Sen. Slotkin on NDAA, AI Nukes, Chinese Cars, and Taiwan

About this episode

Senator Elissa Slotkin discusses the NDAA, AI regulations, and bipartisan efforts regarding Chinese vehicles and Taiwan.

The NDAA is two thousand pages of strategy, pork, and the occasional genuinely big idea — this year including a new robotics combatant command and the first legislated guardrails on AI in the kill chain. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who served in OSD Policy and three terms in the House before joining the Senate Armed Services Committee, joins ChinaTalk to break down what got in, what got voted down, and why markup days are the only two days a year the Senate acts like a functioning institution. We discuss… Why NDAA markup is the Senate's best two days of the year — and what it would take to make the rest of the institution work like that, The AI Guardrails Act, the Anthropic debate, and why no one SecDef or AI company should set the rules for the kill chain, Her bipartisan bill with Bernie Moreno banning Chinese connected vehicles — and the BYDs now streaming over the Canadian border, Why Michiganders care deeply about China but not (yet) about Taiwan, The Democratic playbook if the party flips a chamber in November, Data ownership, the Midwest's data center revolt, and why a healthy democracy would be talking about AI every single day. song…

People in this episode

Host: Jordan Schneider

Guest: Elissa Slotkin

Topics covered

• NDAA
• AI
• Chinese Cars
• Taiwan
• Bipartisan Legislation
• Data Ownership
• Democracy

Keywords

• NDAA
• AI Guardrails Act
• Chinese Cars
• Taiwan
• Bipartisan Bill
• Data Ownership
• Democracy

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: OSD Policy, Anthropic, BYD

Places: Michigan, Taiwan, Canada

More episodes of ChinaTalk

• ModelTalk: Claude Fable (Nathan's pissed), is AI actually productive, advice for graduates · June 12, 2026 · 56 min
• Paul Kennedy on Great Powers, Past and Present · June 8, 2026 · 1h 19m
• WarTalk: The View from AFRICOM with LTG Brennan · June 5, 2026 · 1h 3m
• The Pope has AI Takes · June 1, 2026 · 51 min
• WarTalk: NatSec in Congress + AI Evals for War · May 29, 2026 · 49 min
• Arizona's Abundance Playbook · May 28, 2026 · 59 min