Podcast
ChinaTalk
Hosted by Jordan Schneider · EN
Conversations exploring China, technology, and US-China relations. Guests include a wide range of analysts, policymakers, and academics. Hosted by Jordan Schneider.
Check out the newsletter at https://www.chinatalk.media/
554episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
The FCC's New Robot Rules
5d ago00:51:15Summary readyThe 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'
1w ago01:21:03Summary readyDon'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
2w ago01:28:32Summary readyRoel 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?)
2w ago01:06:00Summary readyThe 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
3w ago01:03:59Summary readyFive 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
3w ago00:59:40Summary readyThe 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!
3w ago02:00:28Summary readyWhat 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
4w ago01:10:30Summary readyClaude 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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WarTalk: Iran + Randy Schriver on Asian Defense
Jul 1001:02:47Summary readyBeijing just announced a persistent Coast Guard patrol east of Taiwan, the administration is calling arms sales a "bargaining chip," and the NDS doesn't mention Taiwan at all. Is deterrence in the Strait quietly coming apart? Randy Schriver is Chairman of the Institute for Indo-Pacific Security (the successor to Project 2049), current chair of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs in the first Trump administration. We discuss… China's new persistent Coast Guard patrol east of Taiwan, and how lawfare, fishermen rescues, and radio queries make sovereignty claims physically manifest, Why treating arms sales as a "bargaining chip" puts the US out of compliance with the Taiwan Relations Act, Whether Seoul and Tokyo go nuclear as hedging accelerates — and what the axis of autocracy means for a Korea contingency, How many Chinese mothers will sacrifice their only legal child for a Xi Jinping vanity project — and why America stopped doing information warfare, Blockade vs. invasion, Hellscape, and why the US should exercise a Keelung–Yonaguni corridor with Japan, The own-goal management of US-India relations, plus Randy's reading list for new Indo-Pacific hands. song link: https://suno.com/s/aRUtODqWdnqhKG3l Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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The Chemicals Powering the Chip Industry
Jul 701:18:49Summary readyWe cover: How the Iran War has exposed vulnerabilities in the semiconductor industry’s chemical supply chains. The chemistry behind chip manufacturing — why advanced semiconductors depend on toxic, explosive, and highly reactive chemicals and why some are purified to levels measured in parts per trillion. How China went from virtually no semiconductor-gas industry to the ability to supply almost every critical chipmaking gas in just fifteen years. America’s CHIPS Act versus China’s Big Fund — why building fabs domestically is easier than building the chemical ecosystem beneath them, and why many critical gases cannot simply be stockpiled. Plus, why Taiwan may be the worst place in the world to host a semiconductor industry and the existential supply-chain risks that come with it and, the surprising appeal of a career in industrial gases. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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