s $10 million, jury duty for AI researchers, and why nothing survives without legislation Will China slow down too? Zhipu and Moonshot turning the crank, military secrets leaking into Claude through proxy routers, and the MSS waking up The Sacks clap-back: whether product liability does the job, and what an eighteen-month pause costs in cancer cures and vibe-coding projects Send in Demis! plus Lu Xun as the antidote to Chongqing TikToks, and what DeepSeek’s Chinese name owes to Qu Yuan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  WarTalk: 9.11, Death of the Army, So Long Dan Driscoll 11.09.2026 1t 11min

  In the week of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Secretary of the Army walked into the White House, told the president the force is breaking, and quit. Days earlier his boss had fired the Chief of Staff, disbanded the Army's only drone battalion, and cashiered Chris Donahue — the last man out of Kabul. Bryan Clark, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan for a hosts-only edition marking a quarter-century of the Global War on Terror. We discuss… Twenty-five years on the treadmill — how Rumsfeld's transformation agenda collided with GWOT budgets to produce LCS, FCS, and the F-35, and why a rotational, casualty-averse force forgot how to accept risk Driscoll walks — the OSD meddling behind the exit, why Congress won't confirm anyone Hegseth nominates, and a Pentagon run by acting officials through 2029 The meritocracy of meritocracies — what firing Donahue tells every field-grade officer weighing the exit, the auto-promoted NCO corps nobody talks about, and why the Ranger tab discourse is real Budget Steve takes the fall — Feinberg blamed for a munitions shortage created by fighting Iran with the stealthiest, priciest weapons in the inventory, plus NIH biodefense money quietly rerouted to the Pentagon Lying to Putin with AI — ISW's report on Russian commanders faking battlefield progress, and what generative deception does to OSINT and soldiers' feeds The Houthis have Claude Code — Anthropic's threat report, Yemeni drone guidance software, and DeepSeek routing PLA subcontractors' queries to Claude through a transfer station Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  WarTalk: GWOT at 25 with Wesley Morgan 05.09.2026 1t 21min

  Twenty-five years after 9/11, the Pech Valley represents the war in miniature: outposts meant to shield Afghan villages that instead drew the fighting to their doorsteps, built for reasons nobody manning them could explain. Wesley Morgan spent a decade finding out why. Wesley Morgan is the author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley, winner of the 2022 Colby Award. He first embedded in the Pech as a college student in 2010 and later covered the Pentagon for Politico. We discuss… How a timber dispute became the Korengal — one Green Beret team refused the bait, the next took it, and Big Taliban followed The three tribes of the war in the east — conventional forces, Green Berets, and the JSOC task force, each fighting its own war in the same valleys Ten thousand beanie babies and record artillery expenditure — how measures of performance swallowed measures of effectiveness Black Hawk Down, Ghost Recon, and the making of multicam — how Crye sold the camouflage of the elite through video games because it couldn't advertise its Delta contract The death of the embed — Rumsfeld overruling Colin Powell, the 2013 shutdown, and why influencers in the briefing r4om beat reporters in the field Whether the Army learned anything at all — disbanding the Asymmetric Warfare Group, rebuilding short-range air defense from zero, and Ukraine as the excuse to never say "Afghanistan" again Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Cyber Apocalypse, Now? Hugging Face and the Future of Cyber Risk 02.09.2026 1t 10min

  OpenAI models mid-training broke out of their sandbox, hacked internal infrastructure, and eventually compromised Hugging Face — the first headline-grade AI breakout, and one that safety researchers saw coming. Is the cyber apocalypse finally on the calendar, or does the industry just need to do its homework? Joshua Saxe spent his formative years as a DARPA and NSA contractor before four years at Meta, where he founded the company’s frontier cyber capabilities evals team and finished as its AI security tech lead. He recently left to co-found Abundant Security. We discuss… What actually happened in the Hugging Face hack, and why AI safety insiders weren’t surprised, The “grad student lab” security culture inside frontier labs racing sixty hours a week to ship, Why the cyber Pearl Harbor predicted since the early 2000s never arrived — and whether swarms of hacking agents finally change that, How nation states will post-train open-weight models like GLM and Kimi into billion-dollar cyber weapons, Why AI has so far favored defenders, from mass bug-squashing to superhuman network monitoring, The industrial economics of cybercrime — kill chains, ransomware divisions of labor, and whether AI gives criminals 100x returns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  WarTalk: USN Readiness Reckoning, Steampunk Navy, and AI Cyberwar with Shashank of the Economist 29.08.2026 1t 4min

