As @POTUS heads to #China, the agenda should go beyond trade and Iran. Three things he should raise: 1. Transnational repression - incl #Xijinping's links to CCP agents in the U.S. 2. Political prisoners with U.S. family. 3. Industrial scale AI distillation. Full details in my article below.

President Trump should make clear that negotiations will not proceed, and Xi’s visit to Washington will be postponed, without the release of several political prisoners, including Jimmy Lai, Pastor Jin, Gulshan Abbas, and others. My latest with @OliviaEnos in @dcexaminer

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice. You thought it was you. It is not you. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse. Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like. The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation. Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first. What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland. Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved. They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data. The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment." The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible. This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis. The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world. Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

Beijing’s global influence machinery is in overdrive, weaponizing overseas diaspora networks to systematically isolate Taiwan. A joint declaration issued by the Brazil Association for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China and the Brazilian Chinese Association—along with 67 other pro-Beijing immigrant organizations—has launched a fierce, coordinated attack against Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te. The statement fiercely condemns Lai’s recent inaugural address, accusing him of pushing a treacherous "two states" narrative, and aggressively declares that Taiwan remains an inalienable slice of Chinese territory. This sudden outburst from São Paulo is far from a spontaneous organic movement. It is a highly calculated, textbook manifestation of the Chinese Communist Party's United Front tactics. Beijing systematically utilizes these front organizations across the globe to parrot state propaganda, manufacture artificial international consensus, and stifle democratic self-determination from afar. The strategy reveals just how deeply the regime's tentacles reach into foreign civil societies. As the geopolitical chess match over the Taiwan Strait intensifies, Beijing is increasingly deploying its weaponized network of global proxy groups to enforce its political will and silence dissent on the world stage. #UnveiledChina #UnitedFront #TaiwanStrait #Geopolitics #ChinaPropaganda #LaiChingTe #GlobalInfluence #ForeignInterference

Absolutely not surprising but a limited leak of a Chinese local surveillance platform drawing off an apparently large national one has a special drop down for tracking for tracking foreign journalists in China… including me. @NetAskari found the data open.substack.com/pub/netask…

Before Air Force One left China, all members of the U.S. delegation threw away the souvenirs and gifts given to them by the Chinese side, including gifts, badges, brooches, souvenirs, and cell phones.

The old Chinese version is different from the English one strikes again!

This is hilarious. They have literally changed Rubio’s name to get around the fact that he remains sanctioned (and therefore barred from) China.

Well said. Taiwan is so valuable to the world and its people just as a thriving democracy and incredibly rich cultural place. But for those who feel this isn’t enough for the U.S. to protect it from the CCP’s encroachments, in the AI age its tech capacity and autonomy are vital.

Good.

President Trump should totally respond to Xi Jinping’s statement on Taiwan with his own non-negotiable T: transnational repression. Just today a jury convicted a Chinese agent of running an illegal police station in New York and monitoring dissidents while countering peaceful protesters like Falun Gong practitioners during a 2015 visit that Xi made to the US. Trump should just tell him this needs to stop. For more on why that’s not only principled but also strategic for the US see my latest article at UnderReported China.

Man who ran Chinese police station in NYC convicted. Pretty nice timing for a second big story on prosecution of a China agent - maybe it’ll help get transnational repression and CCP influence on the summit agenda after all. justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/bro…

Taiwan’s democracy is object of an intensive campaign of intimidation and encroachment by Beijing. This piece, with views from @cepa experts Jim Lewis @bueti @Sarah_G_Cook & me, puts the stakes for Taiwan and world into context at time of US-China summit firstpost.com/world/taiwan-b…

Absolutely. It shows the U.S. can have and use leverage when it wants. I’m sure whoever the official was who had to approve Rubio was gritting their teeth.

My latest in The Diplomat. A 7-Year-Old American Boy Is Trapped in China Because His Father Made Art, by @yangjianli001 open.substack.com/pub/jianli… In what can only be described as collective punishment, the young son of detained artist Gao Zhen is being prevented from returning home to the United States

Watch tomorrow's hearing starting at 10am(EST) on the @CECCgov YouTube Channel featuring @JanJekielek @SamuelBrownback @KalbinurSidik and @Eastofethan youtube.com/watch?v=UBtlQBYF…

“What to Watch at the US-China Summit”- @cepa insights on the Trump-Xi meeting from @bueti @Sarah_G_Cook Jim Lewis and me cepa.org/article/what-to-wat…