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7 retained episodes matching “source:"ChinaTalk"”.

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ChinaTalk

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 into AI and semiconductors during his time at CSET, then went into the NSC and Commerce in the early-to-mid 2020s, across both the Biden and Trump II administrations, to help manifest the export control regulatory regime we have today. He is now out of government and launching the Center for Technology and Statecraft, an IFP-affiliated think tank, which is already producing excellent, grounded, technical, forward-looking work that will certainly shape many an AI policy discussion in the years to come. We discuss: Why Saif started a new think tank, and the value of deep, forward-looking policy research in an AI world moving at breakneck speed; CTS’s landmark DUV report, which projects that sto

ChinaTalk

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 now the 301 tariffs are in court too. So ChinaTalk's series on the people suing the U.S. government over tariffs continues. Ethan Frisch is the co-founder of Burlap & Barrel, a single-origin spice company importing from about 28 countries, and a plaintiff in both the Section 122 suit (which he won) and the Section 301 challenge, argued before the Court of International Trade the day before we recorded. Guest host Peter Harrell — a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a visiting scholar at Georgetown Law's Institute of International Economic Law, and an attorney — joins Jordan to explain where the litigation goes from here. We discuss… From aid worker to spice importer: wild cum

ChinaTalk

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 Chief AI Officer at Accenture Federal Services. We’re going to talk about what the national security community needs — beyond just API access to wonderful models — in order to really change how it does its mission. Our conversation covers: Why the U-2 spy plane offers a surprisingly useful lesson for AI: The hardest part of adopting transformative technology isn’t building it, but redesigning the institutions, workflows, incentives, and decision-making systems around it. The government’s need to manufacture its own “forcing functions”: How carrots, sticks, budget cuts, and a willingness to create winners and losers could help bureaucracies move faster. Giving the troops the tools and getting o

ChinaTalk

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 is where Gerald C. Brown has spent his career. Gerald is two weeks out of government, where he covered Chinese nuclear strategy and the PLA Rocket Force at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Now a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he joins Jordan and WarTalk's Tony Stark, Justin McIntosh, and Bryan Clark. We discuss… Why 2027 is not a go date — the three "strategic capabilities" the PLA pulled forward from its 2035 goals, and why a capability milestone says nothing about intent What the Iran war taught Beijing — day-one decapitation and the heaviest firepower campaign in decades still didn't deliver the political outcome, and PLA journals noticed Th

ChinaTalk

Jordan talks AI with Sebastian Mallaby on his show 'The Spillover'

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

ChinaTalk

The Iran War Oil Shock That Wasn’t...(Yet?)

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

ChinaTalk

Original-language Geopolitics report

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, a

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