Graham Webster
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gwbstr.com
Graham Webster
@gwbstr.com
3.1K followers 580 following 1.4K posts
Chinese tech policy and US-China relations at Stanford
Newsletter: herecomes.transpacifica.net
Basics: gwbstr.com
Also: #filmphotography
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gwbstr.com
I'm going to call it for the year on social media. See you back here if and only if I have new work to announce, which is more likely if I'm not here.

Here's a picture I liked, in some weather I didn't like, in Beijing recently, on #kodacolor200.

#filmphotography
November 10, 2025 at 5:22 PM
gwbstr.com
Jesus. The school actually says it did review the alert and cancel it. (It says "doritos" in the picture.) But the cops rolled in anyway to ruin the day.
"I am writing to provide information on an incident that occurred last night on school property. At approximately 7 p.m., school administration received an alert that an individual on school grounds may have been in possession of a weapon. The Department of School Safety and Security quickly reviewed and canceled the initial alert after confirming there was no weapon. I contacted our school resource officer (SRO) and reported the matter to him, and he contacted the local precinct for additional support. Police officers responded to the school, searched the individual and quickly confirmed that they were not in possession of any weapons. We understand how upsetting this was for the individual that was searched as well as the other students who witnessed the incident. Our counselors will provide direct support to the students who were involved in this incident and are also available to speak with any student who may need support.
October 24, 2025 at 5:13 PM
gwbstr.com
Ideal visual aid for my apparently unpopular take: tearing down part of a historic building is not among my top 10 concerns about the president, his party, and the government.
Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton If you're hopping mad about Trump destroying the White House, we've got a new hat or sticker for you. Your purchase supports progressive groups working to build a fairer, more inclusive America for everyone—and win elections! [hat and sticker say: not his house our house]
October 24, 2025 at 4:53 PM
gwbstr.com
New usability hack dropped
Screenshot shows muting the word tattoo on bsky
October 22, 2025 at 3:20 PM
gwbstr.com
Headlines in Nexis Uni including the phrase "to counter China"
Graph showing a slow rise from near zero starting in 2010 and then a massive spike in 2020, followed by continued high numbers.
October 16, 2025 at 5:58 PM
gwbstr.com
I'm so committed to not being sure that I could never write such a confident take-down, but this is a real good one.
It's all so ludicrious. And, tragically, it's driven poor Ed Zitron insane. But more cracks are starting to appear even among the Al devout. To wit: Last week Ben Thompson in Stratechery, he who gushes about Al regularly, wrote "we've obviously crossed the line into bubble territory, which always was inevitable." Oh, ok then! Meanwhile Matt Levine, who keeps an admirable even keel, observes that OpenAl is announcing deal after deal that's premised on the announcement of the deal itself being the very thing that finances the deal, leading to this masterful paragraph: The financing tool is, you go to Broadcom and you put your arm around their shoulder and you gesture sweepingly in the distance and whisper "omniscient robots" and they whisper "yesssss" and you say "we'll need a few hundred billions dollars of chips and equipment from you" and they say "of course" and you say "good" and they say "do you have hundreds of billions of dollars" and you whisper "omniscient robots" again and they are enlightened. And then you announce the deal and Broadcom's stock adds $150 billion of market capitalization and you're like "see" and they're like "yes" and you're like "omniscient robots" and they're like "I know right." That is the financing tool! In some loose postmodern sense, OpenAl has borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars from Broadcom. You can buy hundreds of billions of dollars of equipment to build the robots to sell for money to pay for the equipment, because you've gotten everyone to believe. Because you've gotten everyone to believe. Again I think back to my Enron experience, when I was surrounded by smart-if-evil Ivy League trained investment bankers who simply could not fathom that anyone would question the ability of this high flying company to spin deregulated power grids into gold. Enron got everyone to believe. But the veil eventually was pierced, and the collapse was swift.
October 15, 2025 at 3:57 PM
gwbstr.com
(quoted image from this seemingly well-sourced piece www.ft.com/content/fbc5...)
A second senior US official said Beijing was using the US commerce department action, which was introduced in late September, as a "total pretext" to proceed with a policy that had been in the works for some time. "They could not pull something so elaborate together in two weeks," he said, referring to Beijing's rare-earth export controls. "The thing that was surprising is that they would do something that was so disproportionate. We are trying to stay proportional. They are not."
October 14, 2025 at 10:01 PM
gwbstr.com
WSJ reporters playing the role of pundit here. Is it a tacit admission? Is coverage an offramp? Could US have overplayed its hand with 50% rule? Not within the scope of this particular puting expedition.
China's Ministry of Commerce issued a response Sunday that notably lacked any specific threats of retaliation against the new tariff threat from the U.S. Instead, the ministry promised to implement the new export controls in a "prudential and oderate manner"—a tacit admission that Beijing has overplayed its hand. "China's export controls are not export bans," the ministry said, while adding the new rule was intended to target military end-uses, not the broader civilian applications that have rattled global markets. "All applications for compliant export for civil use can get approval, so that relevant businesses have no need to worry," it said. Further evidence of Beijing's desire to lower the temperature can be seen in its domestic media, where Trump's recent threat of 100% tariffs on Chinese goods has received minimal coverage. By avoiding inflammatory rhetoric, China is building itself an off-ramp to move the policy away from a blanket ban without losing face.
October 14, 2025 at 9:52 PM
gwbstr.com
You can file this under reasons the Internet used to be better.
A screenshot of the NYT home page in an Internet Wayback Machine capture from 2016. Bylines appear below each headline, including opinion pieces.
October 14, 2025 at 4:04 PM
gwbstr.com
So here is an example of why I'm not sharing video purportedly from the scene of federal immigration/repression activities unless it's been authenticated. The first post (which is still up) has 4.5k reposts. The user understands that it is wrong or misleading but left it up. 1/
A screenshot of a bsky post saying "This Portland police officer stood up for his community against ICE agents trying to drive into a crowd of protesters. "You WILL be arrested." An accompanying video has a similar caption. The text and video are crossed out in red. A follow up post from the same bsky user "A Goddess has NO KING" saying: "UPDATE: It looks like the people in the car may not be ICE but some other trouble makers. The caption on the original video is misleading. I'll turn off comments now, but still grateful for any law enforcement willing to stand up for their community's constitutional right to protest." This post has 39 reshares.
October 7, 2025 at 9:19 PM
gwbstr.com
Signing off early for the weekend. Here are some #filmphotography pictures from walks around Tokyo in August. Remember to look away from the screens.

