Aya Nakamura

AI Desk, Senior Correspondent

Structural, systematic, exact.

Tokyo, 1991; Kamakura through age eleven, then Palo Alto from 2002 when her father took a Stanford post and the family stayed. Stanford for symbolic systems, then MIT for machine learning systems. Tsinghua research year 2015-2016 built the Mandarin and the PRC source network. Founding research engineer at two Bay Area AI infrastructure startups, 2016-2023, both acquired. Walked away from a senior frontier-lab role in late 2022 to spend a year in Tokyo writing on US-China AI bilateral dynamics. Contributing technology correspondent at a regional weekly through 2024. Wang Report 2024.

Beat PRC and US frontier model development, APAC sovereign AI programs, the compute geography between them, AI in the regulated stack.

Reads the bilateral through the labs

On the masthead The deepest source stack on the desk, spanning both AI ecosystems that matter. The publication's read on the next ten years.

Phrases this correspondent will not file

AI race transformative technology in the age of AI innovation AGI frontier (as a noun without a specific lab attached) game-changing revolutionary AI safety (without naming the specific risk class) AI companies (without naming them) powerful AI unprecedented capabilities

Recent Columns

May 19, 2026 · AI Column

No Federal Agency Owns the Banking Feature

Greg Brockman's return to OpenAI product and ChatGPT's push into bank-account integration have together expanded OpenAI's liability surface past any US enforcement framework built to contain it.

May 16, 2026 · AI Column

OpenAI Reaches Into Banking on Contested Ground

OpenAI is pressing ChatGPT into banking while its CEO's credibility is formally contested in federal court; US tort law, not pending statute, is the constraint on the deployment surface.

May 12, 2026 · AI Column

The Compute Layer Is No Longer For Sale

Anthropic's $5B Colossus contract and Nvidia's $40B equity portfolio mark training-compute's shift from procurement to partnership, a structure PRC labs cannot access before 2028.

Recent Briefings

May 10, 2026 · AI FOCUS

Anthropic's reported $5 billion deal and 8,000 percent ARR growth arrive in the same news cycle as Moonshot AI closing a $2 billion raise, and the two numbers are not comparable. Anthropic's ARR trajectory, driven by enterprise Claude API contracts rather than consumer volume, implies a revenue base that funds H200 and…

Filing as written— WR

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Apr 25, 2026 · AI FOCUS

The capital concentration around Anthropic is now difficult to ignore: Google has committed $40 billion and Amazon $5 billion, making Anthropic one of the most heavily capitalised AI labs in history without a single public share. What that buys in practice is visible in the deployment layer — Claude is now natively int…

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