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This is the third piece in a series exploring key semiconductor manufacturing equipment that China needs to indigenously produce high-bandwidth memory (HBM), perhaps the most important bottleneck in its efforts to make AI chips. The first piece was on adv

Economics Ph.D. student at Yale, working on AI, Innovation, History, Growth.

Why are US AI models consistently topping benchmark scores while Chinese ones are about 4-6 months behind? One factor may be that Chinese AI companies have raised far less funding than their US counterparts. To understand this gap, we compiled funding dat

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Claude Mythos marked a step change in the cyber capabilities of AI models. A Mozilla executive called Mythos "as capable as the world's best security researchers". Epoch AI's analysis of cyber benchmarks shows Mythos about seven months ahead of what prior

Front end end errors are a primary driver of denials. The Substrate Eligibility Agent can help remediate them.

It's now well reported that on June 12, 2026, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent Anthropic a letter requiring a license to export its Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5 models to any foreign national, located abroad or in the United States.1 The le

This post was written in collaboration between the AI Futures Project and The Substrate and cross-posted to both.Restrictions on photolithography machines are a crucial bottleneck for China's AI chip efforts. To get around them, China needs to replicate s

Pivotal Research Fellow, Research Fellow at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS), PhD student at Masaryk University

In a nutshellThis post provides an overview of domestic Chinese AI chip1 making, from design to manufacturing to packaging, explaining key terms and concepts as they come up. The Chinese government has for many years given top priority to, and invested he