Klon Kitchen
8.8K posts

Klon Kitchen
@klonkitchen
Tech & national security. @AEI Senior Fellow.



This story is actually insane: • dude drops $2000 on a DJI robot vacuum like a lunatic • refuses to use the normal app like a peasant • Sammy Azdoufal fires up Claude to crack the API so he can drive it with an xbox controller • Claude delivers the goods • pulls an auth token from their servers, connects successfully • except the system thinks he controls 7000 vacuums • checks again • yep, seven thousand • DJI built authentication with zero device ownership verification • any valid token works for any unit on the planet • Sammy now has eyes inside homes across 24 countries • live vacuum camera feeds everywhere • full floor plans from the mapping data • some guy in germany eating cereal at 3am, unaware his roomba is snitching • one API call away from being the most informed burglar in history • all he wanted was to steer his vacuum with a joystick • does the right thing and reports it • DJI fixes it in two days • back to normal life with his stupidly expensive floor cleaner • IoT companies stay undefeated at shipping garbage security

Fight Unfair.





The gap between “technical” and “non-technical” observers of what is happening with AI and chips right now is growing extremely quickly. You really need to have a decent systems-level grasp of the interplay between hardware, software, and energy to understand anything meaningful about where the world is going, how to evaluate China’s progress in any one of these fields, how new breakthroughs will affect the geopolitical balance of power between the United States and China, or how the Trump administration is preparing for these changes. It’s not as simple as counting who has more chips or better-performing AI models. Tracking only one of these variables in isolation would be like trying to understand the rise of coal, shipbuilding, or British-French rivalry in the 19th century without looking at either of the other two variables. The single most important thing for a “non-technical” foreign policy analyst to understand in February 2026 is this: China’s “frugal” AI models aren’t necessarily going to beat U.S. competitors at the frontier. Huawei’s chips still suck, and they can’t make enough of them. But China is succeeding in doing “more” with “less” in a very big, world-reconfiguring way. Companies like Zhipu (Z. ai)—a much, MUCH better version of DeepSeek—have raised the “floor” for AI and a whole suite of related technologies. Their models are not as smooth to use as Claude or ChatGPT. They use “limited attention”—literally less memory. They’re hard-coded with Xi Jinping Thought are probably full of security vulnerabilities, and are trained to censor political output. But they can do 80% of the job of most white-collar professionals in the world today—while consuming much less energy—and up to a third of San Francisco is using them to write computer code: aei.org/foreign-and-de… We @AEIfdp will be releasing some work in the coming weeks designed to upskill the conversation on this issue in Washington. But I am begging foreign policy talking heads to move away from “Whose models are performing the best?” and “Who’s making the most chips?” As AI transitions from a technical capability into an enterprise commodity, the conversation will increasingly be about its distribution and cost-competitiveness. Just as cloud computing became the backbone of global Internet infrastructure, inference compute and energy availability will fuel AI’s adoption and become an essential element of national sovereignty and power. A parallel competition will unfold to fully leverage AI for scientific discovery. If deployment is a horizontal race, this one is probably more vertical. It will require centralizing copious amounts of data, compute, and energy to unlock rungs in a progressively unfolding technology tree—and the qualitative, strategic advantages they might confer upon societies and militaries. There are reasons to think either China or the United States is better-positioned to “win” in either dimension of this competition—but they extend far beyond the metrics many analysts today are conversant in. Pay attention to the South Korean memory chip market. Pay attention to alternate, “sparse-attention” model architectures and token efficiency. Pay attention to grid install capacity and interconnection delays. And pay attention to data availability and grid reliability. These will become increasingly relevant determinants of national power as the 2020s continue to unfold.

Today we’re announcing the AI Grand Prix. The fully autonomous drone racing competition inviting the boldest engineers from around the globe to compete for $500,000 and a job at Anduril. No human pilots. No hardware mods. Identical @neros_tech drones. Software is the only path to victory. If you win, it’s because your autonomy stack is better. Full stop. Season 1 kicks off this spring, leading up to the AI Grand Prix Ohio.