  The USS Abraham Lincoln is coming home after a deployment that stretched past 240 days, and the bill is about to come due: mechanical failures, rations down to the emergency stores, 20,000 unfilled billets at sea, and a maintenance backlog funneling into the one carrier repair yard on each coast. Meanwhile, the White House wants to tear the electromagnetic catapults out of the Ford class and put steam back in. We're joined by Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, a former submariner and Navy strategist, and Shashank Joshi, who has just handed off the defense brief at The Economist and decamped to Washington, alongside regulars Justin McIntosh and Tony Stark. We discuss… Why the fleet breaks: extended deployments, generators failing in the South China Sea, Diego Garcia resupply chains, and 12-hour flight deck shifts that don't end The reenlistment cliff — what happens when half a carrier's crew hits their decision point right after the worst deployment of their careers Steam catapults and hydraulic elevators: 35,000 successful EMALS launches, a four-year delay to the next carrier, and 500 sailors added back to a ship designed to need fewer Whether agentic AI finally gives cyber its strategic moment, or whether dropping a bomb on the power plant remains the cheaper option The offense-defense balance, and why the drone debate should make us humble about predicting it The PLA Rocket Force's new corruption tip line — a purge that fixes a force, or one that reveals how deep the rot goes Chinese components in Ukrainian drones, the Rockchip inside a $400 hugging-face robot, and how much of the Internet of Things you can afford to worry about Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  How AI Becomes a Political Crisis 24.08.2026 1t 8min

  The political economy of AI — things are getting weird, it seems. We have models on the loose, open weights being dropped from the heavenly temple, and data center protests fanning out across the land. There’s a lot of salience in a way that feels really different than it did even six months ago. To discuss, we have the wonderful Anton Leicht, a fellow at Carnegie and author of the excellent Substack Threading the Needle. Our conversation covers: Why even a small amount of AI-driven unemployment could upend national politics, especially if agents start replacing junior white-collar workers and breaking the career pipeline, What policymakers can do to protect workers without calcifying the economy, how to collect better data on AI and labor, and whether to subsidize junior hiring, The case for funding the AI transition with corporate income taxes instead of token taxes, and why offering the government AI equity or “golden shares” would backfire, Data center backlash, strategies for winning hearts and minds, and options for friendshoring AI infrastructure, The political economy of safety — why pausing AI development wouldn’t work, but a coordinated slowdown might, The coming reckoning between open source and the national security state. Plus, Kafka on bureaucracy and happenstance, how Anton’s years in esports shaped his career, and why new ideas seem to travel more easily through American policy discourse than European institutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Lessons from the American Civil War 21.08.2026 1t 32min

  Note: This episode was recorded in late 2024. Luckily, there haven't been any US Civil War updates since then, so the episode's content still holds up. Enjoy! During paternity leave, the new influx of dad energy compelled me to read close to 15 titles on the American Civil War. The Civil War is a case study in traditional ChinaTalk themes like technological change and organizational design. It is also a uniquely well-documented war, just on the cusp of modernity, with gripping characters and human drama basically wherever you look. To discuss all things Civil War, ChinaTalk interviewed Jeremy Neufeld, Director of Immigration Policy at IFP and author of an incredibly nerdy Civil War Twitter account, as well as Wayne Hsieh, a professor at the Naval Academy and co-author of A Savage War, an excellent new military history of the Civil War. We discuss… How the Civil War played a role in America’s rise to superpower status, The impact of technological innovation on the war, including the telegraph, the steamship, and the railroad system, The Confederate invasion of Kentucky and other strategic missteps, Strategies for mobilizing industry and civil society for warfare, Differences in institutional culture between the Northern and Southern armies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  North Korea's Messiah 19.08.2026 1t 59min

