The AI Power Podcast
If you work in AI policy — or you’re just fascinated by it — this is the podcast for you. Every week, The AI Power Podcast unpacks the developments that actually matter: AI regulation, safety, economic policy, U.S.–China competition, semiconductor export controls, and national security. Think of it as drinks after work with the smart friend who tells you what’s really going on, and what might actually work, in plain English.
Plus long-form interview episodes with the policymakers, builders, executives, and analysts shaping AI and the global power competition.
Hosted by Gregory C. Allen. A new show from Decision Tree Research.
Latest from The AI Power Podcast
Weekly analysis and long-form interviews on AI policy, semiconductors, defense, and the U.S.–China technology competition. Listen right here, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Is China Entering the Global Memory Supply Chain?
Chinese memory maker CXMT is on track for roughly 10 percent of the global DRAM market, and HP, Asus, and Acer have reportedly begun shipping notebooks built on its chips — a position Greg and Adam Goodwin trace to equipment bought ahead of anticipated export controls, a validated end-user license granted on 18-nanometer claims that TechInsights reverse engineering puts at 16, and CHIPS Act money that went largely to logic rather than memory. Then Reuters reporting that Samsung and SK Hynix have tested AMEC etching tools for their China fabs — which neither company fully denies — and a Council on Foreign Relations proposal that fabs be made to choose between American and Chinese toolsets.
More episodes
6 earlier episodes · scroll to browseMORE AI Cyber and Bio, Chinese Models, and a U.S. Regulatory Scramble
With co-host Adam GoodwinThree frontier labs have now disclosed models that broke out of evaluation environments and hacked real companies — OpenAI’s Black Hat account of agents leaving each other notes for months, Anthropic’s three real breaches buried in 141,000 evaluation runs, and Meta’s admission of the same — and Greg reaches for Admiral Hyman Rickover and the nuclear navy to explain why blaming the shared testing vendor misses the point. Then the story he finds more alarming: Stanford and the Arc Institute generated 700,000 candidate genomes with a biological foundation model, sixteen of which became working viruses that had never existed on Earth. Plus DeepSeek V4 Flash at three cents a task, and what the White House’s unpublished AI framework concedes about the export controls.
China’s Homegrown DUV Lithography Breakthrough and the Debate Over Banning China’s Open-Source AI
With co-host Adam GoodwinA Shanghai firm has reportedly begun manufacturing immersion DUV lithography machines — the equipment China has spent two decades trying to build for itself — and Greg argues the Japanese components behind the claim, plus China’s growing ability to service its installed fleet, matter more than the machine count. Then the administration’s accusation that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable model, Beijing’s “AI hegemonism” rebuttal, the status of the MATCH Act, and why the open-source fight turns less on open versus closed than on what safety testing should apply past a capability threshold.
An OpenAI Model Hacks a Company on Its Own — Plus Xi’s Open-Source Gambit and Kimi K3’s Market Shock
With co-host Adam GoodwinThree stories broke in the same extraordinary week, and Greg and Adam Goodwin argue they’re really one story about open weights, cybersecurity, and the U.S.–China balance: an OpenAI model that broke out of a sandboxed evaluation and autonomously hacked Hugging Face, Xi Jinping’s first in-person World AI Conference keynote throwing China’s weight behind open-source AI, and Moonshot’s 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 — the largest open-weight model ever — knocking the chip index into a bear market.
An NVIDIA AI-Chip Whitelist, a Bruising BIS Hearing, and New York’s Data-Center Freeze
With co-host Adam GoodwinNVIDIA’s move to a customer whitelist that thins the ranks of authorized Asian distributors, Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler’s rough House testimony on export-control enforcement gaps, and Governor Hochul’s data-center moratorium — and what it signals for state competitiveness.
Licensing AI, the Memory Crunch, H200s to China & Is It a Bubble?
With co-host Adam GoodwinA wide-ranging roundup: the emergence of a de facto AI licensing regime, the DRAM shortage and China’s memory-chip champions, the reversal on H200 exports to China, the strain on the Bureau of Industry and Security, the bubble question, and the threat of model distillation.
The Biggest-Ever Loophole in U.S. AI Chip Export Controls on China? — with Chris McGuire
Guest: Chris McGuire, Council on Foreign RelationsGreg’s interview with Chris McGuire of the Council on Foreign Relations on the Commerce Department’s year-plus failure to enforce export controls on AI-chip sales to Chinese subsidiaries — and what it reveals about how the controls actually work.
Trailer: What the AI Power Podcast Is About
A 54-second introduction to the show.
Gregory C. Allen
Founder and CEO of Decision Tree Research. Greg previously directed the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he hosted The AI Policy Podcast — the show whose successor is The AI Power Podcast.
From The AI Policy Podcast to The AI Power Podcast
From January 2024 to April 2026, Gregory C. Allen hosted The AI Policy Podcast at CSIS — more than one hundred episodes featuring policy principals, researchers, executives, and journalists working at the intersection of AI and national security.
Past guests included two U.S. senators, the Director of White House OSTP, the Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and AI Officer, Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, and the ambassadors of India and France — alongside leading analysts of export controls, AI safety, and China’s industrial policy.
The AI Policy Podcast archive
The full back catalog of The AI Policy Podcast remains available at CSIS. Subscribe to the original show wherever you listen: