Identity Engineering: Why a leading Chinese AI startup abandons its home market
The Chinese AI and venture capital community was shocked by Meta’s swift acquisition of Manus, an AI agent company from Wuhan, China, in a deal worth an estimated $2–3 billion. For Meta, this deal is its third-largest acquisition to date….
Join the Conversation: AI Governance and Global Economic Development
An Official Pre-Summit Event of the AI Impact Summit 2026 The Internet Governance Project at Georgia Tech invites scholars, practitioners, students, and representatives from civil society to an essential dialogue on how AI governance shapes our global economic future. Event…
DeepSeek-OCR: China’s Answer to the U.S. Chip Ban
The CTO of Palantir Technologies Shyam Sankar recently criticized Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s idea that selling products in China would ultimately serve U.S. interests by making China dependent on American technology. Sankar argued that deepening economic dependence on China would…
Identity politics: The TikTok Deal, Chinese export controls, and firms’ country-of-origin conundrum
In mid-September 2025, U.S. and Chinese officials convened in Madrid for a high-level negotiation that yielded a breakthrough on the TikTok deal: a “basic framework consensus” for resolving the long dispute over the platform. This meeting marked the fourth round…
The shocking part of the TikTok settlement that no one’s talking about
There are many reasons to be concerned about freedom of expression in America these days. But one of them, and perhaps the most insidious, is going under the radar. I am talking about the framework agreement under which TikTok’s US…
Intel’s Glorious Past and Current Funeral
It’s time to realize that our industrial policy for semiconductors is failing. It was built on three pillars: subsidies to encourage re-shoring of fabrication, export controls that made trade in chips a function of our political alliances; and an attempt…
“Apple in China:” A Critical Review
A review of Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee Patrick McGee has written a splendid business history that also manages to wade into geopolitics in a misguided way. The book’s underlying focus is the…
Industrial Policy vs. Digital Reality: How Data, Not Labor, Is Rebuilding the Rust Belt
This Palantir advertisement, displayed at the Detroit airport—a symbolic and literal hub of U.S. industrial manufacturing—makes a highly strategic and ideologically charged claim: “Palantir is Reindustrializing America’s Manufacturing.” The ad visually juxtaposes sleek, robotic car manufacturing lines with logos of…
A GENIUS Bill?
The United States has entered a new chapter in financial regulation with the introduction of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins aka GENIUS Act of 2025. With this, Congress isn’t just attempting to contain crypto, it’s designing…
Unpacking US-China “Decoupling” in AI
This is a guest blog from two University of Manchester (UK) doctoral students involved in researching the causal mechanisms linking policy interventions to decoupling outcomes, with implications for innovation ecosystems and global governance. Earlier this year, the release of DeepSeek—an…