  Why is North Korea so weird? Is it Stalinism? Maoism? Japan-style emperor worship? Ancient Korean hermit kingdom energy? No, argues Jonathan Cheng, Beijing bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and author of The Korean Messiah: The Failed Dynasty That Shaped the Hermit Kingdom. You’ve all been sleeping on the influence of 19th-century American revival Protestantism. To discuss why Kim Il-sung kind of thought he was Jesus — or at least wanted to convince everyone else he was — we have the honor of Jonathan joining ChinaTalk today, with Alex Boyd. Our conversation covers: Billy Graham meets Kim Il-sung — how America’s pastor visited Pyongyang in 1992 and bonded with the dictator over their shared Presbyterian childhoods, while touring a birthplace resembling the nativity story. From “Jerusalem of the East” to totalitarian theocracy — how 22-year-old missionary Samuel Moffett brought eschatological founder energy to the wickedest city in Korea, and transformed Pyongyang into the most Protestant city in Asia, complete with jazz clubs and a Chevrolet dealership. The Manchurian cauldron — how the lawless frontier of 1920s Manchuria blended Christianity, Korean nationalism, and Marxism to forge Kim Il-sung’s messiah complex — and why the 33-year-old decided to let peasants believe he could walk on water. Jim Jones, superfan — how the Jonestown cult leader became obsessed with Kim Il-sung, adopted Korean children, and traded tips with North Korean diplomats on running a closed religious society. Christianity as political technology — how Kim weaponized Protestant doctrine and ritual to build a state religion that has outlasted the Soviet Union by three decades. Plus, why North Korea is best understood not as a nation-state but as a religious society, and what Hong Xiuquan and Xi Jinping have to do with any of this. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  The Rise of China’s Electric Vehicle Industry 17.08.2026 1t 54min

  How did China grow its EV industry? Hint: it wasn’t really central planning from Beijing. It was a magical concoction of entrepreneurs and local officials using their guanxi to dance around giant SOEs and central-government regulation, leverage private and foreign capital, and just be really excellent business people. That’s led to our situation in 2026 — world-beating companies that have a ton of overcapacity and are set to take over the planet. To discuss, we have ANU Professor Fengming Lu, who recently wrote a fantastic paper in The China Journal, titled The Rise of China’s Electric Vehicle Industry: Strategic Alliances Between Local Governments and Private Capital, alongside Irene Zhang, contributor and analyst at China Talk. We also get into the lessons this story holds for other strategic industries like robotics and AI — plus a little detour into the Chinese podcasting ecosystem. Our conversation covers: China’s automotive transformation from 130 small carmakers in the 1990s to the world’s most competitive EV industry. The rise of Chery, Geely, and other Chinese auto champions — how local connections, foreign technology, and creative financing helped them break into an industry dominated by state-owned enterprises. The downside of success — how China’s EV boom created an overcapacity problem. The role of guanxi and elite politics in deciding who gets to build cars. When Chinese EVs go global — record exports, overseas factories, trade tensions, and whether the same local-government playbook will shape the next wave of industries, from robotics to AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  China's Best Music in 2026 (So Far) 14.08.2026 54min

  Jake Newby is the author of the Concrete Avalanche Substack, which covers the best music coming out of China. If you enjoy this playlist, check out Jake’s sets from 2025, 2024, and 2023, as well as his Chinese shoegaze feature. Tracklist: 1. ‘Undercurrent’ — Pu Poo Platter — from Undercurrent 2. ‘忧郁干杯乐园’ — the three mice — from where is my mice? 3. ‘错过的提醒’ — Lygort Quartet — from Through Voodoo Light to Shore of Tomorrow 4. ‘B1’ — gogoj aka Sheng Jie + Deng Boyu — from HEH 5. ‘心的傾訴 Jürêk tolƣawe (Unbosom Myself)’ —Mamer — from Bar xatteƣem, Bar ⱪayƣem (All the Joys, All the Pains) 6. ‘没东西可掏 The Well Is Dry’ — Zhang 'NoNo' Xingchan 张醒婵 — from Catch My Boomerang 7. ‘Gaia’s Breath’ — Wu Zhuoling 吴卓玲 — from Uncharted II 8. ‘the one sounds like sweet trip’ — Cassette Player Romance — from Meaning of Home 9. ‘黑天鵝(feat. LukeDaPlaya)’ — Guo Yinan 鍋一楠 and Yuan 猿 — from The Vortex Reconstruction Experiment 10. ‘Extinguished City’ — DEADTREES — from New World 11. ‘让我飞吧’ — Lie 劣 — from Landfill For more information on each of these artists, check out the full write-up on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  $75k Contest Launch! ChinaTalk Hiring + Evals for the Situation Room 10.08.2026 48min

