Parallel Frontier is written by Caroline Swartz. Chinese language & politics (NYU), Russian politics MSc (KCL), Mandarin SIGINT spanning defensive and offensive cyber operations, security operations leadership, short- and long-form reporting in five languages, AI safety research, and an MA in computational linguistics in progress (UCL).
Parallel Frontier publishes weekly. Each issue reads a primary source from China's or Russia's AI world in the original language (a regulation, a paper, a lab release, a piece of discourse) and shows what the English-language coverage leaves out.
Why both countries, not one. China and Russia are usually covered separately, if Russia is covered at all, and the separation hides more than it reveals. China's AI ecosystem is industrial-scale, state-directed, and increasingly a rule-setter in its own right. Russia's is smaller, resource-constrained, and opportunistic: closer to a policy-taker watching what China and the West do, sometimes borrowing from both. Read side by side, the comparison surfaces what neither case shows alone: which governance instruments move between authoritarian systems, where they diverge, and what each borrows from the other's playbook.
The name nods to 平行智能 ("parallel intelligence"), a real term in Chinese AI research: parallel frontiers, read together, not just one.