This Friday, Elizabeth Economy speaks with an expert on Chinese technology about the state—and the stakes—of the race between China and the United States to develop frontier artificial intelligence capabilities; a defector explains how media brought into North Korea on flash drives and smuggled among the youth there has the potential to undermine the brutal Kim dictatorship; and Bill Whalen speaks with Tom Church about the financial challenges facing America’s entitlement programs.
Confronting and Competing with China
If the United States and China are in a race to develop advanced artificial intelligence systems, who is winning, and what would victory entail?
For China Considered, Senior Fellow Elizabeth Economy sits down with Martin Chorzempa of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, an expert in Chinese financial technology. Chorzempa explains how lessons from that sector’s boom and crackdown have shaped Beijing’s approach to AI, from registration and censorship requirements to quiet, behind-the-scenes supervision of its labs. The two examine why China may not be as far ahead in AI adoption as many assume and compare US labs’ proprietary models with China’s open-weight approach. Chorzempa outlines three races—for frontier capabilities, domestic diffusion, and international diffusion—and weighs the trade-offs of chip export controls before turning to what the new US-China AI dialogue could achieve. They close with Chorzempa’s advice for the White House on AI strategy. Watch or listen here.
Freedom Frequency
In a new Freedom Frequency essay marking the 81st anniversary of the founding of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party, North Korean defector Grace Kim explains how foreign media is quietly undermining that regime’s control over information. What started as illegal trade during the devastating famine of the 1990s evolved into black markets distributing films, television shows, music, and other foreign media on USB drives and memory cards. Despite the threat of long imprisonments and public executions, younger North Koreans continue to seek out this media, which equips them with knowledge to question the regime’s propaganda and imagine lives beyond its borders. Kim argues that the circulation of truthful information, bolstered by ordinary North Koreans willing to risk everything for freedom, is planting the seeds of democratic change north of the 38th parallel. Read more here.
Healthcare Policy
Today, nearly 70 million elderly Americans rely on Medicare for their healthcare needs, with that number climbing as more Americans reach their golden years. Senior healthcare occupies a growing chunk of the federal budget, with Medicare now accounting for one in every seven dollars Washington spends. Social Security and Medicare are on track to run out of funds by the early 2030s. Policy Fellow Tom Church joins Distinguished Policy Fellow Bill Whalen to discuss why Medicare reform went nowhere a decade ago, policy avenues for driving down costs, and limitations imposed by the current political lineup in Washington: A Republican president famously averse to entitlement reform and an opposition party championing a single-payer “Medicare for All” alternative. In Church’s view, this institutional state of affairs suggests that the looming entitlement crisis will be tabled until 2029 or later. Watch or listen here.
Economics
Senior Fellow Amit Seru has been awarded a 2026 Banque de France–Toulouse School of Economics Prize in Monetary Economics and Finance, for his “profound impact” on macroeconomics and finance through his scholarship. Seru’s award citation commends “his major contributions to the analysis of the financial system, banking intermediation, credit markets, and the links between finance and the real economy.” In addition to his senior fellowship at Hoover, Seru serves as the Steven and Roberta Denning Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is currently codirecting Hoover initiatives on corporate governance, long-run prosperity, and regulation and the rule of law. Read more here.
Artificial Intelligence and Political Philosophy
Writing for City Journal, Senior Fellow Scott W. Atlas notes that citizens who have lost trust in institutions are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to provide answers to the questions on their mind. AI outputs “can seem remarkably authoritative,” Atlas notes, but pose users a serious challenge: “Is the answer true, or is it just what the prevailing authorities currently believe to be true?” Atlas delves into the nature of truth and emphasizes that it does not mean simply what a consensus of experts asserts. “Scientific and intellectual history contains no shortage of views once regarded as settled that later required substantial revision,” he writes, adding that confident AI responses might obscure this reality. Truth, Atlas argues, “is discovered only after debate and proven by the critical analysis of evidence.” He concludes that we “should not mistake [AI’s] ability to summarize [existing] knowledge for an ability to tell us what is true.” Read more here.
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