The Archive

People visit the booth of Kimi, an LLM developed by the Chinese startup Moonshot, during the World AI Conference in Shanghai, China, July 20th. | Image: LONG WEI/ Feature China/Future Publishing via Getty Images Silicon Valley has spent much of the past week on red alert, digesting the arrival of Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, a Chinese AI model that can allegedly beat some of the best systems built by US companies at a fraction of the cost. Its performance alone would have been enough to intensify the rivalry between the US and China. But Moonshot's plan to release the model's weights for free - and...

Stratechery taking editorial vacation week of July 27; publishing schedule suspended except Sharp China and Asianometry.

Investigation into LLM token reselling market exploiting free trials and stolen credentials, primarily operating in China via open-source proxy software.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. could sanction Chinese open AI models over alleged IP theft, expanding the Trump administration's campaign to slow China's AI advances.

SHANGHAI, CHINA - JULY 20 2026: People visit the booth of Kimi, an LLM developed by the Chinese startup Moonshot, during the World AI Conference in Shanghai, China, Monday, July 20, 2026. | Image: LONG WEI/ Feature China/Future Publishing via Getty Images Last week, two Chinese AI companies unveiled models they say can credibly compete with the best systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. The response was swift and predictable. Markets wobbled, commentators declared Silicon Valley shooketh, and policymakers reached for the familiar language of arms races and wake-up calls. In one headline, The Ass...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Over the weekend, several current and former advisors to President Donald Trump on AI publicly lobbed insults at the country’s leading AI companies. David Sacks, the president’s AI and crypto “czar” until…

China's leading AI companies are ramping up the pressure on Silicon Valley, as Moonshot and Alibaba unveiled models they claim can go toe-to-toe with the best from OpenAI and Anthropic at a fraction of the cost. The rapid-fire releases suggest America's lead at the AI frontier is increasingly tight, just as the technology is becoming central to national security, economic power, and geopolitical influence. The opening salvo came from Beijing-based Moonshot AI, one of China's leading AI model developers, which unveiled Kimi K3 on Friday. Moonshot claims its own testing ranks it consistently ab...

The FT reports Kimi K3 will be the largest open AI model from China, with a parameter count between 2 trillion and 3 trillion.

Apple Intelligence is headed to China after regulators approved Apple’s AI services through a partnership with Alibaba. The long-rumored deal will bring Alibaba’s Qwen AI models to Apple’s operating systems, marking a major expansion of the company’s generative AI platform into one of its most important markets.

It's early, but the plan is to reduce dependency on Nvidia and Huawei.

China's Zhipu AI (Z.ai) released its open-weight GLM-5.2, and some researchers have claimed that it matches Mythos in certain bug-finding and cybersecurity scenarios. While GLM lags behind models from Anthropic and OpenAI in other, more general tasks, it seems that China has dramatically reduced the gap in the capabilities between its models and those of the US. This level of advancement is particularly concerning to the US government, which has worked to restrict China's access to powerful models like Anthropic's Mythos and Fable, as well as the hardware necessary to train and run them. The ...

Analysis of geopolitical security implications of US Fable/Mythos suspension limiting domestic cybersecurity patching capability.

As ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet told TechCrunch in May, what China can currently buy are older-generation deep ultraviolet tools — gear first shipped about a decade ago — the same machines the MATCH Act would now put off limits.

The big three memory makers may come to regret opening up the door to Chinese memory makers; Microsoft, meanwhile, is very incentivized to use Chinese models.

There's a commercial logic that cuts against the idea that ASML would risk its export license to arm a Chinese customer.

Taiwan's drone spending plans for defense could also boost business overseas.

According to a new report from Semafor, the White House's decision to impose export restrictions on Anthropic's Mythos was driven in part by fears that it had been accessed by a group linked to China. If the Chinese government actually had access to Mythos 5 or Fable 5, it would present a serious national security risk. The government could also attempt to reverse engineer the model through distillation, a method in which a "student" AI is trained on a more advanced model to replicate its behavior. The White House has not confirmed this report, and a post on X by Trump advisor David Sacks did...

The best Stratechery content from the week of May 25, 2026, including why everyone hates Luce, how to monetize AI answers, and social mobility in China.

China's AI boom is producing world-class talent, and Beijing is increasingly reluctant to let them go elsewhere.

This is the highest output rate announced. besides this EngineAI has another aditional Zhengzhou 10K/year line planned. Its more than from what Leju Robotics, AgiBot, Unitree Robotics, and others have claimed for their humanoid robots per year. So its likely, China ready to output 100K humanoids robots per year.

Big, if true. Doesn't bode well for research / OS models out of China.

Ex-Samsung executive predicts Chinese DRAM investments will reduce DDR5 prices by H2 2027; supply-side forecast.

Autonomous motorcycles deployed on Chinese streets; limited technical details, unclear autonomous level and deployment scope.

Stratechery weekly digest covering computing trends, Musk commentary, and US-China relations; lacks specific AI technical details or announcements.

Reddit discussion of modded Chinese GPUs (RTX 4090/4080 with increased VRAM) for local LLM inference; community seeking documentation and reviews.

Chinese defense manufacturer reportedly doubles J-20 jet production using automation; off-topic for AI architecture/research audience.

Link: nytimes.com

Reddit post contrasts AI industry regulatory resistance claims against China's stated safety-first governance approach.