#157 Tech Geopolitics ICYMI
In this edition of Technopolitik, Pranay Kotasthane discusses five recent developments that illustrate the accelerating securitisation of technology — from the Indian perspective.
This newsletter is curated by Anwesha Sen.
1. NDRC, not SAMR, blocked the Manus-Meta deal
The proposed acquisition of Manus by Meta was stopped by China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), not by the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR). This distinction is significant.
SAMR is the antitrust regulator. It blocks deals on competition grounds. China is known to use this instrument for national security reasons, but it often does so under the guise of anti-monopoly or consumer harm. You’ll find more about SAMR’s actions in this post.
NDRC, by contrast, is the macroeconomic planning body. Its intervention signals that China views this deal not as a competition problem but as a security problem. If NDRC is now the effective gatekeeper for tech mergers & acquisitions, that suggests Chinese AI firms are no longer commercial assets subject to normal market rules. They are national assets, and their disposition is a matter for economic planners, not antitrust lawyers.
Meanwhile, the NDRC had banned two co-founders of Manus from travelling abroad since March this year, citing this regulatory review. Tough times for a Chinese technology firm—foreign companies see you surreptitiously, and even if you manage to convince them, the CPC blocks the sale. This is exactly the problem that rare earth refiners in China have been facing due to the stringent controls over the last 12 months.
2. The wrong lessons from Mythos
The Anthropic Mythos model, whose cyber-offensive capabilities led Anthropic to delay its public release while American companies patched their software, has become the centrepiece of the case for chip export controls. The argument, most prominently made in the Dwarkesh-Huang exchange, runs like this: if China had more compute, it could have trained Mythos first. And that would be unacceptable to the US and the world because of the harm it would cause.
This framing has three problems.
The first is the frame itself. Mythos-type capabilities do not structurally change national power the way nuclear weapons did. Thinking of AI through the nuclear lens, where getting there first and then denying others is the only viable strategy, leads to bad policy. For countries like India, AI is better understood as a vital, general-purpose technology: something you want widely available, not concentrated in one place.
The second problem is the assumption of asymmetry. The argument treats Chinese offensive cyber use as a given while treating American use as defensive. Both countries have offensive cyber capabilities, and both have used them. The real problem is not Chinese malice in particular; it is the absence of credible governance mechanisms for AI deployment, a problem neither Washington nor Beijing has solved.
The third problem is the most important for India. The Mythos episode shows that if AI models can find thousands of unpatched vulnerabilities in major software systems, then every country running those systems is exposed, including India, regardless of who trained the model. The lesson is about defensive readiness and software hygiene, not about chip exports.
3. What made Taiwan think ITRI’s spinoffs should be private?
Karthik Tadepalli has a lovely essay on ITRI, the Industrial Technology Research Institute that seeded Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, in the Asterisk magazine. He finds that ITRI demonstrates how a focused, applied R&D institute can build a world-class chip industry by starting small, training people, and serving firms rather than competing with them.
One question worth thinking over: what led Taiwan’s planners to assume that ITRI’s spin-offs should be private firms? The default in most developing countries, and certainly in India, was the opposite. C-DOT had genuinely good technology, including telephone switches that were competitive by any standard. BEL had developed strategic IP. But neither institution could imagine letting go of the downstream functions. They did engage private players, but merely as “vendors” rather than partners. The IP stayed inside the public sector and did not compound.
Taiwan’s answer to this question is the crucial variable in the ITRI story. It was not just industrial policy; it was industrial policy with a particular theory of ownership and incentives. Getting that theory right is what allowed TSMC to become TSMC rather than a government procurement vehicle.
4. Heavy rare earths outside China, for the first time in two decades
Lynas has begun heavy rare earth production at its refinery in Malaysia, reports the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, this is the first time in twenty years that a heavy rare earth refinement on a commercial scale has happened outside China.
This is a direct consequence of Chinese coercion. Beijing’s export restrictions on rare earth processing, imposed as leverage in the broader technology dispute with the US, accelerated the diversification it was meant to deter. China+1 is happening, not because of Western industrial policy alone, but because China’s own actions have raised the cost of dependence.
The Lynas development will not resolve the structural imbalance overnight. China still dominates processing capacity. But the direction of travel is now clear, and it is being driven as much by China’s behaviour as by any Western strategy.
5. Tech companies as military targets
My colleague Nitin Pai makes an uncomfortable argument in a recent essay that tech companies, which have become entangled in military operations, are now legitimate targets under international humanitarian law.
The legal standard is whether an entity makes “an effective contribution to military action.” Palantir’s AI targeting tools, Microsoft’s communications infrastructure for US-Israeli operations, and the sanctions imposed on Russia at Washington’s behest are not incidental. Palantir CEO Alex Karp has said explicitly that tech firms owe the US government their support, given the historical conditions that allowed them to grow. That is a coherent position, but it has consequences. You cannot claim both the returns of geopolitical alignment and the protections of civilian status.
The Indian implication is that the more India’s critical systems depend on foreign tech infrastructure whose owners have chosen sides, the more India’s infrastructure is exposed to the targeting logic of conflicts it has no role in. This is not a hypothetical. It is the architecture of the current moment. Nitin’s conclusion is to reduce dependence on foreign tech for critical systems and increase defence spending to protect what cannot be reduced.
HomeWork
[Issue Brief] My paper maps out the causal connections arising from Nvidia selling chips to Chinese firms, but from an Indian lens.
[Book] Farrell and Newman have a wonderful book that expands on a concept they developed a few years ago, and that has now become all the rage—weaponised interdependence.
[Paper] OECD is producing some fabulous reports on semiconductor fabs. The Dec 2025 report titled 'The Chip Landscape: Geographical Distribution of Wafer Fabrication Capacity' has several great insights relevant to India. My summary is here.
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And before you go-
Check out Grammar of War, a newsletter by Adya Madhavan, that looks at advanced military technologies!