Daniel Fu @DanielFuIR

Really? THIS is what they're worried about? What a disgrace this committee is. At a time when racial profiling is driving talent away from American shores and harming US competitiveness, they want to stir up anti-Chinese grievance?

Select Committee on China @ChinaSelect

2 days ago

Are you an American student, postdoctoral researcher, or academic who believes you were denied a research position, laboratory opportunity, or postdoctoral appointment because preference was given to applicants from China? @ChinaSelect wants to hear from you. If you have

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This essay by @Tyler_A_Harper is destined to become a classic. Anyone interested in the pathologies that have undermined the integrity of higher education in the past decade needs to read it. By telling his personal story, he places a spotlight on them. theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/…

US startups literally bringing back robotics components from China in suitcases. Some even break down Unitree humanoids to ship and then reassemble. Saves time and paperwork for customs. Epic piece on China’s dominance in robotics supply chains: theinformation.com/articles/u-s-r…

@kyleichan Big fan, Kyle! @BillKirbyHBS and I actually have a Harvard Business School case discussing DJI’s brutal pricing strategy and other elements of that puzzle here: hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/….

Imagine this: The U.S. is a digital walled garden where foreign software is banned, and everyone depends on a handful of domestic incumbents for costly artificial-intelligence access. Meanwhile, the rest of the world builds AI economies on a base of Chinese open models that can be freely downloaded, customized and distributed. Sound familiar? It is the inverse of China’s “Great Firewall,” a sprawling regulatory and technological system that has stifled foreign competition and restricted the Chinese public’s access to information for more than two decades. Read the rest of my @WSJopinion: wsj.com/opinion/now-am…

It is hard to overstate just how destructive this is for US robotics capacity and talent. China is able to produce an order of magnitude more humanoids than we do. Chinese companies are expected to ship over 50,000 humanoids this year alone, while total US output would be lucky to exceed a few thousand. And our domestic production fundamentally depends on Chinese parts production: China owns roughly 70% of the humanoid supply chain, and domestic production uses Chinese reducers, actuators, and motors. AI researchers from around the world come to the US because it's where the compute is to work on the frontier. Downstream of that, we lead in physical intelligence for robotics too, but researchers operate on $3K Unitrees, not $75K Spots. Cheap and accessible hardware allows for faster iteration speeds to scale your research - it's why academia was one of Unitree's biggest customers as they scaled! Cut that off and you've made the US a worse place to do embodied research, right as Chinese scale drives their hardware further ahead on both capability and cost. Why would an American robotics startup not spend more time in Shenzhen, where they can get hardware iteration cycles on the order of days instead of months in the US? The security concerns behind this are legitimate, but they don't require a blanket ban. Independent researchers doing firmware analysis found the hidden tunnel service in Unitree's robots, and there are ways to address it when found. Research labs routinely run Unitrees air-gapped, wipe the stock software, and put their own control stacks on the hardware. At that point the machine is Chinese actuators and motors running American code. It's obviously important for America to build its own domestic robotics supply chain, but an import ban doesn't do this. We're effectively kneecapping our ability to make meaningful robotics progress in the short term while giving home-grown companies a protected market and no reason to improve now that they're shielded from competition abroad. Cutting off imports today will not allow us to make a domestic supply chain faster.

Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_

2 weeks ago

The Trump administration plans to announce bans on imports of Chinese robots and power inverters later today. It is being reported here on X that a Chinese AI model ban will also be announced today, but that is not in the Reuters article.

