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

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?

Dean Ball on AI, power and geopolitics

Dean Ball is one of the most influential thinkers in AI policy right now — principal author of the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, author of the widely-read Substack Hyperdimensional, and until very recently a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. STW grabbed him just before he started a new role at OpenAI, which made for some propitious timing. The conversation covers a lot of ground. Dean gives his views on two ideas floated by his new boss Sam Altman in the hours before recording: a global governance body for AI standards, and reports that Altman has been in talks with the Trump administration about giving the US government a stake in OpenAI. He also talks about his broader outlook on AI and power — including the argument that the level of AI capability in government hands shouldn’t get too far out of proportion to what’s available to everyone else. Dean discusses the role of safeguards on frontier models, and makes the case for independent third-party auditors sitting between governments and AI companies as a check on both risk and excessive concentrations of power. He covers the opportunities for middle powers like Australia in data centres and rare earths, the realities of US incentives to withhold its most powerful capabilities even from trusted allies, and the evolution of institutions in an AI age — a topic he’s writing a book on. He finishes on a note of cautious optimism. It’ll be worth watching how his thinking evolves from inside OpenAI. Hyperdimensional: Hyperdimensional | Dean W. Ball | Substack [https://www.hyperdimensional.co/] FT Op-Ed [https://www.ft.com/content/0c2e1077-f658-4b3d-9040-602615c961ca] by Sam Altman

Middle power ‘coalitions of the capable’, with Canada’s ex-head of defence strategy Raquel Garbers

How should middle powers such as Australia and Canada maximise their strategic clout in an age of increasingly assertive great powers? Raquel Garbers spent nearly three decades in Canadian defence, security and intelligence, including a stint as Director General for Strategic Defence Policy at the Canadian Department of National Defence, where she served as the principal architect of Canada’s defence policy. As an ASPI Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Raquel brought that experience to last week’s ASPI Defence Conference, where she made a memorable contribution on the role of middle powers in an age of uncertainty. Raquel has watched up close what Donald Trump has meant for the US-Canada relationship. But she's clear-eyed about the limits of what democratic middle powers can achieve without US alignment, and unsentimental about the fact that great powers are great powers. Her answer to that challenge is what she calls "coalitions of the capable": flexible, fast and fierce groupings of like-minded states that can maximise their collective agency. It's a realistic and pragmatic framework for navigating a world that looks very different from the one the post-war order was built for—and a conversation that reflects the enormous importance of these questions for the fates of middle powers such as Australia.

Special episode: ASPI’s report on improving intelligence delivery for the AI age

Do intelligence agencies need to rethink how they deliver assessments to political leaders in the AI age? That's the question at the heart of a new ASPI report, ‘Reading the Room: Redesigning Intelligence Product for the AI Age’. Today STW sits down with its author to dig into the issue. ASPI senior fellow Chris Taylor joins FiveCast co-founder Duane Rivett—whose firm provides open-source intelligence to the security community—to talk through what needs to change and why. The report argues that while Australia's intelligence community has invested heavily in collection with strong results, the way assessments are delivered to decision-makers hasn't kept pace. The conversation covers changing information consumption habits across generations; how AI can adapt and even personalise intelligence products for different leaders and officials; the prospect of intelligence chatbots that can answer policymakers' questions in real time; and the enduring importance of human expert judgement. They also address the risks: losing nuance in a business defined by uncertainty, and the accountability gap when a machine — like a self-driving car — can't be held liable for getting it wrong. Read the report, ‘Reading the Room: Redesigning Intelligence Product for the AI Age’ [https://www.aspi.org.au/report/reading-the-room/].

On technological swords and shields, with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s Nicole Giles

Nicole Giles is Deputy Director of Policy and Partnerships at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service—and she visited ASPI in Canberra to talk through what she calls the three Vs: the velocity, variety, and volume of threats facing Canada and its allies right now. AI-accelerated disinformation that once took weeks to develop can now be deployed in seconds. Violent extremism investigations that once unfolded over months now move from online radicalisation to potential threat action in days. And the sheer number of actors and threat types is growing. Nicole covers foreign interference and election meddling, economic security and IP theft, the rise of youth involvement in extremism, and a disturbing new category CSIS has had to formally define, nihilistic violent extremism—groups like the Maniac Murder Cult and 764, whose goal is simply violent chaos. She also talks about the “swords and shields” of AI for intelligence agencies, and why Five Eyes cooperation—including a specific Australia-Canada collaboration on over-the-horizon radar—is more important than ever. CSIS's annual report is, as STW notes, a good read, and Nicole is a compelling example of why public engagement has become a national security strategy in itself. Read the CSIS annual Public Report 2025 here [https://www.canada.ca/en/security-intelligence-service/corporate/publications/csis-public-report-2025.html].