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Ben Buchanan, now at SAIS, served in the Biden White House in many guises, including as a special advisor on AI. He’s also the author of three books and was an Oxford quarterback. He joins ChinaTalk to discuss how AI is reshaping U.S. national security.

We discuss:

• How AI quietly became a national security revolution — scaling laws, compute, and the small team in Biden’s White House that moved early on export controls before the rest of the world grasped what was coming,

• Why America could win the AI frontier and still lose the war if the Pentagon can’t integrate frontier models into real-world operations as fast as adversaries — the “tank analogy” of inventing the tech but failing at operational adoption,

• The need for a “Rickover of AI” and whether Washington’s bureaucracy can absorb private-sector innovation into defense and intelligence workflows,

• How AI is transforming cyber operations — from automating zero-day discovery to accelerating intrusions,

• Why technical understanding — not passion or lobbying — still moves policy in areas like chips and AI, and how bureaucratic process protects and constrains national security decision-making,

• How compute leadership buys the U.S. time, not safety, and why that advantage evaporates without building energy capacity, enforcement capacity, and world-class adoption inside the government.

Listen now in your favorite podcast app.

The Biden Administration’s AI Strategy — A Retrospective

Jordan Schneider: We’re recording this in late 2025, and it’s been a long road. What moments, trends, or events stand out to you looking back at AI and policymaking since you joined the Biden administration?

Ben Buchanan: The biggest thing is that many hypotheses I held when we arrived at the White House in 2021 — hypotheses I believed were sound but couldn’t prove to anyone — have come true. This applies particularly to the importance of AI for national security and the centrality of computing power to AI development.

You could have drawn reasonable inferences about these things in 2021: AI would affect cyber operations, shape U.S.-China competition, and continue improving as computing power scaled these systems. That wasn’t proven in any meaningful way back then. But sitting here in 2025, it feels validated, and most ...