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Terrible, short-sighted move. We are shooting ourselves in the foot here. I am happy to spend time with policymakers to convince them of the idiocy of banning Chinese hardware in 2026, and how the US might regain a competitive edge in hardware. USA is not in the position of strength where enacting GUARD act would improve prospects for US robotics companies in the short or medium term. Nearly every US lab doing research on humanoids uses a Unitree robot because it is the best product for research. I don't know a single US humanoid company that isn't dependent on Chinese magnets somewhere along the chain. Friendshoring is more Chinese than you think. The "Chinese robots have backdoors" seems like a scare tactic. Narratives like this get pushed with so little critical thought of how business people make decisions and how they value their company image. CloudSail (the remote access tunnel on G1) is just Unitree's version of Tailscale. It's like that meme, "Our Noble Fleet Observability" vs. "Their Barbarous Backdoor". Even the oft-cited report on "Data Exfiltration" arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14139 acknowledges that the functions they discovered are likely used for fleet observability. If China/Unitree were actually trying to backdoor into all robots, they would not roll out their backdoor in this way, and certainly not at today's scales of robots. How dumb would one have to be to put their Evil Backdoor (TM) into the first 10,000 robots? It may very well be an attack vector in the future, but I am befuddled by how "we found Chinese Tailscale on Unitree" is being spun. I'd love to be corrected here, feel free to DM if you have more compelling evidence on these remote tunnels actually being used for nefarious purposes. A better policy that doesn't totally cripple US robotics ecosystem would be to enact stricter data exfiltration laws, e.g. not permit data collected in the US to leave it, much like how China has done. Companies: if you want USA to win, make a good research platform that labs can develop on at a competitive cost. Make the hardware reliable. Enact special economic zones to incentivize Americans to do the same things that the Chinese have done to build up their robotics industry. I don't think there is "unfair competition" - American VCs have deployed way more money than local Chinese govts. Lobbying the govt is not the 200 IQ fundraising move you think it is, and it certainly isn't helping the customer. People want to buy an "American Unitree". Just focus on making that, and make it good.

Agility @agilityrobotics

3 weeks ago

Yesterday, Congress took up the GUARD Act, bipartisan legislation to keep adversary-controlled robots out of American infrastructure. Our CEO Peggy Johnson wrote about why this hearing matters, in a new op-ed with @PirateWires. 🧵

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Many senior researchers in Microsoft Research Asia did not have a chance to have a 1-1 meeting with Satya for their entire 20 years of career. However they are able to have a coffee chat with every senior leader in Tencent, Bytedance, Alibaba, etc. Even a PhD graduate like me had a chance to have a 20 minutes report to Ren Zhengfei and the Executive Management Team, and I met Mr. Ren for at least 10 times during my 4 years at Huawei. It is typically said that if a Chinese person moves from a U.S. company to a Chinese company of a similar scale, they will jump up the organization tree by three levels.

Russ Salakhutdinov @rsalakhu

4 weeks ago

I think there's a lot of confusion and misinformation about Zhilin's visa, H1B lottery, immigration, and why he left the U.S. Zhilin had many opportunities to stay in the U.S. if he wanted to. In fact, I was on an email thread with a senior Apple exec (Tim Cook's reports) asking

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a week ago @SemiAnalysis_ wrote that Chinese labs are "simply too compute poor to truly reach the frontier." today one of those "too compute poor" labs, a 300-person startup actually, shipped a model that compares to opus 4.8 the entire western consensus – export controls, the $650B hyperscaler capex race, the "compute moat" investment thesis – is built on one assumption: flops gate capability. if that were true, chip controls would keep chinese labs permanently behind the frontier. but after reading through moonshot's stack i no longer think it is. training is efficiency-compressible: MoE routing, INT4-native quantization, better data curation, infra built around scarcity (their Mooncake stack exists because they don't have gpus!). a small lab with taste can compress the compute needed to make a frontier model, even if it can't afford to serve one the frontier is no longer something money can buy

Arena.ai @arena

4 weeks ago

Big news: Kimi-K3 by @Kimi_Moonshot is now #1 in the Frontend Code Arena with 1679 pts, surpassing Claude Fable 5. This is a 17-place jump from Kimi-k2.6 (#18 -> #1). In Frontend, Kimi-K3 ranked #1 in 6 of 7 domains: Brand & Marketing, Reference-Based Design, Data & Analytics,

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Kimi K3 puts to rest the idea that Chinese AI models are good just because they distill on US models. It beats US models that were available for it to theoretically distill on, such as Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5.

