Podcast Club ONLINE: Insights into the U.S. - China AI and Tech Race

About this event

For this week's meeting, we'll BOTH listen to a podcast and read an ARTICLE.

China is widely considered the United States' primary and most formidable competitor in the global technology and artificial intelligence race. Now, rather being years behind the US in AI models, it is believed that China is a mere 3 to 9 months behind. Some experts say that, consequently and for other reasons such as trade, geopolitics, and ideology, the US and China are in or at the precipice of a Cold War. How does China's approach to AI and technology differ from that of the US? How do the Chinese people generally view AI and technology as compared to the average American? What's going on with US export controls on the sale of certain technology, particularly advanced semiconductor chips, to Chinese companies? How serious are Chinese cyberattacks and espionage? The US seems to be at an important crossroad with AI here at home (guardrails or full speed ahead?). China certainly is a part of the equation. So how should we deal with what seems to be a potentially very dangerous AI and tech race with China?

This week's podcast which was recorded before Trump and Xi's summit in China, is Interesting Times with Ross Douthet. The guest is Kyle Chan, Fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center of the Brookings Institute. Chan's research focuses on China’s technology and industrial policy across a wide range of sectors, including AI, robotics, semiconductors, electric vehicles, and batteries. He writes an influential newsletter, High Capacity, and is writing a book about China’s tech-industrial policy (under contract with Princeton University Press).
Chan's work has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals and major media outlets, such as The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and the Financial Times. He has testified as an expert before the US House Select Committee on China and the US - China Economic and Security Review Commission. Chan is also host of the High Capacity podcast.

The required article is entitled What the Trump-Xi Summit Revealed, and Left Unsaid, About U.S.-China Tech Competition. Published by the CSIS (Center for Strategic & International Studies) on May 20, 2026, it was authored by Lauryn Williams, deputy Director and Senior Fellow in the Strategic Technologies Program at the CSIS, and Kuhu Badgi, Program Coordinator & Research Assistant at the Strategic Technologies Program.

1. PODCAST -
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/opinion/china-trump-ai-xi.html (includes edited transcript)

or

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chinas-not-the-problem-we-are/id1438024613?i=1000767725652

(53 mins.)

2. ARTICLE
Please access the article HERE. Also, the text of the article has a lot of hyperlinks that provide helpful background, including explanations of technical terms and broader context. Those hyperlinks are very interesting and informative -- please use them! The article also is accompanied by an audio reading of the article (probably by AI); the audio is NOT recommended.

What's a podcast club?
It's like a book club for podcasts. Each week we discuss an interesting and currently-relevant episode from podcasters like Ezra Klein, Michael Shermer, or Russ Roberts. We start off as a large group and spend most of the time talking in small break-out groups, which we remix 3 times during the course of the evening. Our conversations are casual and open. We ask that everyone speak respectfully at all times, and we encourage free and concise discussion relevant to the week's podcast topic. To do this, we try to adhere to Grice's Maxims: https://bit.ly/2p4uSQm

Ultimately, the idea is to help each other think a little differently, learn a thing or two and have some fun.