What would make a large US lead in AI good or bad for the world?

The size, shape, and trajectory of the lead might matter in different ways: for stability and cooperation, for safety, and for who gets to shape the…

Aug 24 • Erich Grunewald

5

2

2

China’s wafer-polishing tools are probably good enough for indigenous HBM

China’s chemical-mechanical planarization tools from Hwatsing and AMEC are a relative bright spot in its HBM push.

Aug 10 • Hamish Low

6

1

July 2026

Why can’t Chinese AI companies raise more money?

Chinese AI companies have raised 24x less funding than their US counterparts, a gap explained largely by compute constraints, a challenging domestic…

Jul 30 • Cheryl Wu and Konstantin F. Pilz

11

10

4

China will likely have its own Mythos-like model around February 2027

A forecast built on chip counts, compute budgets, and Malaysian data centers.

Jul 3 • Hamish Low

26

2

8

June 2026

Is querying a model an export now? And what that means for remote access controls

The US Commerce letter to Anthropic carries implications for how BIS uses its authorities and could set a new precedent for how the Bureau thinks about…

Jun 19 • Cassia King

7

1

3

A forecast of Chinese DUV and EUV photolithography progress

What we can and can’t learn from ASML.

Jun 18 • Hamish Low

40

2

10

Where China’s AI chip supply chain stands in 2026

China’s domestic ecosystem is improving, but it remains constrained by several hard bottlenecks, especially in photolithography equipment and memory…

Jun 2 • Veronika Blablova and Erich Grunewald

26

5

May 2026

How good is China at export controls?

China’s export control agency has a fraction of BIS's staff, but makes up for it through politically centralized rulemaking and well-integrated…

May 24 • Maxwell K. Roberts

6

1

How much US compute is China renting from the cloud?

China is restricted from purchasing advanced US chips, but it can rent liberally from the cloud. Even a modest share of US cloud compute could already…

May 22 • Cassia King

8

1

How much should we worry about secretly loyal AIs?

Defenders have structural advantages but there’s work to be done.

May 20 • Dave Banerjee

7

1

2

How banned AI chips end up in China

AI chips and servers reach China through distribution chains in which each seller vets only its direct customers, and no one is on the hook for what…

May 15 • Erich Grunewald

12

4

April 2026

Making through-silicon vias is not a bottleneck for China's HBM production

Firms like ACM Research are making the deposition machines China needs, though they may suffer from worse yields.

Apr 22 • Hamish Low

9

5