Pressure Systems edition
Agentic Divide, Chinese Energy, and the Open Source Siege
May 28, 2026
What this edition shows
China's energy abundance and chip adaptation are hardwiring structural dominance into the agentic AI race, challenging US hegemony through material infrastructure rather than just model parameters. Simultaneously, the agentic divide is fracturing the tech economy into scalable autonomous networks and high-friction legacy traps, while coordinated supply chain attacks poison the open-source commons that might otherwise serve as a counterweight to proprietary consolidation.
Reporting and analysis behind this edition 9 sources
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China’s secret weapon in AI race with US? Lots of cheap energy
China's abundant supply of cheap electricity is a key advantage in the rollout of data centres needed to run AI models.
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Huawei's ‘Chip Queen’ Throws Down the Gauntlet
The Chinese company is adapting to the demise of Moore’s Law, which guides chip production. It could complicate US chip dominance.
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Xi Ascendant
Trump’s Beijing trip shows that the wind is blowing in China’s direction.
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U.S. versus China: Can open-source beat OpenAI?
Join Jules Polonetsky, Chief Executive Officer, Future of Privacy Forum, in conversation with Itika Sharma Punit, Deputy Editor, Rest of World on April 17, 2026
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The agentic divide: Why “good enough” AI isn’t enough to survive the new economy
A widening gap in agent quality is creating a two-tier system where well-resourced firms scale infinitely while small players are trapped by high-friction, "low-trust" tools.
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AI Agents Plunged the Tech World Into Chaos. Here’s Exactly How That Happened
The definitive story of how Claude Code and OpenClaw kicked off computing’s biggest transformation possibly ever.
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Harness, Scaffold, and the AI Agent Terms Worth Getting Right
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China’s tech rise is creating a new kind of tourism
Foreign visitors are flocking to China’s factories and AI startups in search of the next technological breakthrough.
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A Hacker Group Is Poisoning Open Source Code at an Unprecedented Scale
GitHub is just the latest victim of TeamPCP, a gang that has carried out a spree of software supply chain attacks that has impacted hundreds of organizations.