#ilfordpanf #ilfordhp5 #中目黒 #渋谷 #豪徳寺 #東急世田谷線
October 3, 2025 at 4:45 PM
gwbstr.com
I'm pretty sure this Caixin diagram of the TikTok deal is wrong, at least in that it fails to include Bytedance Ltd. as owner of TikTok Ltd. Who knows about the rest.
October 2, 2025 at 5:07 PM
gwbstr.com
Hear me out. We can’t commit to defend you now, while you have the goose that lays the golden egg. It’s just—we can’t! We’d be totally devastated without them eggs. So listen, here’s the deal. You split the goose in two, and teach us how to breed more, and I promise we’ll say we’ll protect you.
To close the deal with Taiwan, Lutnick suggested that the US would offer "some kind of security guarantee" so that "they can expect" that moving their supply chain into the US won't eliminate Taiwan's so-called "silicon shield," where countries like the US are willing to protect Taiwan because "we need their silicon, their chips, so badly." According to Lutnick, Taiwan can also be assured through the deal that the US will remain "fundamentally reliant" upon Taiwan, as the producer of the other 50 percent of chips.
September 30, 2025 at 4:24 AM
gwbstr.com
Quietly it comes to pass that it's called the department of war, with no clarification, despite the fact that it is not the 1940s (or is it)
It's a risky strategy for Anthropic, which has only recently emerged as an Al power player and is one of the few major companies criticizing Trump. Its chatbot is taking off with coders and developers, and its work with the Department of War includes collaboration with the National Security Agency and a lucrative partnership announced in July.
September 24, 2025 at 4:23 PM
gwbstr.com
Trump: "We made progress on many very important issues including … the approval of the TikTok Deal. … we will be speaking again by phone, appreciate the TikTok approval, and both look forward to meeting at APEC!"

