July 15, 2026

China's Mythos Moment

1 hour 10 minutes

Claude Mythos scrambled American AI policy, leaving us with what Dean Ball calls a de facto involuntary licensing regime from the administration that promised us the opposite. Zhipu's cofounder says China will have a Mythos-class model before the end of the year; IAPS says February 2027. Either way, Beijing is about to face down the same question, but unlike Washington, it already has a form to fill out.

Guests: Kevin Xu of Interconnected. Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment.

We discuss…

Why China's answer to Mythos will look like Glasswing — but started by the state, not a lab, with government ministries and central SOEs first in line

Whether the CAC's content-testing regime can absorb cyber, and why a Chinese lab dropping a frontier model without a heads-up would be "very bold and self-destructive behavior"

The mixed signals on open source — a Reuters report on MOFCOM and NDRC weighing export controls on model weights, versus Minimax and Zhipu founders publicly doubling down, with Xi's WAIC speech as the tiebreaker

Whether open weights even matter when running a frontier model adversarially requires a datacenter, and the case that lighting the dark park makes it safer

What the US and China can actually agree on — non-state actors, eval methodology sharing, and why labor displacement lessons don't travel

Companion-app regulation flowing from Sacramento and Albany to Beijing, the AI policy brain drain into the labs, and whether Sam Altman's five percent is American state capitalism or just a Trump thing

song: https://suno.com/s/xZE1pIKrVBtCfTBO

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By Jordan Schneider

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