ChinaTalk

WarTalk launches! We chat with Pranay Vaddi (MIT, Sandia, formerly Biden NSC) and Chris McGuire (State, NSC, now CFR) about AI, nuclear command and control, deterrence, and how new military technologies could reshape strategic stability. We cover why the U.S. insists on keeping humans in the loop for nuclear employment decisions, where AI may still play a role in warning and decision support, and how drone warfare, undersea detection, and strategic AI capabilities could change the future of war.

05:00 How “human in the loop” became U.S. nuclear policy12:25 Accident risk, NC3, and the new dangers AI could introduce20:25 Where AI could help: targeting, planning, and decision support57:25 The bigger issue: proliferation of AI-enabled strategic military capabilities1:07:30 Tactical nuclear use, escalation, and lessons from recent wars1:17:40 What an AI nonproliferation regime might actually look like1:32:15 Civilian harm, targeting mistakes, and whether AI makes war more or less humane

suno song: https://suno.com/s/d1tG4bBVnCULgQqd

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Two weeks into the US-Iran war, CENTCOM has struck 6,000 targets, but Hormuz is closed, oil is at $100 a barrel, the regime hasn’t fallen, and 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium sit somewhere under rubble.

Shashank Joshi of The Economist, Justin Mc, and Tony Stark drop in to Second Breakfast for week two of the Iran war.

We discuss…


Why CENTCOM’s 6,000-target tally sounds like a Vietnam body count


The staggering failure to prepare for mine and drone countermeasures for the one strait CENTCOM exists to keep open


The prospect of a special forces raid to seize Iran’s HEU


How AI targeting machines like Maven can generate industrial-scale target banks without a theory of victory

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Kevin Xu of http://interconnected.blog/ and I did a liveshow on substack!

We chat about why working in Chinese AI looks so much tougher than building in the West: less compute, lower upside, more political constraints, and a much weaker market for enterprise software.

We also get into Kevin Xu's definitive history of open source in China (https://interconnected.blog/chinese-open-source-a-definitive-history/?ref=kevin-xus-interconnected-newsletter) and talk why open source has become one of the few real paths Chinese AI companies have to win users abroad, even as the business model at home remains brutal.

Also: the Qwen shakeup at Alibaba, what it says about the limits of China’s AI lab ecosystem, and why Chinese firms may still beat the West in areas like AI shopping and commerce.

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Russell Kaplan, co-founder of Cognition — the company behind Devin — and previously at Scale AI and Tesla, joins the podcast to discuss what “software abundance” could mean for government.

Our conversation covers…


Why government software is so broken — Despite spending over $100B annually on IT, critical systems at agencies like the Social Security Administration and U.S. Department of the Treasury still run on decades-old code that few engineers know how to modify.


How two-year software projects become three-week ones — why AI agents are particularly good at the painful migration and modernization work engineers tend to avoid.


What “software abundance” actually means — AI agents can handle the tedious work of switching systems 24/7, collapsing the switching costs, and forcing software vendors to compete on value rather than locking customers into outdated systems.


AI for cybersecurity — From triaging massive vulnerability backlogs to automatically fixing CVEs, AI will be essential for defending critical infrastructure as attackers gain the same tools.


The coming “post-coding” world — As models converge in capability, the key bottleneck shifts from writing code to understanding problems, reviewing systems, and deciding what should be built in the first place.

Plus, the future of procurement in an AI world, fraud detection in government datasets, the DMV as a software problem, and why Kaplan thinks the real skill of the future is knowing which problems matter.

Thanks so much to Cognition for sponsoring this episode.
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Frank Kendall served as the 26th Secretary of the Air Force from 2021 to 2025. Before that he was Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics under Obama. His new book, Lethal Autonomy: The Future of Warfare, comes out in June.

Cohosting today is Bryan Clark of Hudson, JustinMc and Eric Robinson.
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