"appreciate the TikTok approval" could be re a completed or future/desired event. 2/
I just completed a very productive call with President Xi of China. We made progress on many very important issues including Trade, Fentanyl, the need to bring the War between Russia and Ukraine to an end, and the approval of the TikTok Deal. I also agreed with President Xi that we would meet at the APEC Summit in South Korea, that I would go to China in the early part of next year, and that President Xi would, likewise, come to the United States at an appropriate time. The call was a very good one, we will be speaking again by phone, appreciate the TikTok approval, and both look forward to meeting at APEC!
September 19, 2025 at 3:51 PM
gwbstr.com
Folks are reporting and commenting that Trump says Xi approved a TikTok deal. I'm not so sure. I think it's intentionally ambiguous, and probably suggests it's not done.

Here's AP's gloss. 1/
Trump says on his social media site that he made progress on trade, TikTok and Russia's war in Ukraine in his Friday call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Trump said he and Xi will meet in person on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea that runs from Oct. 31 to Nov. 1. Trump also said he would visit China "in the early part of next year, and that President Xi would, likewise, come to the United States at an appropriate time." Trump's post suggested that Xi had approved the proposed TikTok deal but he provided no details.
September 19, 2025 at 3:47 PM
gwbstr.com
Pretty confusing to work through what might happen re “the algorithm,” which of course is not one thing.

“US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent said the spun off app would be controlled by American investors but preserve some ’Chinese characteristics’”
It remains unclear to what extent TikTok's Chinese parent would retain control of the algorithm in the US as part of a licensing deal. An Asia-based investor of ByteDance said the new US TikTok entity would use at least part of the Chinese algorithm but train it in the US on American user data. "Beijing's bottom line is a licensing deal," said the investor. "Beijing wants to be seen as exporting Chinese technology to the US and the world." "It's the ultimate Taco trade," said one US adviser close to the deal, referring to the acronym "Trump always chickens out" "After all this, China keeps the algorithm."
September 17, 2025 at 1:52 PM
gwbstr.com
China bans tech companies from buying Nvidia AI chips www.ft.com/content/12ad...
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) told companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, this week to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia's tailor-made product for the country, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. Several companies had indicated they would order tens of thousands of the RTX Pro 6000D, and had started testing and verification work with Nvidia's server suppliers, the people said.
September 17, 2025 at 1:40 PM
gwbstr.com
From The Information’s Martin Peers.
In sheer revenue terms, TikTok America (as the company was to be called as of earlier this year) is likely to be second among social media firms to Meta in revenue, well ahead of other social media firms like Snap, Pinterest, X and Reddit. That’s based on our report in April that TikTok parent ByteDance’s international revenue—primarily TikTok—rose 63% to $39 billion in 2024. Even if TikTok only accounts for $30 billion of that, the U.S. version seems likely to be the majority of that.
September 17, 2025 at 1:29 AM
gwbstr.com
The demand side for very bad uses of machine learning is pretty fearsome.

www.politico.com/news/magazin... 1/2
“I’ve heard combatant commanders say, ‘Hey, I want someone who can take all the results from a war game and, when I’m in a [crisis] scenario, tell me what the solution is based on what the AI interpretation is,’” says Schneider, a self-described “geriatric millennial” and mother of two who, along with many of her university colleagues, is worried about how fast the shift to AI is happening. In the heat of a crisis, under pressure to move fast, her fear is that it will be easier for those commanders to accept an AI suggestion than to challenge it.
September 3, 2025 at 6:56 PM
gwbstr.com
Rahm Emanuel's novel both-sidesism*:
A: Tea Party and January 6
≈
B: Occupy Wall Street and *gasp* a lefty mayoral candidate

This to argue that both parties are weirdos and real enemy China is taking advantage.

