AI Policy and Geopolitics
National AI strategies, export controls, chip restrictions, global competition, public-sector adoption, and geopolitical implications.
Perplexity Frames AI Agents as Metered Digital Labor
Perplexity chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko argues that AI agents should be judged less as software features than as metered digital labor: tools users will pay for when they perform economically useful work. In a Big Technology Podcast interview, he makes the case that Perplexity’s computer-use agents, workflow packaging, broad permissions and multi-model orchestration are all part of that shift. The unresolved question is whether users and companies will accept the access, trust and usage-based pricing required to make those agents a real business rather than another AI novelty cycle.
AI Demand Is Stress-Testing the Global Semiconductor Supply Chain
Bloomberg’s primer argues that the AI boom is turning the semiconductor supply chain into a strategic stress test, raising demand for advanced processors while exposing how dependent the industry remains on a handful of companies, machines and manufacturing clusters. The source traces that pressure through ASML’s lithography tools, AMD’s AI chip designs, TSMC’s concentration of advanced fabrication in Taiwan, and competing US and Chinese efforts to rebuild domestic capacity. Its central claim is that chips are becoming more economically and politically essential just as their production remains physically fragile, capital-intensive and difficult to replicate.
U.S. China Policy Needs a Unified Economic Statecraft Command
Elizabeth Economy’s conversation with Randy Schriver and Mike Kuiken of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission argues that Washington’s China problem now cuts across trade, technology, supply chains, cyber operations, Taiwan planning, pharmaceuticals, and sanctions policy. Schriver and Kuiken say the US government still manages many of those risks through agencies and laws built for an earlier era, leaving economic statecraft fragmented just as China’s leverage has become more integrated. Their case is less for severing all economic ties than for building the machinery to decide which ties are tolerable, which are dangerous, and which require national effort to replace.
Deterring China Over Taiwan Requires Options Short of War
Eyck Freymann’s argument in Defending Taiwan, discussed with Niall Ferguson at the Hoover Institution, is that U.S. deterrence is too narrowly built around stopping a Chinese invasion. Freymann says Beijing could instead use customs controls, coast guard pressure, energy constraints, supply-chain leverage, and political coercion to force Taiwan toward submission without triggering a clear war. His prescription is for Washington to build credible options between inaction, military escalation, and an economic rupture it cannot sustain.
IIT Madras Scales Online Data Science Degree Without JEE Entry
Speaking with Craig Smith on Eye on AI, IIT Madras electrical engineering professor Andrew Thangaraj argues that India’s AI talent problem begins with a higher-education system that filters too many students out too early and rewards exam knowledge over usable skills. He presents IIT Madras’s online undergraduate degree in data science — a low-cost, no-JEE program with a rigorous exit standard and project-heavy diploma stage — as an attempt to move the filter from admission to completion. Thangaraj says that model is necessary if India is to build AI capacity at national scale rather than through a handful of elite seats.