Ross Douthat is a New York Times Opinion columnist and host of the NYT podcast "Interesting Times". A conservative-leaning commentator, he covers politics, religion, and technology and AI policy.
Background
Douthat writes opinion columns for the New York Times and hosts the paper's "Interesting Times" podcast.
AI-related work
On May 14, 2026, Douthat published an "Interesting Times" interview with Kyle Chan of Brookings titled "China's Not the Problem. We Are.", released during the Trump-Xi Beijing summit (China's Not the Problem. We Are. (NYT Interesting Times, Douthat-Chan, May 14 2026)).
In the interview, Douthat raised arguments associated with a hawkish view of U.S.-China competition, including AGI timeline urgency, espionage, distillation, and Taiwan-invasion scenarios, while Chan responded from a position framing the competition as multiple separate races rather than a single one. The exchange documents competing U.S.-China framings, with Chan's "different races" view set against the hawkish case (Kyle Chan, US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics).
Relationships
- author-of: China's Not the Problem. We Are. (NYT Interesting Times, Douthat-Chan, May 14 2026) — Chan interview
- related: Kyle Chan (interview subject), NYT (publication), US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics