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
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. 🧵
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…
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…?
Daniel Fu retweeted
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?
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 firsthand information or supporting documentation, please contact the Committee through our whistleblower email at [email protected].
Daniel Fu retweeted
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/202…
Daniel Fu retweeted
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/…
Daniel Fu retweeted
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-america-…
Daniel Fu retweeted
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.
Daniel Fu retweeted
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.
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. 🧵
Daniel Fu retweeted
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.
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 whether Zhilin would consider joining Apple. I said that he wanted to go back to his homeland. The response was, well, we have an office in Beijing if he'd like to join there.
But Zhilin was quite determined to go back and build a startup. I remember him telling me that if he didn't at least try starting his own company, he would regret it for the rest of his life. I respect that, and he was right.
Many of my international PhD students do choose to stay in the U.S. Of course the U.S. immigration process can be quite intimidating and uncertain, even for superstar PhD graduates from places like CMU.