Rational Security · The Lawfare Institute

The “Chestbursters Roasting on an Open Fire” Edition

December 17, 2025·1 hr 22 min·7 clips

A 25% kickback on NVIDIA's China chip sales may be unconstitutional and is definitely absurd.

Holiday scheduling comes first. Scott R. Anderson asks listeners to send topics and object lessons for the end-of-year episode by Sunday, December 21st. The banter stays dry. Sick children, canceled plans, positive tests, and newly discovered flu tests give the opening a tired domestic feel. The joke lands because it is blunt: if one never tests, one never tests positive. The panel treats that as a very American strategy. Then the conversation tightens. Should American AI systems, Chinese open-weight models, or American hardware become the default stack elsewhere? The answer avoids slogans. On software, one speaker says some countries may have a real reason to choose American models over Chinese ones. Saudi Arabia is the example. But that does not settle the chip question, because models can usually run on different hardware, depending on architecture and chips. Hardware is harder to pin down. The case attributed to NVIDIA or David Sachs is that American chips could pull users into an American hardware stack. The payoff is still vague, and that matters. The technical hinge is CUDA, NVIDIA's low-level systems language for getting performance out of GPUs. CUDA is the lock-in story. If everyone uses NVIDIA chips, they may also build around CUDA, which could matter later even if the argument leaves parts of that unsaid. AMD and Google are still in the mix, so the long-term importance of one stack stays unsettled. The episode closes with credits. Anderson signs off with Ari and Alan, says the show is going quiet until 2026 apart from the holiday special, and hands things back to the usual Lawfare machinery.

As heard by us

A technical, useful look at why AI power may depend as much on CUDA and chips as on models and alliances.

Rational Security takes a wonky AI policy question and makes it concrete: should Washington care more about other countries using American models, American chips, or the software stack that comes with them? Scott R.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A holiday check-in that turns into a careful argument about AI chips.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Rational Security