This is your US-China CyberPulse: Defense Updates podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here, your friendly neighborhood China-and-cyber nerd, and this week’s US‑China CyberPulse is…busy.

Let’s start with Washington hardening the digital moat. Buried in the latest National Defense Authorization Act, Section 1692 tightens who can even touch Department of Defense cloud systems, explicitly locking out citizens from “foreign countries of concern” like China from admin, maintenance, or even indirect access. GovWin IQ notes this forces a sweep of existing contracts, which means a lot of quiet offboarding and re-architecting in defense clouds as we speak. That’s not “zero trust,” that’s “zero chance you’re from Beijing and holding root.”

Over at CISA, updated Cybersecurity Performance Goals push critical infrastructure toward real zero‑trust, stronger supply‑chain defenses, and clearer incident-response comms. Utility Dive reports they even added a “Govern” category, basically telling CEOs, “You own this, not just your CISO.” That lands squarely on Chinese threat activity: think Volt Typhoon‑style infiltrations into power, ports, and telecom; the new goals assume that kind of long-term pre-positioning is the norm, not the edge case.

Now zoom into the Pentagon’s soft underbelly: operational technology. Lawfare highlights how air‑gapping is basically a myth and how some China-made infrastructure devices quietly phone home. The emerging strategy isn’t “rip everything out tomorrow,” but catalog every OT asset, assume it touches the internet, and then wrap it with controls designed to survive compromise, especially when Chinese hardware is embedded in the stack. It’s like discovering your base has smart lightbulbs from Shenzhen…then deciding the new policy is: every bulb is hostile until proven otherwise.

On the private-sector flank, Anthropic’s national security head Tarun Chhabra just told the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee that Anthropic not only blocks model access from China, but also from China-tied companies. That’s a US company turning its AI stack into a strategic asset, not just a product. Combine that with Trump’s recent executive order centralizing AI policy at the federal level, described by firms like Fenwick as an explicit move to keep US AI ahead of China, and you get the new defense perimeter: the model, the data center, and who’s allowed to query what.

Internationally, US cyber teams are tightening playbooks with allies, borrowing from Five Eyes-style intelligence sharing and joint exercises, as highlighted by Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft work. The idea is simple: if China hits one grid, everyone’s sensors light up, and response turns from solo to swarm.

On the tech front, SOC Prime’s write‑up of fresh React RSC vulnerabilities is a reminder that Chinese operators don’t need zero‑days in nukes when your front-end app leaks source or falls to a DoS. The defensive trend here is faster detection-as-a-service, threat hunting tied to specific PRC clusters, and auto-patching pipelines baked into DevSecOps.

So, listeners, the pattern this week is clear: fewer naïve assumptions, more hard lines—on identity, on hardware, on AI access, and on who gets to sit anywhere near the cloud.

Thanks for tuning in, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss the next pulse. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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