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TWiT 1093: California Sober - Kimi K3, Qwen3.8, & China's Open-Weight AI Gambit
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Project Golden Eagle: White House Control of Frontier AI Releases
At 1:00:10 · chapter starts 59:40
Leo describes Project Golden Eagle — the Trump administration program that would give the government a 30-day window to review and approve new frontier AI model releases before public availability. The frontier labs are reportedly going along with it. Harper Reed is skeptical: having worked for the Obama administration, he jokingly suggests he'd never get access to any approved models. More seriously, he argues that US government actions around AI are driven by shareholder value and political interest, not safety — drawing an analogy to COVID response failures and school shooting non-action. Alex Wilhelm expresses disappointment that what seemed like a 'free-range AI' administration has ended up in the same place as a more regulatory one — government control over model access.
China's open-weight AI strategy isn't careless — it's deliberate soft power, the digital equivalent of the Belt and Road initiative. Countries building massive data centers in the Middle East will choose models they can customize to their own values. American closed-source models won't even be in the running.
The US government is positioning itself to greenlight which companies can access frontier AI models before release, under the voluntary Project Golden Eagle. The panel sees this as driven less by safety and more by political and financial interests — a Faustian deal the frontier labs are embracing.
