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jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

there's a lot of nuance to AI psychosis incidents. chatbot use is rarely the only trigger, but it likely makes things worse

this essay IMO does a good job wrestling with the complexity & suggesting specific interventions

it was a pleasure to edit

October 12, 2025 at 10:30 PM

jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

A rare first-person account of experiencing AI-induced psychosis, from a young tech founder who "should have known better"

joinreboot.org/p/ai-psychosis

October 12, 2025 at 10:29 PM

jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

So why did he change his mind?

"I was really excited about the "burn it to the ground" stuff, then you start to realize what "burn it to the ground" means."

June 6, 2025 at 5:14 PM

jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

I wanted to better understand (and complicate!) the “tech right,” so I interviewed an anonymous startup founder who supported Trump in 2024. He regrets it now.

I found our conversation fascinating 🧵

jasmi.news/p/fit-to-rule

June 6, 2025 at 5:14 PM

jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

My Stanford years were defined by heated protests against tech work for ICE and the US military

5 years later, defense-tech is cool again, and I returned to campus to find out why.

New article for @sfstandard.com:

sfstandard.com/2025/03/12/s...

March 12, 2025 at 7:28 PM

jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

we’ll need a new personal ethic for living alongside AI

open.substack.com/pub/jasmine/...

February 7, 2025 at 6:56 PM

jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

Finally, anti-immigration and the US-China Cold War will be the biggest themes of the new Trump administration.

We in tech should be careful not to resort to nativism. Here's one final quote from a Chinese data scientist I spoke with.

Those who are staying in the US, meanwhile, say they feel exhausted. "I've been in the US for almost a decade," a Chinese-born data scientist and UC Berkeley graduate told me. "Many of us left to escape that political environment, and are the most liberal-leaning Chinese you can find. We spend so much time going through the American education and immigration system — and now the US says it doesn't welcome us either. It feels like we have this talent that no one wants."

January 20, 2025 at 9:59 PM

jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

Like with TikTok, there are legitimate foreign surveillance and security risks in AI.

The question is how to address them without fueling baseless xenophobia or pushing out immigrant talent.

I spoke with @dkaushik.bsky.social and @yangyangcheng.bsky.social to understand these tradeoffs.

Divyansh Kaushik, a tech and national security expert at Beacon Global Strategies, told me that America needs policies that are a "scalpel, not a sledgehammer." He recognizes the risk of espionage, citing China's 2017 National Intelligence Law, which legally obligates all Chinese citizens to "support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work." But Kaushik considers blanket bans on foreign nationals just as counterproductive. He instead pointed to policies that restrict students from specific Chinese-military-affiliated universities from obtaining visas. "There will be false positives and false negatives," but the US can mitigate the risk without overreaching, he told me.
Other experts believe that nationality-based anti-espionage efforts are more security theater than reality. Yangyang Cheng, a physicist and China researcher at Yale Law School, told me that AI risks "are not exclusive to Chinese firms or unique products of the Chinese authoritarian system." She cited examples of American professors who helped build biometric technologies for ethnic oppression in Xinjiang, arguing that we should be focused on preventing harm wherever it originates. She thinks the TikTok ban makes the same mistakes. "The focus on the Chinese government's subpoena power overlooks the many ways American companies cooperate with the state," she wrote for Wired.

January 20, 2025 at 9:59 PM

jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

Spy mania isn't new — the DOJ's now-shuttered "China Initiative" went after US professors suspected of undisclosed ties to China from 2018-2020.

Its slipshod approach led to several wrongful arrests of academics of Chinese descent, and at least one suicide.

Concerns over Chinese spying have been on the rise since the early 2010s, when the US escalated its efforts to address Chinese cyberattacks. In 2018, the Department of Justice under Donald Trump undertook a controversial "China Initiative," which aimed to prevent industrial espionage in the research community by investigating hundreds of academics suspected of having ties to China. It found only a few cases of actual spying.
The plurality of investigations, Bloomberg and MIT Technology Review reported in 2021, involved undisclosed funding and affiliations to Chinese institutions, while "just three claim that secrets were handed over to Chinese agents," Bloomberg wrote. Instead of catching spies, many cases just indicted professors for bureaucratic oversights — those found guilty claimed they didn't disclose their funding because they didn't think they had to.
The China Initiative's slipshod approach upended many people's lives. Gang Chen, a nanotechnologist, and Anming Hu, a physicist, were both US-based tenured professors who were arrested by the FBI, only for authorities to later realize they had made a mistake. During the yearlong investigations, Chen was barred from his university's campus, and Hu was suspended without pay and his work authorization revoked. (Though both were later reinstated to their positions, Chen said he would no longer take federal research funding). The suicide of the neuroscientist Jane Ying Wu last year came after a China Initiative investigation shut down her lab.

