KC

Kyle Chan

Things Kyle Says on Podcasts

“There's even a sort of ideological foundation to all this. The vision of AGI is so deeply embedded in the American AI community and Silicon Valley culture that I think there's a risk of disconnect within the US between those in the labs like Anthropic and those outside, who are like, why are we building these giant metal boxes in our backyards? Part of it is this long-standing obsession in the American AI imagination with getting to the machine God.” — Kyle Chan, Decoder with Nilay Patel “For those who have done long-term research on China, it looks like a much messier picture than any of these portrayals, especially from those in Silicon Valley who juxtapose China against this annoyingly messy and unruly democracy. The Chinese system is full of conflicting interests, rife with corruption. Sometimes Beijing gives a signal and local governments run that way, and then Beijing is like, no, other way. To anyone in Silicon Valley making this neat argument, all I can say is: go talk to people in China. They can tell you how messy it is on the ground.” — Kyle Chan, Decoder with Nilay Patel “They kind of shot themselves in the foot on this one. From Beijing's perspective, they don't want to see more export controls. But now, because of this potential Chinese spy, they've tainted the one man who has been advocating the most for loosening export controls. It has really galvanized the Democrats who have been criticizing the Trump administration about not being tougher on these export controls.” — Kyle Chan, Decoder with Nilay Patel

Where to Find Them

Kyle Chan has been a guest on Decoder with Nilay Patel .

Recently: “Jensen Huang is out. What did China want from him?” on Decoder with Nilay Patel (November 2026).

What They Said

“There's even a sort of ideological foundation to all this. The vision of AGI is so deeply embedded in the American AI community and Silicon Valley culture that I think there's a risk of disconnect within the US between those in the labs like Anthropic and those outside, who are like, why are we building these giant metal boxes in our backyards? Part of it is this long-standing obsession in the American AI imagination with getting to the machine God.” — Kyle Chan, Decoder with Nilay Patel

Nilay Patel had said China is pursuing the spread of good-enough models while American labs chase AGI. Kyle Chan widens that into a point about a gap between AI insiders and the public in the US.

Decoder with Nilay Patel · 2026-11-12 Permalink → Listen →
Decoder with Nilay Patel Around 17:15 into the episode
Speaker 4

…trying to not fall too far behind the U.S., but really focus a lot more on trying to get, especially these open source models out there across the Chinese economy and globally as well. And to that extent, on that metric, they seem to be doing pretty well. That to me always has seemed like the real

Speaker 3

…compete in that dynamic, right? Where you have one very managed economy that has set a much more near-term and potentially achievable goal. And then, you know, our market system, where the incentives of the leading market players have nothing to do with the economic incentives of the rest of us.

Speaker 4

There's even a sort of ideological foundation to all this because the vision of AGI is one that is like so deeply embedded right now in the American AI community and sort of Silicon Valley culture that I think there's a risk of potential disconnect, not just between the US and China on this issue, but within the US between those who are in the labs like Anthropic and those who are outside, who are like, why are we building these giant metal boxes in our backyards? Like, we don't really see the point of this. So there's already that divergence there. And I think part of it is this long-standing obsession in the American sort of AI imagination with getting to the machine God, essentially.

Speaker 3

Bringing that all back to the context of NVIDIA, Jensen Wang, Alice Wang, Megaspeed, Megaspeed is a data center provider in Southeast Asia. That's theoretically their business. They're building data centers, they're buying these chips. Shouldn't market forces just end this, right? Like the United…

Speaker 4

an interesting question because there is ultimately market demand in China still for these NVIDIA chips. And there is a divergence here between the companies in China who still want NVIDIA chips, who still want access to them, and the government who is like, no, no, no, why don't you try Chinese…

Speaker 3

Or by the influence of an alleged spy. Right. This is what I, because in

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“For those who have done long-term research on China, it looks like a much messier picture than any of these portrayals, especially from those in Silicon Valley who juxtapose China against this annoyingly messy and unruly democracy. The Chinese system is full of conflicting interests, rife with corruption. Sometimes Beijing gives a signal and local governments run that way, and then Beijing is like, no, other way. To anyone in Silicon Valley making this neat argument, all I can say is: go talk to people in China. They can tell you how messy it is on the ground.” — Kyle Chan, Decoder with Nilay Patel

Nilay Patel asked about the cliché that China is directed and plans for a hundred years while the US is chaotic. Kyle Chan rejects it, and says the Nvidia and Megaspeed episode shows Beijing can fumble too.

