Stop the World

This Saturday marks ASPI's 25th birthday – the date the institute began operations in 2001. To mark it, STW is joined by Hugh White, ASPI's founding executive director, and Justin Bassi, its current executive director, for an in-depth conversation about how the institute came to be and what it's for.

Hugh recalls the establishment of ASPI by the Howard government – including a fateful plane trip with Howard's first defence minister Ian McLachlan – and a first few weeks that turned out rather differently from what he was expecting. He discusses ASPI's early impact and the experience of publicly challenging the 2003 Iraq invasion to which Howard had committed Australian troops.

Hugh and Justin discuss how a think tank should balance the issues of the day against the over-the-horizon questions no one is asking yet, in traditional defence and in emerging areas such as critical technologies. They talk about how deep into the fundamentals of strategic policy a think tank should probe, the importance of challenging orthodoxy, and the US alliance, AUKUS and the state of Australia's strategic policy debate. Despite their different views of the world, their evident respect for one another shows that healthy, robust debate is very much possible in 2026.

For more on the bipartisan commitment to contestability, look out for a piece this weekend jointly authored by John Howard and Kim Beazley.

Australia’s new Chief of the Defence Force, Admiral Mark Hammond, joins STW on the sidelines of the ADSTAR Summit in Adelaide to share his thoughts on the integration of advanced technology into defence. It’s a quickie but a goodie, with the CDF packing plenty of insights into a few minutes.

We cover the key areas where technology is making a difference, especially improving the survivability of Australian personnel; long-range fires; the value of nuclear powered submarines; the close tech relationship with the US; artificial intelligence; the relationship with industry and why warfare will necessarily remain a human affair.

This is a great episode while you make your morning coffee or your commute to work.

STW speaks with Anton Leicht, one of the most compelling voices on the geopolitics and economics of artificial intelligence. Anton has become a leading authority on how middle powers such as Australia can carve out a role in the global AI value chain and avoid being pushed to the periphery as the technology advances.

Anton is the author of the influential Substack Threading the Needle and a fellow with the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He discusses Australia’s opportunity to build data centres to train and run AI, how that would help guarantee future access to advanced American models such as Claude and GPT, the prospects for sovereign models built here, and how Australia can sustain a cooperative relationship with the US built on mutual dependence.

The conversation then turns to AI and security: keeping models safe while avoiding a concentration of power in government hands, the responsibilities of the AI labs themselves, and compromise proposals such as third-party experts acting as safety watchdogs.

Anton closes with his views on the likely economic impacts of AI and the big questions around the future of work. He’s a frontier thinker on the political economy of AI, and is closely watched by policymakers, fellow experts and industry leaders alike.

As a relatively small military, the Australian Defence Force needs to fight and win through advantages such as superior technology. Chief Defence Scientist Professor Tanya Monro, AC, is in charge of figuring out smart ways to do that.

Tanya kicks off our short series recorded at the ADSTAR Summit in Adelaide, Australia's premier defence science and technology gathering. ASPI joined the summit as podcast partner alongside organisers the Defence Science and Technology Group.

Tanya talks about the newly launched Defence Innovation, Science and Technology Strategy and its three core objectives: generating asymmetric advantage, accelerating innovative solutions into capability, and reinforcing an integrated ecosystem through closer work with industry and international partners.

She gives her perspective on how to harness the remarkable innovation happening across technology fields, including AI, and channel it into a stronger defence force. She walks through the six priority areas Defence is focusing on, and the balance between work that delivers immediate new capabilities and longer-term fundamental research that may not pay dividends for years but is nonetheless vital.

A note that this was recorded on the sidelines of an event with more than 2000 guests, so there's some background noise. We’ll roll out further ADSTAR episodes over the next few weeks.

Links:

https://www.defence.gov.au/about/strategic-planning/2026-defence-innovation-science-technology-strategy

As foreign minister of Lithuania from 2020 to 2024, few people had the front row seat of Gabrielius Landsbergis to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Trump’s return to the White House and Europe’s response to both.

Since leaving office, he has become one of Europe’s clearest and most forceful champions for democratic values, for support for Ukraine, and for resisting the aggression of Russia and the risks posed by other authoritarian nations, including China.

This interview comes at a time that Ukraine is showing signs of regaining the upper hand on the battlefield and increasing discussions about the possibility of the US administration providing patriot system licenses to Ukraine. Gabrielius talks to Dave about whether Putin’s grip on power is as secure as it appears.

Gabrielius is not for waiting though, assessing that it is too risky for Europe to rely on Russia losing, the US making the decisive difference or NATO 3.0 taking shape. Instead, Gabrielius has an innovative solution that would create a genuine coalition of the ‘willing-and-able’.

Gabrielius also talks about why China has largely escaped meaningful consequences for backing Russia’s war effort. He discusses the implications of the Iran war on US credibility as a global leader for the world order that Gabrielius believes must be defended by all those who believe in democratic values and principles.

Janet Egan is a senior fellow and deputy director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, and one of the most respected thinkers on AI and national security — globally and from an Australian perspective. She joins STW at the perfect moment after PM Anthony Albanese’s AI speech and the big news about OpenAI’s agents going rogue.

