Gabrielius Landsbergis on Ukraine, Russia, authoritarianism and the future of democracy

Gabrielius Landsbergis on Ukraine, Russia, authoritarianism and the future of democracy

As foreign minister of Lithuania from 2020 to 2024, few people had the front row seat of Gabrielius Landsbergis to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Trump’s return to the White House and Europe’s response to both. Since leaving office, he has become one of Europe’s clearest and most forceful champions for democratic values, for support for Ukraine, and for resisting the aggression of Russia and the risks posed by other authoritarian nations, including China. This interview comes at a time that Ukraine is showing signs of regaining the upper hand on the battlefield and increasing discussions about the possibility of the US administration providing patriot system licenses to Ukraine. Gabrielius talks to Dave about whether Putin’s grip on power is as secure as it appears. Gabrielius is not for waiting though, assessing that it is too risky for Europe to rely on Russia losing, the US making the decisive difference or NATO 3.0 taking shape. Instead, Gabrielius has an innovative solution that would create a genuine coalition of the ‘willing-and-able’. Gabrielius also talks about why China has largely escaped meaningful consequences for backing Russia’s war effort. He discusses the implications of the Iran war on US credibility as a global leader for the world order that Gabrielius believes must be defended by all those who believe in democratic values and principles.

CNAS’s Janet Egan on AI security and Australia’s big opportunity

Janet Egan is a senior fellow and deputy director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, and one of the most respected thinkers on AI and national security — globally and from an Australian perspective. She joins STW at the perfect moment after PM Anthony Albanese’s AI speech and the big news about OpenAI’s agents going rogue. The conversation opens with the OpenAI hack of online AI repository Hugging Face—which Janet calls a very big deal—and works through the implications for cybersecurity attackers and defenders. She addresses the argument that safeguards on frontier models are restricting their use and handing an advantage to China, weighs the merits of open source and open weight models, and reads the clues in Xi Jinping's recent AI speech about China's current strategy. The conversation then turns to Australia. Janet offers her assessment of Albanese's AI speech and examines the case for Australia to build data centres capable of training frontier models like Claude, GPT and Gemini. She covers the fraught AI copyright debate before finishing with thoughts on global AI governance and the prospects for US-China cooperation to reduce the most catastrophic risks.

Taiwan in the bullseye of China’s AI-charged info warfare. With You-Hao Lai of DSET

Taiwan is the target of more information operation attacks than anywhere else on earth, most of them originating in mainland China and aimed at dividing Taiwanese society and eroding the resolve to resist Beijing. AI is supercharging that barrage. And to tell us about the impact and how Taiwan is fighting back, we’ve spoken with You-Hao Lai, a researcher at Taiwan's Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology. You-Hao starts by giving us his takeaways on Chinese leader Xi Jinping's keynote at China's global AI conference, including on Beijing's push to ensure that the world embeds Chinese technology, with Chinese standards, into its systems rather than American alternatives. He then covers the ways that AI is transforming China's information operations: the scale, speed and sophistication of the attacks, the narratives deployed, the strategic purpose behind them, and documented cases that illustrate how rapidly things are evolving.  You-Hao then walks through Taiwan's whole-of-nation response, organised around “four Cs”—cutting, clarifying, curbing and cultivating—a framework that reflects years of hard-won experience building national resilience against a relentless and well-resourced adversary. There are real lessons here for the rest of us.

The Great Escape: OpenAI models go rogue and China pressured at ASEAN. With David Wroe & Justin Bassi

Leading artificial intelligence company OpenAI prompted commentators to dig deep into their bag of Hollywood sci-fi dystopia comparisons this week when it announced a pair of its frontier models had broken out of a secure test environment and hacked into online AI library Hugging Face.   Today, David Wroe and Justin Bassi pick out two of this week’s dizzying array of events that stretch from the Saudi-US nuclear deal to the South China Sea, and dissect in detail the stunning OpenAI revelation and the pressure that China faced during the ASEAN foreign ministers’ meeting in Manila, Philippines.   No one got hurt when the AI models went marauding in the real world, but the episode has jolted the tech industry, governments and the public. Questions are now flying about regulation, safety and global governance as leading AI labs in the United States and China race to get ahead with the most powerful models. The twist in the tale is that Hugging Face had to use an open-source Chinese model to defend itself against the rogue AI agent attack, prompting opponents of AI regulation in the US to demand fewer restrictions on their own models, and AI safety experts to sharpen their calls for the two tech superpowers to talk earnestly about common safeguards.   Meanwhile, Australia announced it would provide drones to the Philippines for maritime security amid China’s latest efforts to squeeze the Southeast Asian nation in the South China Sea. Foreign Minister Penny Wong visited the Philippines Coast Guard headquarters where she blasted China’s “destabilising and dangerous conduct” at sea.

Frontier AI, cyber and tech contest with China, with Mike Kuiken, Michael Sulmeyer and Sophie Mayo

Can Australia count on continued access to the most advanced frontier AI models from the US? And if not, what should it do about it? That’s the starting point for a wide-ranging conversation with three American guests who bring deep expertise across cyber, AI and strategic competition. Michael Sulmeyer is Professor of the Practice at Georgetown University and until recently was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy. Mike Kuiken is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Vice Chair of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Sophie Mayo is a non-resident fellow at the United States Studies Centre and a research assistant at Georgetown’s Centre for Security and Emerging Technology. Together they cover Australia’s push to build large-scale AI data centres and whether that could generate real leverage in the global technology race; the cyber implications of powerful AI models and why old software, unpatched systems and critical infrastructure remain stubborn vulnerabilities even as AI gives defenders new tools; and China — whether the US still has a coherent strategy for competing with Beijing, and how AI is converging with biotech, quantum and other emerging technologies. The conversation also takes in AUKUS, the Australia-US alliance, export controls, venture capital and talent flows. These can sound like separate issues. STW’s guests make clear they’re really all part of the same question: how does Australia make itself useful, ambitious and strategically relevant in a much tougher technological era?