Ben Buchanan on AI and Cyber

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Ben Buchanan, now a Professor at SAIS, served in the Biden White House in many guises, including as a special advisor on AI. He’s also the author of three books and an Oxford quarterback. He joins ChinaTalk to discuss how AI is reshaping U.S. national security.

We discuss:

• How AI quietly became a national security revolution — scaling laws, compute, and the small team in Biden’s White House that moved early on export controls before the rest of the world grasped what was coming,

• Why America could win the AI frontier and still lose the war if the Pentagon can’t integrate frontier models into real-world operations as fast as adversaries — the “tank analogy” of inventing the tech but failing at operational adoption,

• The need for a “Rickover of AI” and whether Washington’s bureaucracy can absorb private-sector innovation into defense and intelligence workflows,

• How AI is transforming cyber operations — from automating zero-day discovery to accelerating intrusions,

• Why technical understanding — not passion or lobbying — still moves policy in areas like chips and AI, and how bureaucratic process protects and constrains national security decision-making,

• How compute leadership buys the U.S. time, not safety, and why that advantage evaporates without building energy capacity, enforcement capacity, and world-class adoption inside the government.

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