The conversation opens with the OpenAI hack of online AI repository Hugging Face—which Janet calls a very big deal—and works through the implications for cybersecurity attackers and defenders. She addresses the argument that safeguards on frontier models are restricting their use and handing an advantage to China, weighs the merits of open source and open weight models, and reads the clues in Xi Jinping's recent AI speech about China's current strategy.

The conversation then turns to Australia. Janet offers her assessment of Albanese's AI speech and examines the case for Australia to build data centres capable of training frontier models like Claude, GPT and Gemini. She covers the fraught AI copyright debate before finishing with thoughts on global AI governance and the prospects for US-China cooperation to reduce the most catastrophic risks.

Taiwan is the target of more information operation attacks than anywhere else on earth, most of them originating in mainland China and aimed at dividing Taiwanese society and eroding the resolve to resist Beijing. AI is supercharging that barrage. And to tell us about the impact and how Taiwan is fighting back, we’ve spoken with You-Hao Lai, a researcher at Taiwan's Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology.

You-Hao starts by giving us his takeaways on Chinese leader Xi Jinping's keynote at China's global AI conference, including on Beijing's push to ensure that the world embeds Chinese technology, with Chinese standards, into its systems rather than American alternatives.

He then covers the ways that AI is transforming China's information operations: the scale, speed and sophistication of the attacks, the narratives deployed, the strategic purpose behind them, and documented cases that illustrate how rapidly things are evolving. 

You-Hao then walks through Taiwan's whole-of-nation response, organised around “four Cs”—cutting, clarifying, curbing and cultivating—a framework that reflects years of hard-won experience building national resilience against a relentless and well-resourced adversary. There are real lessons here for the rest of us.

Leading artificial intelligence company OpenAI prompted commentators to dig deep into their bag of Hollywood sci-fi dystopia comparisons this week when it announced a pair of its frontier models had broken out of a secure test environment and hacked into online AI library Hugging Face.

Today, David Wroe and Justin Bassi pick out two of this week’s dizzying array of events that stretch from the Saudi-US nuclear deal to the South China Sea, and dissect in detail the stunning OpenAI revelation and the pressure that China faced during the ASEAN foreign ministers’ meeting in Manila, Philippines.

No one got hurt when the AI models went marauding in the real world, but the episode has jolted the tech industry, governments and the public. Questions are now flying about regulation, safety and global governance as leading AI labs in the United States and China race to get ahead with the most powerful models. The twist in the tale is that Hugging Face had to use an open-source Chinese model to defend itself against the rogue AI agent attack, prompting opponents of AI regulation in the US to demand fewer restrictions on their own models, and AI safety experts to sharpen their calls for the two tech superpowers to talk earnestly about common safeguards.

Meanwhile, Australia announced it would provide drones to the Philippines for maritime security amid China’s latest efforts to squeeze the Southeast Asian nation in the South China Sea. Foreign Minister Penny Wong visited the Philippines Coast Guard headquarters where she blasted China’s “destabilising and dangerous conduct” at sea.

Can Australia count on continued access to the most advanced frontier AI models from the US? And if not, what should it do about it? That’s the starting point for a wide-ranging conversation with three American guests who bring deep expertise across cyber, AI and strategic competition.

Michael Sulmeyer is Professor of the Practice at Georgetown University and until recently was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy. Mike Kuiken is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Vice Chair of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Sophie Mayo is a non-resident fellow at the United States Studies Centre and a research assistant at Georgetown’s Centre for Security and Emerging Technology.

Together they cover Australia’s push to build large-scale AI data centres and whether that could generate real leverage in the global technology race; the cyber implications of powerful AI models and why old software, unpatched systems and critical infrastructure remain stubborn vulnerabilities even as AI gives defenders new tools; and China — whether the US still has a coherent strategy for competing with Beijing, and how AI is converging with biotech, quantum and other emerging technologies. The conversation also takes in AUKUS, the Australia-US alliance, export controls, venture capital and talent flows.

These can sound like separate issues. STW’s guests make clear they’re really all part of the same question: how does Australia make itself useful, ambitious and strategically relevant in a much tougher technological era?

Dean Ball is one of the most influential thinkers in AI policy right now — principal author of the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, author of the widely-read Substack Hyperdimensional, and until very recently a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. STW grabbed him just before he started a new role at OpenAI, which made for some propitious timing.

The conversation covers a lot of ground. Dean gives his views on two ideas floated by his new boss Sam Altman in the hours before recording: a global governance body for AI standards, and reports that Altman has been in talks with the Trump administration about giving the US government a stake in OpenAI. He also talks about his broader outlook on AI and power — including the argument that the level of AI capability in government hands shouldn’t get too far out of proportion to what’s available to everyone else.

Dean discusses the role of safeguards on frontier models, and makes the case for independent third-party auditors sitting between governments and AI companies as a check on both risk and excessive concentrations of power. He covers the opportunities for middle powers like Australia in data centres and rare earths, the realities of US incentives to withhold its most powerful capabilities even from trusted allies, and the evolution of institutions in an AI age — a topic he’s writing a book on. He finishes on a note of cautious optimism. It’ll be worth watching how his thinking evolves from inside OpenAI.

Hyperdimensional: Hyperdimensional | Dean W. Ball | Substack

FT Op-Ed by Sam Altman