Excited to share that my book on technological revolutions and power transitions will be published in @PrincetonUPress in August. Available to preorder ($30 paperback): - amazon.com/Technology-Rise-G… - bookshop.org/p/books/technol…

In @NewYorker today, I write about the "But China" problem—evoking China as the reason to avoid pausing or slowing down AI development and regulation. The argument, rooted in Western philosophy and its thought experiments, takes a sensible premise like self-improving AI and slips into sci-fi absurdity—killer robots, ethnically targeted bioweapons, supersoldiers—while ignoring basic realities of diffusion: how tech burrows into societies and organizations. As @jjding99 shows, the AI “race” is a marathon, not a sprint. Even god, if it is to mean something in this world, must come down to earth and grapple with all its messiness. newyorker.com/news/the-lede/…

Genuine career highlight for me + lots of fun to join @ezraklein for a long conversation on Chinese AI policy & what that means for upcoming 🇺🇸-🇨🇳 talks. We recorded this last Thursday so **if** anything happened after that we might not have covered it... nytimes.com/2026/09/15/opini…

We are hiring two (!) tenure-track assistant professors in security studies. @GWtweets @ElliottSchoolGW gwu.jobs/postings/128080

This is a dramatic over read of a Global Times op-ed. Chinese reactions to Amodei always focus on his China rec: undermine them as much as possible. Of course they're going to lambast that. Going from that to China rejecting any engagement on safety is a giant, unsupported leap.

Reputation collectives! The real international solution for safety in high stakes domains. Described well here by @jjding99 chinai.substack.com/p/chinai…

A China Hawk's Case for Studying in China Ten years into my own career, I consider my lack of formal China studies education to be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because—as Jackie suggests—I was able to piece together a great deal of knowledge about the Middle Kingdom free from bias by the entrenched China hands. Having to figure everything out on my own (with tutoring from some colleagues at @CSETGeorgetown) forced me to learn more, and more deeply, about CCP policy—and to move beyond words-on-paper to consider how China “really works.” If you read my work, you’ll notice I tend to elide commentary on the traditional, politically symbolic policy pronouncements taught in Asian studies programs (who cares?) in favor of brass-tacks calculations of U.S. and Chinese power. But, speaking personally—as rewarding as it’s been to chart my own path and come to my own conclusions, I feel my lack of in-country experience has been a real detriment to my analysis. Looking only at the digital exhaust left behind by the CCP, I came to learn a great deal about China’s policies and the predilections of the ruling Party—and relatively little about China itself. I now teach a class on open-source research methods, and was lucky to spend a few years practicing diplomacy directly with Chinese diplomats. The gulf between what you can observe remotely and what you get face-to-face is massive. Each of these is an indispensable source of knowledge, but believe me when I say they are not substitutable. Ten years on, I have still never lived in China. It is probably one of my life's great regrets. I feel I can credibly claim expertise in U.S.-China relations and segments of China’s technology industry. Yet I still have huge blind spots when it comes to the lived experience, social pressure, cultural references, and general worldview of many Chinese people—blind spots that undoubtedly weaken my analysis of the Asian security environment. This deficiency is common in Washington, and it is getting worse. At a recent conference attended by ~200 undergraduates, I polled the room and was shocked to discover that not one was studying China. And while China once dominated IR masters programs, many of my @GeorgetownCSS students are now refocusing on Russia or Iran. I routinely attend dinners for China policy specialists in Washington where almost nobody besides me has set foot in the country in the past decade. The resulting assessments and policy recommendations are often badly miscalibrated. In my own field notes from last year, I wrote that “there’s a texture to a country that can’t be captured through policy documents or sardonic social media posts—unguarded glimpses of how a society actually feels about itself, which can only be witnessed with one’s own eyes and ears.” I still believe this is true. My advice to most American undergrads contemplating study in China: Go. Take the security risks seriously. Document your contacts, keep your ordinary digital life off any device you bring, and assume you are being monitored. Resist recruitment pitches and report suspicious approaches. Do not endanger Chinese friends or sources merely to satisfy your curiosity. Recognize that some research topics, personal circumstances, or the political calendar may still make your travel inadvisable—and if you're seeking a security clearance, you may have to explain your decision later down the line. But for most students, calculated exposure to risk is not the same thing as naïveté. In many respects, college is the best—and perhaps the last—window in which to immerse yourself in China without carrying the full professional and security liabilities that would accompany such an opportunity later in your career. The opportunity cost of going, and the scrutiny you receive from both U.S. and Chinese security services, will generally only increase as you age. So go, learn the language. Eat the food, hike the Wuyue, learn to negotiate with the waijiaobu. Make friends with princelings, dissidents, nationalists, strivers, cynics, and people who care nothing about politics. My own decision to live and study in Russia before the war was one of the best decisions of my life, and (I believe) has made me a better analyst of life inside of authoritarian systems. Go with eyes wide open. Enjoy being a stranger in an even stranger land. You'll learn so much—about things you would otherwise never know you never knew. Not all of you will enter government. But some of you might. I'm counting on it: America needs China hawks who know China.

