ChinaTalk

The gang returns and rebrands! Note: we recorded this Friday afternoon, before the FT reported that 'US believes Nvidia’s Huang had romantic relationship with alleged Chinese spy Kevin Xu of Interconnected, Matt Klein of The Overshoot, and Peter Harrell of Georgetown Law, who ran international economics at Biden’s NSC, asked in January whether America was cooked. Now they’re voting on a rebrand: Are We Cooking? We discuss… What to undo, what to keep — repealing the Canada tariffs, reining in Section 232’s creep into kitchen cabinets, and keeping Trump’s rare earths deals with conflict-of-interest rules attached. Make Big Tech pay — Kevin’s plan to turn bipartisan fury at data centers into a pro-labor, pro-build agenda that could win back union voters, and with them the White House. Sixty bucks a head — why OpenAI’s community pledges amount to political malpractice, and how Virginia’s Data Center Alley turned server farms into property tax cuts. Pause China’s AI too — why a Democratic Congress may finally codify tougher chip controls, with an affordability pitch built on rising memory prices. The alleged spy in Jensen Huang’s orbit — why the FBI’s routine defensive warning apparently never came, and what Beijing could want from Nvidia’s CEO that it isn’t already getting. Beijing’s midterm math — what a blue wave does to the value of any deal Trump brings home from Shenzhen, and why China is squeezing Europe instead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining me for WarTalk’s post-midterms edition are regulars Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, Special Forces veteran Justin McIntosh, and former House staffer Tony Stark. We discuss… Why Iran holds the cards now — a blockade too slow for the White House’s clock, half the deployed Navy pinned down, and Tehran’s likely asks, from reparations to a strait toll. The war Congress won’t pay for — why no NDAA or appropriations bill moves while the shooting continues, and the one-line rider that could end it. Hegseth’s impeachment math — articles due Monday, how many Senate Republicans might break, and the 1876 Secretary of War who raced to resign minutes before the House vote. Defense tech after the wave — why a big Democratic majority may be kinder to the topline, the coming scrutiny of politically connected contracts, and Starshield’s governance problem. Who does the oversight — Tony’s new guide to being a good staffer, and why the Pentagon keeps 23-year-old aides in the dark. The WarTalk Book Club debuts — Harold Coyle’s Team Yankee as a case study for company commanders, why mil-fic makes me uneasy, and proof that officers have never read. Plus, I had Claude rebuild the original Team Yankee board game. Play a friend or the AI here (https://claude.ai/artifact/7LyRbALwL11FnqZWsqC9Rp). Next book: Tonio Andrade’s The Gunpowder Age. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You can read a translation into English of this interview here: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-make-fun-of-chinese-ai Xianyu (咸鱼), the writer behind 葬AI — “Funeral AI” — produces some of the best satire out there about China’s AI industry. ChinaTalk Substack readers may remember his essay “Open Models Are the United Front of AI”.In this conversation, Irene and Xianyu talk (in Chinese) about: Why AI writing isn’t funny; How Xianyu made a website for ordinary people to rank video model by meme-ability; Why Five Year Plans are a kind of benchmark; And why there’s so much Chinglish in AI. We also disagree about where the hype is worse: China or America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The blockade is squeezing Iran. So why does it keep being easier to press the war button? WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, Bryan Clark, and Tony Stark. Why the strikes continue when the blockade is doing the real work, and what running the war off two carriers costs the Navy. Combatant commanders pitching the president their own wars, and whether Cuba is next. The myth that a more lethal military would have won in Afghanistan. The Joint Staff J-5’s firing, and what it says about a Pentagon that’s stopped planning. Plus: join the Navy, see the world (mostly the Iranian coast), and letting AI pick the next war. Timestamps: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:20 Iran and the midterms 00:10:20 Is Cuba next? 00:24:37 Jensen, spies, and the J-5 firing 00:42:07 The Afghanistan myth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the new era of global competition, being at the forefront of Super Intelligence innovation equals geopolitical power. To maintain leadership and establish the next world order, the U.S. is moving to cement its lead. Barnett Koven is a Managing Director of AI and Data at Accenture Federal Services. He came to Accenture Federal Services after stints in industry and a faculty job at the University of Maryland, where his counterinsurgency research showed that some of the most influential quantitative studies got the answer exactly backwards. We discuss… Why “inaction is in and of itself risky” — and how government risk-aversion compounds against less-cautious competitors The “gun-armor race” in classified AI environments, where defense costs grow exponentially against linear offense Entity resolution and predictive modeling for BIS export-control enforcement, and unwrapping the PLA’s shell-company maze DOE’s Genesis Mission and Accenture Federal’s “backbone for scientific research” Thank you to Accenture Federal Services for bringing us this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ChinaTalk spends a lot of time on the leading lights of the Chinese economy... the MiniMaxes, ByteDances, Unitrees, and BYDs of the world. But what about the rest of the system, the part growing at zero to two percent? To talk about what's broken, not just what works, we talk with Meg Rithmire. Meg is the James E. Robison Professor at Harvard Business School and author of Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia. With UC San Diego's Peter Cowhey, she recently wrote "The Cost of Keeping China Out" for Foreign Affairs, which argues that Washington should let some Chinese firms build in America... on strict terms. We discuss… Mafia firms: how Anbang, HNA, and Wanda raised money on stock exchanges, tunneled it into subsidiaries by the thousands, and bought the Waldorf Astoria without making anything at all How China's zombie firms moved out of real estate and into industrial policy, why households put up with it when "the rest of the world seems awful," and what Japan teaches about living well