Leading artificial intelligence company OpenAI prompted commentators to dig deep into their bag of Hollywood sci-fi dystopia comparisons this week when it announced a pair of its frontier models had broken out of a secure test environment and hacked into online AI library Hugging Face. Today, David Wroe and Justin Bassi pick out two of this week’s dizzying array of events that stretch from the Saudi-US nuclear deal to the South China Sea, and dissect in detail the stunning OpenAI revelation and the pressure that China faced during the ASEAN foreign ministers’ meeting in Manila, Philippines. No one got hurt when the AI models went marauding in the real world, but the episode has jolted the tech industry, governments and the public. Questions are now flying about regulation, safety and global governance as leading AI labs in the United States and China race to get ahead with the most powerful models. The twist in the tale is that Hugging Face had to use an open-source Chinese model to defend itself against the rogue AI agent attack, prompting opponents of AI regulation in the US to demand fewer restrictions on their own models, and AI safety experts to sharpen their calls for the two tech superpowers to talk earnestly about common safeguards. Meanwhile, Australia announced it would provide drones to the Philippines for maritime security amid China’s latest efforts to squeeze the Southeast Asian nation in the South China Sea. Foreign Minister Penny Wong visited the Philippines Coast Guard headquarters where she blasted China’s “destabilising and dangerous conduct” at sea.

Can Australia count on continued access to the most advanced frontier AI models from the US? And if not, what should it do about it? That’s the starting point for a wide-ranging conversation with three American guests who bring deep expertise across cyber, AI and strategic competition. Michael Sulmeyer is Professor of the Practice at Georgetown University and until recently was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy. Mike Kuiken is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Vice Chair of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Sophie Mayo is a non-resident fellow at the United States Studies Centre and a research assistant at Georgetown’s Centre for Security and Emerging Technology. Together they cover Australia’s push to build large-scale AI data centres and whether that could generate real leverage in the global technology race; the cyber implications of powerful AI models and why old software, unpatched systems and critical infrastructure remain stubborn vulnerabilities even as AI gives defenders new tools; and China — whether the US still has a coherent strategy for competing with Beijing, and how AI is converging with biotech, quantum and other emerging technologies. The conversation also takes in AUKUS, the Australia-US alliance, export controls, venture capital and talent flows. These can sound like separate issues. STW’s guests make clear they’re really all part of the same question: how does Australia make itself useful, ambitious and strategically relevant in a much tougher technological era?

Dean Ball is one of the most influential thinkers in AI policy right now — principal author of the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, author of the widely-read Substack Hyperdimensional, and until very recently a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. STW grabbed him just before he started a new role at OpenAI, which made for some propitious timing. The conversation covers a lot of ground. Dean gives his views on two ideas floated by his new boss Sam Altman in the hours before recording: a global governance body for AI standards, and reports that Altman has been in talks with the Trump administration about giving the US government a stake in OpenAI. He also talks about his broader outlook on AI and power — including the argument that the level of AI capability in government hands shouldn’t get too far out of proportion to what’s available to everyone else. Dean discusses the role of safeguards on frontier models, and makes the case for independent third-party auditors sitting between governments and AI companies as a check on both risk and excessive concentrations of power. He covers the opportunities for middle powers like Australia in data centres and rare earths, the realities of US incentives to withhold its most powerful capabilities even from trusted allies, and the evolution of institutions in an AI age — a topic he’s writing a book on. He finishes on a note of cautious optimism. It’ll be worth watching how his thinking evolves from inside OpenAI. Hyperdimensional: Hyperdimensional | Dean W. Ball | SubstackFT Op-Ed by Sam Altman

How should middle powers such as Australia and Canada maximise their strategic clout in an age of increasingly assertive great powers?Raquel Garbers spent nearly three decades in Canadian defence, security and intelligence, including a stint as Director General for Strategic Defence Policy at the Canadian Department of National Defence, where she served as the principal architect of Canada’s defence policy. As an ASPI Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Raquel brought that experience to last week’s ASPI Defence Conference, where she made a memorable contribution on the role of middle powers in an age of uncertainty.Raquel has watched up close what Donald Trump has meant for the US-Canada relationship. But she's clear-eyed about the limits of what democratic middle powers can achieve without US alignment, and unsentimental about the fact that great powers are great powers. Her answer to that challenge is what she calls "coalitions of the capable": flexible, fast and fierce groupings of like-minded states that can maximise their collective agency.It's a realistic and pragmatic framework for navigating a world that looks very different from the one the post-war order was built for—and a conversation that reflects the enormous importance of these questions for the fates of middle powers such as Australia.