  Contest links: General $50k https://www.chinatalk.media/p/50k-chinatalk-submission-hiring-contest we're looking at submissions on a rolling basis! AI evals: Due Over the past few years, we’ve seen hints of policymakers and national leaders using AI models in their actual policy decision-making. The Prime Minister of Sweden said he uses it for second opinions on policy; the German Chancellor is testing it to draft legislation; even Trump said he had it re-write a speech at some point. It’s fair to assume that senior leadership across the world, and in Washington as well, have started using AI not just for tactical or operational tasks, but increasingly for broad strategic decision-making. While that’s exciting — there’s the promise of uplift and smarter calls on some of the most consequential decisions leaders face in foreign policy and national security — we’re also flying blind. Enormous effort and energy goes into benchmarking and evaluation for things like coding. The experiments you can run to make models better at software development are much easier to execute and much lower-stakes than running a real experiment when you’re deciding whether to invade a country or sign a treaty. That’s why we at ChinaTalk are trying to kickstart a field aimed at helping researchers and policymakers understand exactly what they’re working with when they ask these models to support some of the most consequential decisions they may make in their lifetimes. We’re launching an evals/essay project contest to explore this theme. I’ve brought on two expert AI eval creators to discuss why the field is important, what interesting work has already been done on how models approach broad national-security and strategic questions, and how you — as an eval professional, semi-professional, or just a concerned person — can contribute new ways to poke and prod at these models and see what they can really do. Joining us today: Florian Brand, research engineer at Prime Intellect, and John Chen, professor at the University of Arizona, who’s done some pretty wild things getting models to start nuclear wars with each other in Civ V. Our conversation covers: How frontier labs are hitting eval-building limits — they’ve gone from undergrads to PhDs to field experts, and the models are now catching the experts’ mistakes. How Civilization V exposes AI’s strategic blind spots (terrible second-order reasoning) and models’ distinct strategic personalities (Claude’s really into science!). Why ethical prompting in Civilization V still doesn’t stop models from launching nukes. Jordan's PresidentBench eval, where a Chinese model was nonchalant about a Taiwan invasion, while Claude wanted to keep Taiwan free and independent. Advice for designing better AI evals and ChinaTalk’s new essay/evals contest! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  WarTalk: Out of Ammo for Real + Are CCAs Dumb? 07.08.2026 1t 17min

  Six months into the war with Iran, the United States has fired 850 Tomahawks, emptied its LRASM and JASSM-ER inventories, expended essentially every ATACMS and PrSM in the arsenal, and burned through the SM-6 and PAC-3 interceptors it had been stockpiling for a fight with China. The administration's position is that the munitions are fine and the people saying otherwise are committing treason. Bryan Clark is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a former submarine officer who runs war games for the Navy and its allies. Justin McIntosh is a retired Army Special Forces soldier — twenty years in, sixteen of them as a Green Beret — who now writes Mind of Things on defense, technology, and foreign policy. We discuss… Why 850 Tomahawks in two months emptied the stockpile that was meant for China The leak hunt at Camp David, and why it should be a very short list How "lethality" became a testosterone prescription instead of an ammunition line item Japan's new defense strategy, which finally names China out loud — and bets on one-way attack drones Whether AUKUS Pillar 1 is quietly consuming the rest of the Australian military Why manned-unmanned teaming keeps failing in the war games, and what the CCA program got wrong Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  The FCC's New Robot Rules 06.08.2026 51min

