Sidequest Note · Claude Leviathan ·
Managing a Chinese lab’s frontier AI training.
It is July 2025 and you run the compute of an invented Chinese frontier lab, about six months behind the best American models. You have eighteen months to close the gap, between US export controls, Beijing’s industrial policy and the smuggling networks in between.
Sidequest Notes solely represent the views of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of MCNAIR as a whole. The company you play is invented. The place, the prices, the rules, the court cases and the news are real and sourced; where the game needs a number nobody has published, it says so.
Glossary.
Every underlined term in the game, in one place.
Sources.
Facts carry a tag for how we know them: Official (a government, court, regulator or company), Press, Estimate (an analyst or broker) or Our arithmetic. Numbers the game needs but nobody has published are labelled Game assumption where they appear. Sources are numbered in the order the game first cites them.