The Hoover Institution's Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region hosts China's "AI Commons": Three Layers of Open-Weight Diffusion on Wednesday, April 29, 2026 from 12:00 pm-1:30 pm PT in the Herbert Hoover Memorial Building, Room 160.
What exactly is China's open AI ecosystem: a collection of independent open-source releases, or something structurally different? This talk argues for the latter, identifying an emergent "AI commons" in which published weights, architectural designs, and modular components flow across firm boundaries in ways that do not map neatly onto entity-level policy tools. This talk examines the commons' three-layer structure and traces where two US policy instruments, hardware denial through export controls and market saturation through the Pax Silica framework, each encounter structural boundaries that warrant closer analytical attention.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Kai-Shen Huang is Director and Research Fellow of the Democratic Governance Program at the Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology (DSET) in Taipei, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at National Chengchi University (NCCU). His research examines the geopolitics of artificial intelligence within the context of US–China technology competition, with a focus on export control effectiveness, open-weight diffusion dynamics, and AI governance frameworks.
Kharis Templeman is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and program manager of the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region, as well as a lecturer in the Department of East Asian Studies at Stanford University. A political scientist by training, he writes and speaks frequently about cross-Strait relations and Taiwan politics and policy issues.