It is incredibly disappointing that @ChinaSelect, which began with bipartisan consensus and produced good work, has descended into this. Seriously, what? Giving preference to applicants from China over American students?

It's hard for the public to understand the benefits of faculty research when our articles sit behind a paywall that costs $5k to drop: (One reason I'm proud to edit @TXNatSecReview: articles are free to the public, thanks to @utsystem @UTAustin @ClementsCenter @StraussCenter.)

I'm reading @jjding99's book on technological diffusion, and it strikes me as an implicit yet persuasive challenge to a lot of Canada's current economic policy discourse. For decades we've obsessed over innovation, commercialization, and producing more domestic technology champions. More recently, that conversation has evolved into a broader emphasis on sovereignty economics in general and AI sovereignty in particular. But what if we're focused on the wrong things? Ding's argument, broadly speaking, is that for general-purpose technologies, long-run economic and even geopolitical advantage depends less on who invents or owns them and more on who diffuses them most effectively across their economy. If that's right, then Canada's main challenge is more about a lack of technological adoption than technological production. A country that builds the next Anthropic or OpenAI but fails to deploy AI widely may underperform a country that builds no frontier models but becomes exceptionally good at using them. This points to quite a different policy discourse about business investment and technological take-up. It suggests that Canada spends too much time worrying about who owns frontier technologies and too little time worrying about who uses them.

Must-read essay by @jjding99 on the highly questionable assumptions underlying Anthropic's approach toward US-China tech competition. open.substack.com/pub/chinai…

Re-upping our call for applications for the New Faces in Chinese Politics Conference for PhD students and post-docs who will be on the market this fall

Jake Sullivan coming around to position of @jjding99 and others about US-China being in a multi-decade competition rather than a short sprint to AGI (even name checks him in the piece) My extended interview with Prof. Ding earlier this year, my most read piece since joining SCMP: scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/ar…

And this is why so many Chinese families I know used their dishwashers merely as drying racks.

Co-authored w/ GW PhD student Dennis Li, my latest article is published open-access in RIPE. I wrote a recap of the main points, including implications for AI governance, for ChinAI: chinai.substack.com/p/chinai…

Reputation collectives: how international industry associations influence China’s safety standards in high-risk technologies, by @jjding99 & Dennis Yuen Li tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.…

FREE BEER!!! 🍺🍻 Ok, free book. It's called "Age of Deception" after all. You can now get my open access book on all things cyber and international relations for free on Kindle, or download the PDF from Cornell, and I promise I am not deceiving you (...which is exactly what I would say if I was, kind of like governments signing on to an anti-espionage norm.) Cornell University Press: cornellpress.cornell.edu/boo… Kindle and Audible: amazon.com/Age-Deception-Cyb…

> PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon > 6,900 academic research citations > Machine Learning Research Scientist at Meta > Moving from the US to the UK because we denied his visa re-entry We are brain draining ourselves... 🫠

I repeat.