*Don't worry, the next graf begins "To be sure…"
That shift came at a grave cost. By 2011, the country was beset by two movements defined almost exclusively by anger and resentment. Occupy Wall Street’s antipathy to capitalism fixed the sentiment now driving Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York mayor. The tea party simultaneously metastasized into the MAGA movement and the riots of Jan. 6, 2021. With real violence in the offing, politics are worse than they have been in decades.
September 3, 2025 at 3:50 AM
gwbstr.com
Also mentioned:
- alem.ai -- a project in Astana.
- Some language (see image) on Internet governance and cybercrime.
Member States, expressing concern about the growing risks in the field of information security, strongly oppose the militarisation of the information and communication technology sphere and the creation of threats to the security of critical information infrastructure. Member States consider it important to ensure equal rights for all countries to regulate the Internet and the sovereign right of states to manage it in their national segments. Reaffirming their intention to deepen cooperation in the field of international information security and to jointly combat the use of information and communication technologies for terrorist and other criminal purposes, the Member States emphasise the key role of the UN in countering threats in the information space. In this regard, they support the further development, on a voluntary basis, of universal norms in the field of international information security within the framework of the United Nations and call for efforts to sign the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime, as well as to improve mechanisms for combating information crime.
September 2, 2025 at 7:43 PM
gwbstr.com
AI bits from the Tianjin Declaration of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation states. Lots of attention to Xi-Modi-Putin, but Belarus, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikstan and Uzbekistan also members, 16 observers+partners.

Text assembled by Bert Hofman substack.com/home/post/p-...
Member States, building on the UN General Assembly Resolution on Strengthening International Cooperation in the Field of Artificial Intelligence Capacity Building, emphasise that all countries have equal rights to develop and use artificial intelligence. They noted their readiness to work together to prevent risks in order to continuously improve the security, accountability, reliability, transparency, inclusiveness, trustworthiness and fairness of artificial intelligence technologies for the benefit of all humanity. In this regard, they advocated for the implementation of the Roadmap for the Implementation of the SCO Member States' Cooperation Programme on Artificial Intelligence Development (Chengdu, 12 June 2025). The member states welcomed the UN General Assembly Resolution "The role of artificial intelligence in creating new opportunities for sustainable development in Central Asia" of 25 July 2025, which notes the initiative to establish a Regional Artificial Intelligence Centre in Dushanbe. Member States noted the proposals to establish mechanisms for cooperation in the field of artificial intelligence, as well as on advanced and breakthrough technologies of the SCO.
September 2, 2025 at 7:40 PM
gwbstr.com
So you don't have to, I listened to Trump on H20s, Blackwell chips, taking 15%, and some fairly confused and confusing indications of his understanding of what these things are. From his press conference today.
“This is an old chip that China already has and I deal with Jensen who’s a great guy at Nvidia. The chip that we’re talking about, the H20, it’s an old chip. China already has it in a different form, different name, but they have it, or they have a combination of two will make up for it and even then some. Jensen also has— Jensen’s a very brilliant guy. And Jensen also has a new chip, the Blackwell. Do you know what the Blackwell is? The Blackwell is super duper advanced. I wouldn’t make a deal with that, although it’s possible I’d make a deal, a somewhat enhanced in a negative way Blackwell, in other words take 30 percent to 50 percent off of it. But that’s the latest and the greatest in the world. Nobody has it. They won’t have it for five years, but the H20 is obsolete. You know it’s one of those things, but it still has a market. So I said listen I want 20 percent, if I’m gonna approve this for you, for the country, for our country, for the US— I don’t want it myself, you know every time I say like— 747, I want. I want, yeah, for the Air Force. So I just wanted— So when I say I want 20, I want for the country. I only care about the country, I don’t care about myself. And he said will you make it 15. So we negotiated a little deal. So he’s selling a essentially old chip that Huawei has a similar chip, a chip that does the same thing. And I said good if I’m going to give it to you, cause they have a, you know, they have a stopper, what we call a stopper, not allowed to do it, a restricted, it’s really known as a restrictive covenant. And I said if I’m going to do that I want you to pay us as a country something cause I’m giving you a release. I release them only on the H20. Now on the Blackwell, I think he’s coming to see me again about that. But that will be a un-enhanced version of the big one. Like I don’t know if you know we will sometimes sell fighter jets to a country and we’ll give them 20 percent less than we have, you know what I mean right?”
August 11, 2025 at 5:13 PM
gwbstr.com
Don’t agree? Check out this authoritative data from Notes.app
August 7, 2025 at 6:20 PM