This is your US-China CyberPulse: Defense Updates podcast.

Hi listeners, Ting here—your cyber confidant and decoder of all things US-China CyberPulse! The headlines this week? Congress and the White House have been locked in a digital thunder dome while hackers and diplomats watch with popcorn in hand. I’ll dive straight into the whirlwind that’s been US cyber defense against Chinese threats, so buckle up.

Top of the drama chart: Congress just dropped the bipartisan No Adversarial AI Act. This bill aims to slap a hard ban on any AI tools developed by China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea from being used by the US government—unless it’s for critical missions. If you’re keeping score, the main target right now is DeepSeek, which the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party just called “a profound threat” to national security. The idea is to build a ‘federal firewall’ that’s so solid, even your grandma’s firewall would be jealous. Designated offices would now have to keep a public list of adversary-linked AI and make sure Uncle Sam stays clear. The message? If your AI says ni hao, dasvidaniya, or salām, it’s probably not welcome in the federal sandbox.

But plot twist! The Trump administration this week rolled back export restrictions on Nvidia, green-lighting the sale of H20 AI chips to China. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang confirmed the move, which basically hands DeepSeek exactly the kind of hardware it needs to power up. So on one hand, Congress is building sandbags against Chinese AI, and on the other, the executive branch just turned on the faucet. It’s cyber Jenga at the highest level.

While DC is playing ping pong, the State Department is playing Operation—badly. July 11 saw a wave of firings and the dissolution of its Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy. Strategic cyber diplomats like Liesyl Franz are out, gutting America’s global cyber diplomacy at a time when cross-border teamwork is basically oxygen for cyber defense. With a smaller team, the US will find it harder to unite international partners against next-gen threats, especially with China quietly offering itself to the world as a noninterventionist digital savior.

The FCC is also on the move with new proposals to secure submarine cables against foreign adversaries—think ‘presumption of denial’ for Chinese contractors, plus bans on “covered equipment” in this critical infrastructure. Since these cables ferry 99% of the world’s internet traffic, sabotage here would be digital armageddon.

Meanwhile, in the private sector, trust is becoming the main currency. US tech giants are still seen as independent from the government, which makes them more attractive to global customers than China’s state-linked firms. But if Washington steps too far into deploying offensive cyber or strong-arming industry, there’s a risk that the US image as a trusted cyber partner could take a hit, pushing other nations to consider “the Huawei option”—less cutting-edge, but no political strings attached.

Internationally, America is pivoting to tie up chip and compute capacity in the Gulf, hoping alliances with Saudi Arabia and the UAE will act as a buffer against Beijing’s digital expansion. But should the situation escalate in the Middle East—think a breakdown of the Israel-Iran ceasefire—all bets are off and critical projects could stall, rebalancing the entire tech landscape.

Thanks for tuning in to this week’s ride through the intersection of policy, tech, and global strategy! Don’t forget to subscribe and keep your firewalls up and your news feeds refreshed. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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