I just joined @BBCWorldService to discuss AI at the Trump-Xi summit. From the public readouts, it looks like the United States and China achieved less than anticipated — but 🇺🇸 still has an abiding interest in seeing 🇨🇳 take AI security seriously.

Here are some projects US is pushing, working on, or already locked in to counter China. Idea that this administration is "soft on Xi Jinping" or that "US is in decline" is incredibly misleading 🧵

MAGA Republicans are more pro-Taiwan than any group polled: 83% percent believe it is important for the U.S. to defend Taiwan against Chinese aggression. If China took military action against Taiwan: *75% would support deploying U.S. military assets; *72% would support establishing a no-fly zone that could include “shooting down Chinese warplanes”; *63% would support committing U.S. ground forces to defend Taiwan *84 percent would support the United States officially recognizing Taiwan as an independent country. Free gift link:

I don’t know why data centers have become this generations nuclear power. Unlike nuclear power, there is a 0% chance that a data center can lead to any sort of disaster scenario. This project in Utah is: - in an uninhabited area - bought and repurposed water already in use - is bringing its own power, so it won’t cost citizens anything It’s like being against building a nuclear power plant in the middle of Nevada, except there is no radioactive waste. No fall out. No risk of anything. It’s a big computer in the middle of nowhere, that is self sufficient in all resources. There are a million real problems in America. Data centers just aren’t one.

Good to see pushback from Congress. One minor but important point. This is not “aid.” Taiwan pays in full for these weapons and is one of the largest purchasers of American defense hardware in the world.

My advice to anyone working in tech policy is that there is still so much alpha left in understanding the “tech” part, and that moat is only likely to increase. It’s way easier to go from tech/finance into policy than the other way around, but you should still try.

A big pivot from Ken Griffin on AI: “Number one is, in the last few months, there has been a step change in the productivity of the AI toolkit. It is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago. And for us at Citadel, that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI. And it has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days. These are not these are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high skilled jobs being, I'm going to pick a word, automated by agentic AI. And I gotta tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society. When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks, it's like, wow, like that's the first time I've seen real impact in our four walls.” This echoes my own experience with agents and the conversations I am having with students, friends & clients. The toolkit has dramatically transformed and it feels like in finance, for the first time, AI is real.

We are starting to get data with which economists can estimate the price elasticity of demand for AI inference. And whether the worry some has rightly raised that the seemingly unlimited demand for AI was only a result of heavily subsidized AI tokens and the “100x” will be real.

China’s Ministry of Commerce has issued an update on bilateral trade talks: * Beijing and Washington will adopt a series of measures, including mutually cutting levies on certain products, to expand bilateral trade in areas including agriculture. It didn’t provide more specifics, adding that both teams are still currently negotiating over the details.  * Confirmed plans to purchase US planes without providing a number or the brand. CEOs of Boeing and GE Aerospace traveled with Trump to the summit in Beijing and met with state officials there.

Marco Rubio: China's doing what I would do if I were a Chinese leader. They are trying to dominate the world in all these key industries of the future. We may not like it, but that's what they're gonna do because they're acting in their best interest. We have to act in our best interest.

Tomorrow, May 16, is the 60th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution. In my two books, I wrote about how its legacy shaped elite politics after Mao's death and the entire Xi family. Today I'm re-upping my recent piece on new findings about the origins of the Cultural Revolution.

This interview by @BretBaier is an absolute must-watch for a sense of where Trump's head is at on China, Taiwan, and the relationship between security and economic threats as he seems them. Let's just say, if you've worked on U.S.-China relations or Taiwan policy in or out of government in a prior administration, this is not conventional stuff.

Beijing was crawling with US journalists this week thanks to the state visit— like the good old days. The number is otherwise artificially low & that’s not good for US-China relations. “Constructive strategic stability” needs a well informed American public.

The President is right that American labs are well-positioned to lead the world in AI—this is particularly true for LLM architectures, where having large amounts of inference compute is an acute American advantage. It’s notable there was no agreement for a sustained AI dialogue.

Hard disagree with this piece. The more likely outcome, at least in Asia, is fragmentation not unipolarity one way or the other. Putting China to the side, Asia includes sizable, capable, self-interested powers that are not going to simply accept Chinese "hegemony" (whatever that means). If we think in terms of function, not form, it is more likely that we will see shifting coalitions, portfolio politics, and diversity rather than unipolarity or Cold War like bipolarity. I've written a lot on this, including here in 2020 for example:

What the hell is going on with H200 chip sales to China? A bizarre confluence of internal fights within the U.S. and Chinese governments has led to an extremely confusing situation—whereby China may graciously “agree” to import the Nvidia chips its AI labs desperately need, while also framing this as some sort of “concession” the United States should be thankful for. Here’s what’s actually going on: Chinese AI labs desperately need American compute, which is why they’ve been renting or outright smuggling huge numbers of Nvidia-designed chips from third countries. A lack of computational power continues to materially constrain Chinese AI labs’ ability to train frontier models and serve them to global publics. But not every part of the Chinese Communist Party cares equally about the plight of the country’s AI labs. In fact, different segments of the CCP are optimizing for different security and development objectives: While economy-promoting organs like the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) generally want labs like DeepSeek and Alibaba to succeed in building and selling more capable AI services, cadres in the Cyberspace Affairs Commission (CAC) and across the Chinese security services are deeply wary of importing U.S.-designed hardware, fearing U.S. chips might contain back-doors or location-tracking features that could jeopardize China’s national security. Still some other offices—and, I believe, Xi Jinping personally—worry primarily about accelerating China’s indigenization of every part of the semiconductor supply chain—and would rather see Chinese AI labs eat the bitter medicine (吃苦) of temporary chip scarcity, so long as it helps to create a captive market for Chinese chipmakers in the medium-term. The U.S. government, for its part, has had its own disagreements about the wisdom of export control. While it would seem truly idiotic to sell Chinese AI labs the single resource they need to build AI systems that threaten the United States or compete with U.S. companies like @OpenAI, @Anthropic, and @Google in international markets, some parts of the Trump administration are—like parts of the CCP—optimizing for a different objective: A prevailing faction within the Trump administration believes it can disrupt Huawei’s position within the Chinese chip market by keeping China “dependent” on American hardware. Under this worldview, successfully persuading the Chinese government to approve the import of Nvidia’s H200s would be a “win” for American industry. This has led to a bizarre situation where different sets of officials across both governments simultaneously view the sale of H200s to China as a “concession” to be fought for and/or guarded against. USTR Greer’s comment that the import of H200s would be China’s own “sovereign decision” suggests to me that the United States probably asked China to approve their import, CCP security services refused, and the United States opted not to press the issue further. At the end of the day, China’s AI labs remain compute-constrained and will continue desperately trying to gain access to American chips, regardless of whether they may be imported legally—and this will be broadly tolerated by the CCP. Though it probably did not mean to, China has managed to accidentally achieve the best of both worlds: a captive hardware market protected from competitive U.S. exports, and a software industry quietly empowered to rent or smuggle whatever resources it needs to chase the American frontier.