with bad macro numbers Why the Chinese Communist Party is more nervous about controlling its own champions than Western media assumes A reverse Tesla: Meg's case for letting BYD and CATL build in the US with localized supply chains, split hardware and software, and continuous monitoring US vs. China corruption Plus: the Indonesian tycoon hiding behind the building on Meg's book cover, whether AI can do David Barboza's paper-trail reporting in five seconds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ukraine and Russia have rebuilt their armies around drones, deception, and long-range strike. What should the U.S. military take from it? Michael Kofman joins WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark. We discuss: How much leverage the U.S. still has over the war, and why Europe can't replace America's role in NATO. Why buying drones means nothing without drone platoons and companies to fight with them. Why no one owns the night anymore, and why the U.S. military has no culture of decoys. What counts as a lesson from Ukraine, and discussions on wet-gap crossings Plus: getting rich as a military analyst, and how to tell real maneuver from sparkling mobility. Timestamps: 00:00:00 Intro 00:03:28 U.S. leverage in Ukraine 00:30:02 Who will fight with the drones? 00:47:05 You don't own the night 01:04:32 Wet gap crossings 01:08:56 What to tell Congress Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Brown is a co-founder of the Center for Technology and Statecraft (CTS), a new think tank spun out of IFP, that looks at long-term technology challenges and opportunities facing the US. Nick was a physics major, spent a while as a software engineer in and around government, and had an arc as an aspiring concert violinist. But we’re here to talk about what is in pole position for my paper of the year: his master class on what would happen if the US cut off DUV exports to China: DUV Immersion Lithography: The Foundation of US AI Compute Advantage. Co-hosting is ChinaTalk’s Aqib Zakaria.We discuss: The case for banning DUV exports to China: Why lithography is the hardest part of the semiconductor manufacturing stack for China to replicate/indigenize and the strongest point of leverage the US and its allies have over China’s future AI compute. The cannonball-sized hole in US export controls: China imported roughly 90 immersion lithography systems a year in 2024–25, nearly two-thirds of ASML’s immersion exports. If imports continue at this rate, China could approach or even reach parity with the US in AI chipmaking within a decade. What the MATCH Act would do: How Congress could close this gap by restricting DUV immersion exports and servicing, and whether the US can get its allies on board. Will Beijing retaliate? Why a gradual, long-term restriction may be less likely to provoke another rare-earths crisis Buying time for AGI: How cutting off DUV imports could preserve America’s AI compute advantage into the 2030s, giving the US more time to navigate the technological, geopolitical, and societal implications of increasingly powerful AI. Timestamps: 00:00:00 Intro 00:07:11 EUV vs. DUV 00:21:55 What the MATCH Act does 00:41:24 Would Beijing retaliate? 00:58:59 Japan, the Netherlands, and the light-source option Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

He was recently promoted to DIU’s acting director after spending the past year running the Drone Dominance Program. Co-hosting are Brian Clark, senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a retired submariner, and Justin McIntosh, a twenty-year retired Green Beret who served in the 1st and 5th Groups, who now works in defense tech and writes a Substack called Mind of Things. We discuss: Why the Department of War isn’t going fast enough to procure, scale, and field drones, and how the DIU’s Gauntlet competition is using real orders, competition, and falling prices to build a drone industry capable of producing at scale. What American drone makers can learn from Ukraine’s battlefield laboratory and how the Pentagon is trying to replicate the conditions of electronic warfare in its evaluations. Why the US drone industry is “wide but not deep,” how the first orders banning Chinese motors and battery packs are testing the limits of supply-chain decoupling, and why Drone Dominance alone can’t solve dependencies in battery chemistry and rare-earth refining. Why the future of drone warfare depends on systems that can operate autonomously under electronic attack, and how Metz thinks mass-produced, increasingly autonomous drones will reshape military procurement, training, and force structure. Timestamps: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:27 How Drone Dominance works 00:08:36 Ukraine, jamming, and the Gauntlets 00:32:41 Component supply chain 00:47:37 Doctrine and forcing functions 01:03:11 Bombers, pilots, and autonomy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Bian is the head of product operations for Ant Ling, the foundational LLM at Ant. If you don’t know Ant, they most famously make Alipay, which makes your money and your world run when you’re in China and sometimes beyond. Richard is a former software engineer at Microsoft and Square, and he previously served as head of open source at Ant, where he scaled the open source initiative into a dedicated team. He’s lived and worked in Singapore, Canada, the US, and China, and he loves to build products. Topics covered: The Hugging Face hack as a sign of progress? Why Richard sees the incident involving OpenAI research agents as an inevitable discovery rather than simply a disaster, and why finding a solution now is a positive development. AGI is coming, but nobody knows what it will look like. AGI is inevitable, and we’re still in the early stages of figuring out what these models can do. Rather than obsessing over leaderboards, we need better evaluations and a more open-minded approach to judging models. Open source as a product strategy, not just a way to give things away. How open-weight models can harness global talent, accelerate development, and support a diverse ecosystem of products, and why the real business challenge is gross margins rather than capex. Why the AI conversation needs more voices. Why we need to pay attention to diverse perspectives on where AI is going, and be more willing to explore rather than declare the endgame. AI moves fast: since we recorded, Ant Ling has announced its latest LLM, Ling 3.1 Flash, which was open-sourced on October 14 with 560B parameters and up to a 1M-token context window. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices