Stonex PhD Scholar in International Relations @LSEIRDept/@lseideas. Previously @HarvardHBS & @GovAIOrg. @BostonCollege and @Columbia alum. U.S.-China Tech.
London, England
Joined December 2019
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Daniel Fu retweeted
Well China will have just as hard of a time trying to limit export of Chinese models as the U.S. American models
The Mofcom explainer of the revised export control rules. sinocism.notion.site/MOFCOM-… risks of building a business on PRC open AI models going up. “facilitation measures such as automatic licensing may apply if they are deployed in relatively controllable-risk circumstances, such as on a company’s own cloud infrastructure overseas 如果部署在海外自有云等风险相对可控的情形下，可适用自动许可等便利措施”
Daniel Fu retweeted
This is the way. Not by framing Taiwan as an actor in a struggle between democracy vs autocracy or by presenting Taiwan in relation to looming great power war. Building awareness of Taiwan's indispensability to America's economic future is the best path to durable US support.
Taiwan plans to raise billions of dollars to develop industrial parks in the US that would build a base for a comprehensive supply chain for Nvidia and other AI hardware makers in the country bloomberg.com/news/articles/… via @business
Washington is restricting China's access to advanced AI hardware, but in doing so is accelerating Chinese model efficiency, domestic chip adoption, and software-hardware integration. Short-term constraints produce long-term competitors. Thanks @JChengWSJ for sharing my research.
“Technological bottlenecks constraining Chinese advances are not static. As Washington restricts one part of the AI technology stack, Chinese firms have successfully substituted, economized on, or circumvented that constraint.”
centerforchinaanalysis.asias…
Daniel Fu retweeted
The Washington Post and now Bloomberg argue in favor of allowing more Chinese investment into the US.
I wrote about how the US should manage the risks and reap the benefits of Chinese tech products & investments: brookings.edu/articles/a-new…
Daniel Fu retweeted
1/ Article now officially out in @ISQ_Jrnl!
Every day, we hear about how disruptive technologies are "breaking" international security.
AI. Quantum. Biotech. Hypersonics.
If alarm bells are sounding, isn't it time to regulate?
Yet policymakers almost always wait. 🧵
Friedberg’s (@AaronFriedberg) new book is a valuable intervention to the burgeoning literature on chokepoints and weaponized interdependence. I’m particularly pleased that he cites my @ChinaBriefJT article on the political drivers of China’s private-sector demise.
I read Jon Ossoff’s (@ossoff) work as a Master’s student at @LSEIRDept. His review of Kishore Mahbubani’s The Great Convergence is devastatingly brilliant. If elected president, he’d be the most intellectually grounded president on international relations in American history.
Excited to share my latest research for @AsiaPolicy on how China’s leading AI start-ups are often successfully adapting to U.S. export controls. I look at novel algorithmic efficiencies, model architectures, and domestic chip alliances and substitution.
centerforchinaanalysis.asias…
This research came out of my summer fellowship with @GovAIOrg. Special thanks to my wonderful supervisor @jjding99, @pstAsiatech for partially inspiring this and my wider PhD dissertation, and @wstv_lizzi for her rounds of edits and ultimately publishing this!
Daniel Fu retweeted
How do Chinese AI firms make money? In a new report, @cherylwoooo and @ansonwhho identify five revenue sources and analyze how much each contributes. 🧵
Daniel Fu retweeted
Good piece by @DesmondShum on how positionality impacts analysis. But the dichotomy is too crude: what Western analyst really doesn’t approach official sources with scepticism? Or look for how a source compares historically? Or seek to corroborate with other kinds of sources? 1/3
Why Chinese and Western Analysts See China Differently
On a regular basis, I probably review ten Chinese-language podcasts or pieces of writing on China for every two from Hong Kong and one in English.
Over time, I have noticed a consistent difference among them. Hong Kong analysis often sits somewhere between the two, but broadly speaking there are two largely separate worlds of China watching: the Chinese-language world and the English-language world.
desmondshum.substack.com/p/w…
If China faces a compute crunch, why export computing power? And if compute can go global digitally while hardware stays in China, why export scarce AI chips?
I explore this in my latest for @ChinaBriefJT. Thanks for sharing, @kyleichan!
China is pushing to export AI, even as it faces supply constraints on advanced chips.
One key route is token exports: running AI services on data centers in China for overseas customers. jamestown.org/the-prcs-compu…
Read here: jamestown.org/the-prcs-compu…
Daniel Fu retweeted
Reposting a piece I wrote for ChinaFile, with my fantastic @AsiaPolicy CCA colleagues
lizziclee.substack.com/p/why…
Full @ChinaFile piece here Full piece here: asiasociety.org/policy-insti…
Daniel Fu retweeted
Should the U.S. track AI chips to reduce smuggling?