January 20, 2025 at 9:59 PM

jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

Chinese workers are increasingly self-excluding from AI jobs and events, and returning to China by choice or not.

Many described it as a "double bind." They came to the US to pursue liberties China didn't afford. But in the US, they now face similar state & social sanctions.

As a tech worker, she has turned down AI-related job opportunities to avoid scrutiny for herself and her family from both the US and Chinese governments. She also tries to downplay her Chinese accent and cultural identity. "A lot of Chinese nationals don't agree with the Chinese government" on issues like Uyghur repression in Xinjiang, she said. "But in social situations, you have to vocalize it passionately just to lower the guard people have toward you."

Sarah affirmed this sentiment. She hoped to contribute to global AI safety work by bridging the information gap between Chinese- and English-language researchers and policymakers, but the hawkish environment has made collaboration difficult. "Whenever you say anything neutral about China, people will think, 'That's pro-China, and this person is bought by the CCP,'" she said.

Unlucky visa holders who get flagged have no choice but to appeal for an extended leave of absence from their university or workplace. One AI Ph.D. student wrote in November, "I have now waited for more than 130 days. My school has deferred me for one semester, but I cannot defer it again."
As tensions ramp up, many Chinese tech workers are reconsidering whether the American dream is worth the risk. When Microsoft offered its China-based employees a chance to relocate to another country, tensions between the US and China made some reluctant to take the offer, according to reporting by Rest of World. Going viral on X turned out to be a tipping point for Sarah. She returned to China in December. "Initially I was afraid of trouble on the Chinese side, but it turns out that the other side is more problematic," she said about the US.

January 20, 2025 at 9:59 PM

jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

Tech talent — domestic & immigrant — will make-or-break US AI leadership. China is the largest source of top researchers, and ~90% want to stay in the US, per @csetgeorgetown.bsky.social.

But social sanctions, visa hurdles, and geopolitics are making it harder & harder to retain.

Meanwhile, the US faces a critical talent shortage in AI. A 2021 report by the National Security Commission on AI found that the number of US-born STEM and AI doctorates is not nearly keeping pace with the industry's growth. While 42% of top-tier AI researchers worked in the US in 2022, only 18% of them received their undergraduate degree here, Macro Polo's AI Talent Tracker found. China is currently the largest source of these top-tier researchers — and more are choosing to stay in China.
"For the first time in our lifetime, the United States risks losing the competition for talent on the scientific frontiers," the NSCAI report says. "Immigration reform is a national security imperative."

January 20, 2025 at 9:59 PM

jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

The obsession with Chinese spies is an own-goal for AI.

Chinese scientists, workers, and founders *want* to work in Silicon Valley, but an atmosphere of hostility & suspicion is pushing them out.

New from me for @businessinsider.com (1/7)

www.businessinsider.com/chinese-spie...

Screenshot of article titled "Silicon Valley's new Red Scare"

January 20, 2025 at 9:59 PM

jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

pitches are open for Kernel Magazine Issue 5: RULES

we want critical & creative meditations on your most esoteric regulations, logics, constraints 👷 📐

pitches and submissions are due february 1. we pay!

joinreboot.org/p/kernel-5-p...

Vibes we would like to see: The NIST standard for lighting a cigarette. Three felonies a day. Getting a text and making yourself wait before responding. The move-fast-break-things to extremely-specific-content-moderation-policy pipeline. The internationally approved frequencies for amateur ham radio operators to contact the International Space Station. Not selling a painting, but selling the rules for how to make a painting. Surviving on the 2b2t anarchist Minecraft server.

January 18, 2025 at 11:19 PM

jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

Richard Brody continues generational run of being wrong about every movie ever made

January 18, 2025 at 7:49 PM

jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

I'm also excited about writing because it develops good habits: attention, conversation, synthesis, revision; radical openness in the service of truth

a job that brings me closer to how I want to live my life

Easy moral-political spectrums can’t answer these questions; tech media ought to outgrow its beloved hero/villain stories. I’m practicing radical openness instead: looking strange ideas directly in the eye, taking them to coffee, inviting them to dance. Living with my Notes app always open, listening well and asking good questions. Indulging the senses. Cultivating epistemic openness: independence, nonalignment, the ability to tear down and reconstruct inherited beliefs.⁴ My all-time favorite aphorism: Strong opinions, weakly held. Writing not as a job but a way of life.

January 3, 2025 at 6:11 PM

jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

I launched my new indie writing/research project today! a 21st century "anthropology of disruption"

I plan to explore the places where the past and future collide—what happens when frontier tech meets established communities and institutions?

some questions on my mind + find me at jasmi.news