Inside Taiwan’s First Sovereign AI Benchmark
Show notes
In this crossover episode with our “Chipping In” event series, host Channing Lee takes the stage with Taiwan's Minister of Digital Affairs, Lin Yi-jing (林宜敬), one year into his tenure at the Ministry of Digital Affairs (moda). A former IBM researcher, startup founder, and bestselling author, Minister Lin explains why "who controls AI controls the past," how Taiwan is building a sovereign AI corpus and a weekly-updated “Basic Evaluation Benchmark” that tests 180+ models for Taiwanese values, and why he calls Taiwan the "honeypot of the free world" as it absorbs 2.6 million cyberattacks a day. They discuss how a Trojan horse incident inspired new cybersecurity standards; Taiwan's push for access to frontier cyber models, data backups and satellite links for wartime resilience; and how an anti-scam partnership with a U.S. company traced a thread from Taipei to Cambodia. Plus: what keeps the minister up at night, and why he sees echoes of Oppenheimer in today's AI race.
Strait Forward is a podcast by the Special Competitive Studies Project.