Decoder with Nilay Patel · 2026-11-12 Permalink → Listen →
Decoder with Nilay Patel Around 33:47 into the episode
Speaker 4

…if a Chinese company acquires a stake in a U.S. or European company, what does that mean? Does that mean they're trying to obtain the technology, or is that like a regular commercial deal? That's where it starts to get more difficult to parse. And you'd have to look at it at a case-by-case basis.

Speaker 3

…system is directed. They make 100-year plans, not one-quarter plan. Like we've heard it, everyone knows these clichés. How true is that? Right? I mean, like in this case alone, it doesn't seem like they achieve the goal of their plan. In many cases, they might have actually set themselves back.

Speaker 4

Oh, yeah. I mean, for those who actually study China, who have done long-term research on this country and who understand it more closely, it looks like a much messier picture than any of these portrayals, especially from those in Silicon Valley who try to juxtapose China against what they find to be this kind of annoyingly messy and unruly democracy. Like the Chinese system, both within the government and then across industries and government, is full of conflicting interests, rife with corruption. There are lots of times where you have bureaucratic turf wars that spill out into the open. You have missteps, ones that can backfire profoundly. So you see that all the time. You see the local governments not following what Beijing wants or following what Beijing wants, but in the wrong direction, right? Sometimes they're given a signal and they're like, oh, okay, we got to run that way. And then Beijing is like, no, no, no, no, no, other way, other way. So yeah, this happens all the time. And I think, you know, to anyone in Silicon Valley who's trying to make this neat argument, all I can say is like, go talk to people in China. They can tell you how messy it is actually on the ground.

Speaker 3

Kyle, this isn't great. What do you think happens next year? What should people be looking out for?

Speaker 4

I think the biggest thing is a congressional investigation and who's behind that, what that surface is. And then potentially along with that, these pending bills around export controls and whether those will now get more momentum to pass in Congress and whether Trump himself, the White House in…

Speaker 3

I suspect we're going to want to talk to you again as this process plays out. Thank you so much, Kyle, for being on Decoder.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“They kind of shot themselves in the foot on this one. From Beijing's perspective, they don't want to see more export controls. But now, because of this potential Chinese spy, they've tainted the one man who has been advocating the most for loosening export controls. It has really galvanized the Democrats who have been criticizing the Trump administration about not being tougher on these export controls.” — Kyle Chan, Decoder with Nilay Patel

Nilay Patel asked what China could have hoped to gain, given that the spy story destabilized the American AI economy. Kyle Chan, a Brookings China Center fellow, says the scandal may backfire on Beijing's own goals.

Decoder with Nilay Patel · 2026-11-12 Permalink → Listen →
Decoder with Nilay Patel Around 28:02 into the episode
Speaker 4

…right now, a lot of people are just more wondering, you know, nuts and bolts: is this technology going to cost me my job tomorrow? You know, is it actually useful? Is it impacting my university studies? Those are things that maybe are more sort of impactful day to day for most ordinary Americans.

Speaker 3

…man. What truly would the Chinese government hope to gain from that? Because in one way, they've actually achieved a victory here, right? They've destabilized the American AI economy, but it doesn't seem like that was the goal. Like they're furiously denying that any of this even happened. There

Speaker 4

is another sort of very kind of intuitive take, which is they kind of shot themselves in the foot on this one. So from Beijing's perspective, right, they don't want to see more export controls. They might want to see a loosening. But now they, because of this potential Chinese spy, now they've kind of tainted the one man who has been advocating the most for loosening export controls. In some ways, now they've like taken out someone who had otherwise, for sort of like sheer commercial reasons, been like more aligned. And who's going to take that place? And if anything, now it has really charged, especially the Democrats who have been criticizing the Trump administration about not being tougher on these expert controls. It has really galvanized the Democrats on this front and made it more of an issue, perhaps than it was before.

Speaker 3

Especially when you connect it to corruption and the AI industry wasting money. It's all there for them. Tell me more broadly about Chinese spying in the AI industry. There was a report, I don't know, a few months ago, that OpenAI was warning its employees that spies abound, that if suddenly…

Speaker 4

All I can say here is that they are juicy targets, right? So the US AI labs, anyone who's involved with sort of like cutting-edge frontier AI or AI chip production, chip design, they would be juicy targets for Chinese intelligence gathering because this is something where China is trying to catch…

Speaker 3

Meanwhile, they're putting all their information into Slack and getting breached on the daily. Who knows these warnings are taking off. Last set of questions here. I'm thinking about Apple and Tesla, where we moved our manufacturing to China. We moved our supply chains to China, the Chinese…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

Collections They Appear In

Tech Strategy & Big Tech