Morning edition — reporting checked through 6:05 a.m. ET, September 20, 2026.
Reuters correspondents Eduardo Baptista and Laurie Chen have a new On Assignment episode on China’s attempt to diffuse AI throughout the economy, rather than treating frontier-model leadership as the only scoreboard. It covers chip access, distillation, export controls and why “winning the AI race” changes with the chosen metric. Listen to “Inside China’s AI race,” released September 19
The episode is worth pairing with today’s negotiations because model quality, deployment scale and strategic dependence lead to different policy conclusions. China can trail on the most expensive frontier training run while gaining leverage through cheaper open models and widespread adoption. The podcast is reported context, not a technical audit of the systems it discusses.