Kimi.ai @Kimi_Moonshot

4 weeks ago

Introducing Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence 🔹 2.8 Trillion Parameters, 1 Million Context, Native Multimodal 🔹 Kimi Delta Attention enables up to 6.3x faster decoding in million-token contexts 🔹 Attention Residuals deliver ~25% higher training efficiency at <2% additional

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This is utterly ridiculous, the equivalent of describing institutions as diverse as BAE, Microsoft, Salesforce, Boston Dynamics, Phillips, Nvidia, MIT, and Google as U.S. military-associated companies. Everyone intuitively understands that these companies develop products that are consumed by the Department of War or else are part of extended weapon system supply chains, but the connotation of a "military associated company" is that these companies are effectively proxies or extensions of the military. No one doubts that these companies are independent from the Department of War and in fact are companies who are almost exclusively commercially oriented, deliberately shield large parts of their business from the military procurement system, have cultures and employees that are generally anti- or agnostic to the military, are staffed entirely by civilians, have executives who think about the military less than .1% of their days, etc. But in China, every company with executives who are members of the party or have contracts with PLA research institutes is apparently inflected with, if not compromised by, these associations. What's the solution here? Surely the Pentagon requires education, but more to the point we shouldn't place such designations in the hands of tendentious thinkers who don't understand the party, the PLA, or the PRC industrial, research, and technology ecosystem? The China Mission Center is surely capable of motivated reasoning but not as ideologically compromised as whoever puts together this list in the Pentagon (USW(A&S))?

Paul Triolo @pstAsiatech

2 months ago

US says BYD, Baidu, Alibaba and other tech giants are aiding China's military Is this a game we really want to play? See comments. reuters.com/world/asia-pac…

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Bill Kirby (@BillKirbyHBS) and I, along with ex-@TradeGov analyst Reginald Anadio, have a new background paper looking at how the Commerce Department’s China strategy has evolved since the advent of the first Trump administration. store.hbr.org/product/the-co…

In a discussion with @fccchina, I talk about China’s increasingly robust energy security and why there is no longer a “Malacca dilemma” confronting Beijing. aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacifi…

Shared some thoughts with the @straits_times on Trump’s visit to Beijing and the likelihood of some concrete deals.

The Straits Times @straits_times

3 months ago

Trump wants China to buy a lot more US energy. Analysts doubt he’ll get his way bit.ly/48NyOOq

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Back in 2022, I supported the Biden chip-export controls on China. After a week with Chinese AI researchers and tech leaders, I've changed my mind. The controls are not working, and they obstruct another strategy that just might work. Models like Anthropic's Mythos show us how dangerous AI is becoming. Not governing AI is not an option. nytimes.com/2026/04/13/opi…

Pretty interesting and timely jamestown.org/the-myth-of-th…

The new issue of China Brief is out now. Read all the articles through the link below 🔗🇨🇳 jamestown.org/cb-volume/volu… #PRC #China #Geopolitics #ChinaBrief #JamestownFoundation

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Trump is sorely mistaken. China does not need Iranian oil and is not dependent on other “chokepoints” like the Malacca Strait. Chinese elites no longer perceive threats with overseas energy dependence. My latest with the @ChinaBriefJT surveys their views: jamestown.org/the-myth-of-th…

Aaron Rupar @atrupar

4 months ago

Trump: "You know, China gets 90% of its oil from the Strait of Hormuz. They should be policing their own strait. We're getting ready to get out of there."

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Really excellent research coming out from Taiwan and @KTristanTang - showcasing how Taipei has a large role to play in open-source analyses of China. Always wondered why there are not more OSINT analysts from TW. @ChinaBriefJT goes from strength to strength under @Arranjnh!

K. Tristan Tang @KTristanTang

7 months ago

My latest analysis on Zhang Youxia’s purge, published by @ChinaBriefJT at the @JamestownTweets, identifies the likely core causes of the purge and the timing behind it, based on official reporting over recent years: Zhang Youxia’s Differences with Xi Jinping over PLA Development

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Taiwan is a crisis Xi needs to avoid, not an opportunity he wants to seize. It can go very sideways for the Communist Party and compel them to do things that would put at risk the rest of what he's really trying to accomplish for China's mid-century goals. 1/4

Bonnie Glaser / 葛來儀 @BonnieGlaser

7 months ago

“Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Failing Would Be Disastrous for Xi Jinping.” My latest, with ⁦@ZackCooper⁩. foreignpolicy.com/2026/01/19/chi…

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