Vol. I·No. 01·May 2026·Geopolitics·AI·Tech·Business

China governs as an engineered system. We read its outputs the same way.

Forward Indicators is an independent think tank at the intersection of geopolitics, AI, technology, and business.

We publish analysis, essays, and dispatches alongside five active research programs — each a public, dated, falsifiable inquiry into systems most institutions prefer to treat as a black box.

Active Research Programs

Five questions, scored in public

Can a model predict state behavior?

Five programs run the same experiment on five different corpora: a calibrated model trained on the published record of a state apparatus — or the firms and capital flows around it — scored against what actually happens. The instrument is the same. What changes is the question we point it at.

IProgram · Researcher RestrictionsWhich Chinese AI researchers face restriction in the next twelve months?Chinese AI researcher restrictions are accelerating: travel curbs, lab freezes, formal sanctions. We run a calibrated model against the public restriction record — trained on five years of hand-coded events and dozens of features — and publish a dated, Brier-scored ranking every month.IIProgram · Five-Year Plan AnalysisWhich sectors will the 15th Five-Year Plan fund — and how much?The 15th Five-Year Plan will shape a decade of state spending across semiconductors, AI infrastructure, EVs, robotics, and energy. We train a retrieval-augmented model on fourteen prior plans to forecast which sectors get funded, how much, and when — before the ministerial action lands.IIIProgram · Doctrinal Event-ResponseWhen the West moves, how will Beijing answer — in what frame, at what tier, on what timetable?Sixty years of doctrine from Mao to Xi, five hundred hand-coded event-response pairs, four structured prediction dimensions. When a global event happens — an export control, a Taiwan incident, an EU enforcement action — we publish a calibrated forecast of how the state will respond, before it does.IVProgram · Comparative Tech FirmsWhat premium do Western AI and robotics firms command over their Chinese counterparts — and where is it closing?Chinese AI and robotics firms — Kimi, Minimax, Zhipu, Unitree — are approaching capability parity with their Western counterparts at a fraction of the valuation. We build a comparable-firms scoreboard tracking capability benchmarks, revenue, and the market-access premium investors pay for one side over the other.VProgram · AI Sentiment & InfrastructureAre Americans losing faith in AI while the Chinese keep building?Americans are losing faith in AI. The Chinese are not. We score the gap between US and Chinese media corpora on a rolling 13-week index, and log every disclosed US data-center cancellation as the leading hard signal of where belief is breaking.

Why this exists

Almost nothing in AI and tech policy comes out of nowhere. Almost everything was on a timetable.

Most institutions analyze AI policy, tech policy, and geopolitical risk as if each one were a black box. They read the press release when an export control drops; they infer intent from the rhetoric; they call the consequences a surprise. That frame is convenient for the people selling it — and a methodological dead end. It treats every sanction as an act of will, every restriction as a shock. It rewards access over evidence. It produces narratives that are unfalsifiable by design.

Forward Indicators reads the specifications. Doctrine, regulation, procurement schedules, subsidy cascades, talent restrictions, sectoral controls — these are the source trail of modern AI and tech power, published and dated. Read them as code, and the surprises become legible.

Read the full manifesto

From the Manifesto

The press reads the press releases.
We read the specifications.

Read the manifesto

How the Institution Works

Four commitments we make to our readers.

Predictions are dated.

Every claim about future state behavior is logged with a date, a confidence, and a falsification criterion. The log is append-only. No retroactive edits.

II.

The prior is public.

System prompts, few-shot examples, feature definitions — versioned and viewable. You can read why the model says what it says.

III.

Baselines stay shipped.

Random, last-observed, and feature-only logistic regression run alongside the LLM model. Lift over baseline is shown on every scoreboard.

IV.

Calibration over accuracy.

A 70% prediction must be right 70% of the time, not 90%, not 50%. Reliability diagrams are the headline chart, not point accuracy.

Collaborations

We work with the institutions building this future.

Forward Indicators collaborates with universities, research institutions, governments, foundations, and businesses on commissioned analysis, custom research programs, and structured policy work.

If your team needs a public, dated, calibrated read on a policy or technology question — or wants to fund or co-author a program — write in. We work with a small number of partners at a time.

Inquire about a collaboration

Follow the log. Cite the data.

Research-log RSS goes live with v0. Datasets are public on release. If you are a researcher, journalist, or policy team — write in.