  The FCC has spent the past year quietly rewiring the American import market, first routers, then drones, next undersea cables, and as of last week, robots. Adam Chan is national security counsel and senior advisor to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, and directs the agency’s new Council on National Security. He previously clerked on the Second Circuit and served as a national security legal fellow for the House Select Committee on China. ChinaTalk’s Aqib Zakaria co-hosts. We discuss… How the covered list works The case for “simple and stupid” rules over big-brained ones with endless carve-outs Onshoring plans, allied carve-outs, and the 65% domestic content test Why robot vacuums got swept in alongside humanoids How AGI-pilled you have to be for the robot rule to make sense Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Jordan talks AI with Sebastian Mallaby on his show 'The Spillover' 01.08.2026 1t 20min

  Don't sorry I put two ChinaTalk Records songs at the end! their show notes: On this episode of The Spillover, Sebastian Mallaby sits down with Jordan Schneider of ChinaTalk to unpack a frantic month in artificial intelligence. The conversation turns on whether the U.S. can actually “win” the AI race, with Schneider arguing that the most durable competitive edge will come from compute rather than model quality. The two debate China’s open-weight model strategy as a commercial weapon and question whether it will be possible to sufficiently harden systems against threats like cyberattacks and AI-designed bioweapons. Anthropic’s Mythos model has led the Trump administration to take an AI-safety U-turn. Mallaby notes that as late as March 2026, “if you had said to the Trump administration that they would be trying to suppress an American AI model, decelerate the progress in the name of safety, they would have said, ‘You’re nuts.’” Schneider notes that a similar shift has not yet arrived in China.  AI models are now escaping their sandbox and raising false alarms about foreign hackers. In remarking on OpenAI’s models hacking AI company Hugging Face, Schneider comments, “They think it’s the Chinese. . . . And they’re freaking out. They’re calling the FBI.” For Schneider, the episode is a warning that “we’ve really crossed a threshold with these models,” which now have “the potential to do really dramatic harm just on their own, because we like can’t even physically watch them.” The real AI scoreboard is compute, not model quality. Schneider argues that there is too much of a focus on the gap between Chinese and Western frontier models. Mallaby adds, “In other words, I shouldn’t be asking about how far is China behind in terms of the quality of model. It’s more a question of like, how much can China deliver the AI to users within China, given their lack of computational resources?” China’s open-weight models are a weapon without a business model. Mallaby frames Chinese open-weight as a “counterweapon”—good-enough models pushed out cheaply to erode the economics of U.S. frontier labs. Schneider notes that DeepSeek’s CTO is pitching investors a Manhattan Project-like vision in which profits should take a back seat to the pursuit of AGI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  WarTalk: Odyssey Edition 30.07.2026 1t 28min

  Roel Konijnendijk of Oxford returns to talk Nolan's Odyssey, ancient PTSD, siege warfare, and the choices we'd all make in adapting. Justin McIntosh cohosts. YoungBoy Never Broke Again as well as James Blake each deliver an outtro song! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  The Iran War Oil Shock That Wasn’t...(Yet?) 26.07.2026 1t 6min

  The biggest oil shock in modern history came and went without the catastrophe everyone expected. When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, analysts warned that oil could hit $200 a barrel, but the global economy avoided that fate. The Trump administration has argued that the crisis was contained thanks to their aggressive action, but they may be taking the wrong lessons from the avoidance of that apocalyptic scenario. What happened was the largest unexpected swing in global oil balances: China quietly cut crude oil imports by more than five million barrels a day. Yet there was no corresponding collapse in economic activity, no obvious drop in mobility, and no official explanation from Beijing. Somehow, China stopped buying oil from the rest of the world and started drawing from stockpiles we can’t fully observe. That single decision may have done more to prevent a global energy crisis than anything Washington or OPEC accomplished. This matters because it demonstrates that China likely has a stronger discretionary policy lever than the West does. The West is really good at market-driven, private-sector oil production. But through this crisis, we’ve seen that Washington does not have the scale of discretionary policy control that China or OPEC does. This time, China cooperated and did the good thing, at least for the broad economic picture — but we cannot rely on that in the future, and that tool can be used against the West as easily as for it. Western governments must grapple with that discretionary gap and not rest on their private-sector bona fides to get through the next crisis. Arnab Datta, managing director of policy implementation at Employ America, and Rory Johnston, oil analyst and founder of Commodity Context, join ChinaTalk to discuss: Why Rory’s own prediction of $200 oil never happened and why J.D. Vance is thanking the wrong people. How China quietly cut crude imports by five million barrels a day with zero visible impact on domestic mobility, and the detective work analysts use to peer into Beijing’s black-box inventories. Competing theories for why Beijing backstopped the global oil market — self-interested altruism, a backroom deal during the state visit, or a dry run for a Malacca blockade in the event of a Taiwan contingency. What India, the Gulf states, and the rest of the world learned from the Iran War and why strategic reserves are suddenly back in fashion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  WarTalk: Iran War Back On, Rogue AI, Ukraine Civ-Mil 24.07.2026 1t 3min

