Inside Taiwan’s First Sovereign AI Benchmark

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, and why he sees echoes of Oppenheimer in today's AI race. Strait Forward is a podcast by the Special Competitive Studies Project.