Congress is debating it now, and in a new CSET report, @HannaDohmen @KyauMill21 and I weigh in.
We find ping-based location verification is the best option—but complexity and cost leave us unconvinced it’s worth it.
🧵 (1/12)
Daniel Fu retweeted
I wish there was more recognition that the US does not make these machines, and we should not erase the Dutch (who do) and their interests when we talk about ever further stretched extraterritorial authority.
What is now being discussed (like MATCH Act) is to go beyond the US telling a Dutch company what it can sell (which we already do, and many advanced DUV are already restricted) to force them to stop servicing equipment that was permitted under US controls to be sold to China. The goal is to try and brick the machines ex post.
This would be a major escalation, from saying you can't buy something to trying to brick something you legally bought for a lot of money!
The Dutch see that a) CN would retaliate and b) they worry employees in China will then start their own servicing firms/take the machines apart for easier reverse engineering, which would be long term very bad for them (cc @lithos_graphein). Export controls involve tricky intertemporal trade offs.
CTS co-founder @KonstantinPilz says China makes all its AI chips on Western DUV machines, the US could cut that off tomorrow, and explains why it hasn't:
"China is relying entirely on Western machines to make its AI compute. They are not using EUV, which has been banned since 2019, but they are using DUV, the previous generation. China has rapidly ramped up the amount of DUV they are buying, and the US is just not doing anything about that."
"If the US wanted to, they could just restrict those exports and China would be making way less AI compute."
"Someone goes to policymakers and says, here's my first recommendation, ideally we'd also do this, this, and this. And policymakers are like, oh, maybe we'll talk about the first one."
"We've known about DUV for probably several years now. It's just a very slow process to convince people to actually act on it."
@techstatecraft
Daniel Fu retweeted
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.
The Chinese government has now clearly and unmistakably rejected serious collaboration with the United States on AI safety. This was a predictable development. It is also a clarifying moment for the importance of U.S. export controls on AI chips and other technologies, which are now indisputably a necessary element of any AI safety regulatory regime—and must be an urgent policy priority.
The Chinese government is now explicitly saying it views any U.S. proposal that would constrain its AI capabilities as an effort to lock-in U.S. technological dominance over China—which is unsurprising because that is the exact same way it has historically viewed U.S. arms control proposals. And particularly given President Trump has stated that staying ahead of China in AI is basically an existential issue for the United States, it is understandable that China would have little willingness to put any constraints on its own AI labs so long as it feels like they still have a chance to overtake the U.S. AI labs. China is unlikely to change this posture unless it perceives it cannot catch up to the United States in AI, or there is a catastrophic event that shocks the Chinese government into changing its perspective (à la the Cuban Missile Crisis).
If China will not agree to any negotiated restraints on its AI labs, this leaves the United States with two options if it wishes to stay ahead of China in AI: (1) slow China’s AI development ourselves by strengthening export controls on U.S. AI chips and other relevant technologies, which China needs to stay competitive with the United States in AI; or (2) race ahead of China as fast as possible by refusing U.S. labs’ requests to impose regulations that slow their development of AI to ensure it is safe, and hope that the labs’ warnings about the potential for catastrophic risk if AI development moves too fast are wrong.
Those are the only two options. There is no longer any middle ground. As long as China is a pacing threat, the United States will be limited in its ability to impose meaningful AI safety regulations on its own AI labs given maintaining AI leadership is existential. This means it is no longer an intellectually consistent position to support AI safety regulations but oppose export controls on China. If you oppose export controls, you either oppose AI safety regulations, or believe the Chinese government is lying when it says it rejects U.S. proposals to slow AI development. And China has no incentive to lie about that.
This is a dangerous situation. If you do believe that AI leadership is existential and that domestic AI safety regulations are necessary and urgent, the time for half-measures on export controls is over. China has shown us its cards and told us it will not cooperate on AI safety. If China will not slow itself down in the near-term, we have no choice but to take steps today to slow China down ourselves. Not doing so is irresponsible.
Daniel Fu retweeted
It’s a good idea to pay close attention to what current & former officials in China are saying, in order to understand their strategy and behavior.
Understanding is not endorsement.
Daniel Fu retweeted
Huawei is capacity constrained on its latest Ascend 950DT AI chips for now.
But DeepSeek and other top Chinese AI labs are preparing for domestic AI chip production to ramp up significantly before too long.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Daniel Fu retweeted
US urged to consider military strikes to stop China achieving AGI first
OK, someone has to say it, this is beyond insane, not to mention ill-informed and irresponsible...
scmp.com/news/us/article/336…?
