ChinaTalk

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

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, Justi...

2026-10-26

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The MATCH Act and China’s DUV Imports

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 ...

2026-10-20

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Drone Dominance | Travis Metz - DIU Acting Director

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 submarin...

2026-10-17

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

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 i...

2026-10-16

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

Saif Khan makes his ChinaTalk debut. He is perhaps my favorite example of posting-to-policy that I’ve seen over the course of my time following Washington. Saif wrote some truly excellent deep dives i...

2026-10-16

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Matt Yglesias + Jerusalem Demsas + Jordan Crossover Pod

I join Matt and Jerusalem for an unhinged conversation (most entertaining of the year?) about China, AI, corruption, politics, and various other things. Check out their show The Argument, it's good. ...

2026-10-13

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AGI Believers: Kevin Roose on the Race

Kevin Roose, formerly of the New York Times and Hard Fork, joins ChinaTalk to discuss AGI Chronicles, his new history of OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, and the people who believed in AGI long before it ...

2026-10-09

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

Everyone wants AI that wins wars. Very few people want to collect, label, store, and test the data it runs on. Bharat Patel is currently Accenture’s AI and data lead for its defense portfolio, a form...

2026-10-06

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WarTalk: AutoWarCom + Project Meridian

It's a new fiscal year with no new budget, and the Pentagon has a fresh batch of proposals. Two stand out: a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, built to buy and field autonomous weapons fast, and P...

2026-10-06

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Section 301 and the Spice Man who Sued Trump Over Them

In February, the Supreme Court ruled Trump's IEEPA tariffs illegal. So why is everyone still paying them? Because the administration rebuilt them: first under Section 122, then under Section 301, and ...

2026-10-02

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China's Economy is Broken | Logan Wright

After the global financial crisis, China added a third of global GDP to its bank assets in just eight years... the largest single-country credit expansion in at least a century. Today investment is ...

2026-09-29

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WarTalk: Potemkin Pacific, Midterm Budget Woes

WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan. We discuss… The Potemkin Pacific — why Paparo has half the planet on his map and nothing to fight ...

2026-09-26

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

Julian Gewirtz, author and former Biden NSC China director, joins ChinaTalk days before Xi Jinping’s first White House visit since 2015. With little substantive agenda on the table, what is the US get...

2026-09-23

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Can AI Beat the Pentagon’s Bureaucracy?

Garrett Berntsen was last seen on ChinaTalk in his role as Deputy CDAO at the State Department. He then went to the Department of Defense for a little bit, and now makes a return in his new role as Ch...

2026-09-22

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

In the deserts of western China sit 320 brand-new missile silos, and for a while, by the Pentagon's account, some of them simply didn't work. The gap between the PLA on paper and the PLA in practice i...

2026-09-19

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ModelTalk: Pacing the Frontier

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 conspi...

2026-09-15

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

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 Sta...

2026-09-12

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WarTalk: GWOT at 25 with Wesley Morgan

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 mann...

2026-09-06

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Cyber Apocalypse, Now? Hugging Face and the Future of Cyber Risk

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 s...

2026-09-02

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WarTalk: USN Readiness Reckoning, Steampunk Navy, and AI Cyberwar with Shashank of the Economist

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 bi...

2026-08-30

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