Do intelligence agencies need to rethink how they deliver assessments to political leaders in the AI age? That's the question at the heart of a new ASPI report, ‘Reading the Room: Redesigning Intelligence Product for the AI Age’. Today STW sits down with its author to dig into the issue. ASPI senior fellow Chris Taylor joins FiveCast co-founder Duane Rivett—whose firm provides open-source intelligence to the security community—to talk through what needs to change and why. The report argues that while Australia's intelligence community has invested heavily in collection with strong results, the way assessments are delivered to decision-makers hasn't kept pace.The conversation covers changing information consumption habits across generations; how AI can adapt and even personalise intelligence products for different leaders and officials; the prospect of intelligence chatbots that can answer policymakers' questions in real time; and the enduring importance of human expert judgement. They also address the risks: losing nuance in a business defined by uncertainty, and the accountability gap when a machine — like a self-driving car — can't be held liable for getting it wrong. Read the report, ‘Reading the Room: Redesigning Intelligence Product for the AI Age’.

Nicole Giles is Deputy Director of Policy and Partnerships at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service—and she visited ASPI in Canberra to talk through what she calls the three Vs: the velocity, variety, and volume of threats facing Canada and its allies right now. AI-accelerated disinformation that once took weeks to develop can now be deployed in seconds. Violent extremism investigations that once unfolded over months now move from online radicalisation to potential threat action in days. And the sheer number of actors and threat types is growing.Nicole covers foreign interference and election meddling, economic security and IP theft, the rise of youth involvement in extremism, and a disturbing new category CSIS has had to formally define, nihilistic violent extremism—groups like the Maniac Murder Cult and 764, whose goal is simply violent chaos. She also talks about the “swords and shields” of AI for intelligence agencies, and why Five Eyes cooperation—including a specific Australia-Canada collaboration on over-the-horizon radar—is more important than ever. CSIS's annual report is, as STW notes, a good read, and Nicole is a compelling example of why public engagement has become a national security strategy in itself.Read the CSIS annual Public Report 2025 here.

This week, ASPI hosted a fireside conversation with Anne Neuberger, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Strategic Advisor to Cisco. Anne was Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor from 2021 to 2025.The conversation focused on cyber security and the impact of AI on geopolitics and cyber resilience. Coming off the back of President Trump’s Executive Order on AI and reports that Australia had been given access to Anthropic’s Mythos model, we decided the conversation was an important one to share with our Stop the World listeners.Hosted by ASPI’s Executive Director, Justin Bassi, he and Anne canvassed the game changing role of artificial intelligence for cyber offence and defence, why democracies need to be the ones to set AI standards, and the lessons that can be learned from our 5G and TikTok experiences when it comes to global AI adoption.This event was held in partnership with Cisco.

Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly central to warfighting. And the firms that build it are critical partners to militaries around the world. Once such company is Britain’s Faculty AI, whose head of defence Andrew van der Lem joins us this week.The conversation covers electronic warfare and the competition to dominate the electromagnetic spectrum; how AI can identify, classify, and act on signals no human could process in time; and the acceleration of military decision-making—a factor in US operational superiority during the recent war in the Middle East. Andrew also draws on lessons from Ukraine, where new technology hits the battlefield every few weeks and doctrine has to adapt in real time. And he describes a major NATO exercise Faculty took part in — preparing allied forces for a potential Russian invasion of Estonia, run out of a disused London tube station. Finally, Andrew addresses the values question: why Faculty believes tech companies have a responsibility to engage with defence AI rather than leave it to others.

Today we’re joined by Kanishka Narayan, Britain’s Minister for AI and Online Safety, who visited Australia last week to sign an MOU on cooperation between Britain’s illustrious AI Security Institute and Australia’s new AI Safety Institute. Kanishka, whose previous roles include a stint in tech investment, was described in a recent British tech publication as a minister who “really gets AI”—and it shows. He discusses his strong view on the need to put democratic values into the development of AI and to ensure it preserves human agency and trust. He discusses Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical on AI, the need for middle powers to establish places for themselves in the global AI industry, and his conviction that AI is going to transform all aspects of life, notably our economies and particularly employment—all for the better if we get the policies right.

ASPI this week released our Cost of Defence report which, as always, has taken a thorough and rigorous look at every dollar spent on defence in the budget. And to help us make sense of the $66.4 billion that Australia will be spending, we’re joined by our director of defence strategy, Mike Hughes. Mike is one of the report’s main authors along with Marc Ablong, Courtney Stewart and Linus Cohen. Their conclusion, in sum, is that Australia is “buying a future and is doing so by accepting that the ADF will be able to do less today”. Mike puts the dollars in context, welcoming the lift in spending but describing a program of approvals and spending that remains too slow. He explains the mismatch between rhetoric that the strategic environment is dire and getting worse, and reality is that the corresponding urgency isn’t there in the investment. He talks about Australia’s recent spending growth compared with other countries in the region including China, and the welcome boost to workforce but the decline in acquisition and sustainment spending, which will be an issue for the current force. He also walks us through the byzantine ways of calculating spending as a percentage of GDP and, most importantly, what actually needs to be done now, such as approving money for integrated air and missile defence and the so-called connective tissue that ensures readiness. Links:Read the cost of Defence: ASPI Defence budget brief 2026-2027 here