  Five months into the Iran campaign, the US has two carrier strike groups parked in the Arabian Sea, a blockade that may take months to bite, and a daisy chain of tankers stretching thousands of miles because there is no longer any fuel or food to buy inside the Gulf. Now the Houthis have entered the chat and declared their own blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb. Just the OG crew with Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former submarine officer, Justin Mc a former special operations officer who works on defense technology, and Tony Stark. We discuss… What Trump is doing in Iran, why the Navy is short-cycling ships out of maintenance and what happened the last time the fleet ran this hot, from McCain and Fitzgerald to the Truman’s two collisions in one deployment Why a ground campaign in Iran is a fantasy, from the Marsh Arabs to the Alborz range to the Baluch salt flats, and what Shia militias in Iraq would do to the logistics tail The nuclear-powered cargo ship renaissance and why circumnavigating Africa at 30 knots suddenly pencils out Whether Congress should get an AI kill switch, why DHS is the wrong home for it, and what happens when the boy who cried wolf is finally right Ukraine’s civ-mil drama Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Kimi K3, Xi's Speech, and China's Mythos Moment 22.07.2026 59min

  The whole ChinaTalk gang gets together to discuss a big week in China AI with the release of Kimi K3 and Xi talking open source and safety at WAIC. We also discuss our latest article exploring the three potential scenarios for Chinese governance when they really get their Mythos moment (you can read here: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/chinas-mythos-moment-366). song: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  WarTalk: Ancient Greece Edition! 21.07.2026 2t

  What do actual historians think about the Thucydides Trap? Does our 'low T' discourse all just come back to the movie 300? How the did ancient Greeks fight and why does Homer still keep us coming back 2700 years later? To discuss we have on the excellent Roel Konijnendijk, professor at Oxford and author of Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Tony Stark and Justin McIntosh join. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  China's Mythos Moment 15.07.2026 1t 10min

  Claude Mythos scrambled American AI policy, leaving us with what Dean Ball calls a de facto involuntary licensing regime from the administration that promised us the opposite. Zhipu's cofounder says China will have a Mythos-class model before the end of the year; IAPS says February 2027. Either way, Beijing is about to face down the same question, but unlike Washington, it already has a form to fill out. Guests: Kevin Xu of Interconnected. Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment. We discuss… Why China's answer to Mythos will look like Glasswing — but started by the state, not a lab, with government ministries and central SOEs first in line Whether the CAC's content-testing regime can absorb cyber, and why a Chinese lab dropping a frontier model without a heads-up would be "very bold and self-destructive behavior" The mixed signals on open source — a Reuters report on MOFCOM and NDRC weighing export controls on model weights, versus Minimax and Zhipu founders publicly doubling down, with Xi's WAIC speech as the tiebreaker Whether open weights even matter when running a frontier model adversarially requires a datacenter, and the case that lighting the dark park makes it safer What the US and China can actually agree on — non-state actors, eval methodology sharing, and why labor displacement lessons don't travel Companion-app regulation flowing from Sacramento and Albany to Beijing, the AI policy brain drain into the labs, and whether Sam Altman's five percent is American state capitalism or just a Trump thing song: https://suno.com/s/xZE1pIKrVBtCfTBO Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices