ChinaTalk

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, 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.
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Roel 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!
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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 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.

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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, 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

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The 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:
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