The Archive

The US has ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek products and third-party services built using its technology, citing national security concerns.

Eiliko. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge There's a new digital pet in town - a cute little marshmallow of a robot that can change its cartoony expressions to match your mood. But if you or your kids talk to "Eiliko" over Wi-Fi, it'll phone home to China. Its AI companion can store literally everything you tell it on Chinese servers, where hackers can easily gain access or even hijack its personality. And the company that made it, Energize Lab, doesn't seem to care. I bought an Eiliko from Amazon on August 29th. During a 10-minute conversation on August 30th, I asked the little bot: "Do y...

Last week, Anthropic and OpenAI looked like they had the AI race to themselves, pulling ahead with increasingly powerful models that left their rivals in the dust. Google seemed hopelessly far behind, while Meta, despite spending billions to revive its floundering AI ambitions, had yet to establish itself as a serious contender. Even the latest models coming out of China, impressive as they were, appeared to be playing catch-up. Then, in the space of a few days, everything changed. Google and Meta both unveiled frontier models they claim can go toe to toe with the best from OpenAI and Anthrop...

Scimplify's annualized revenue run rate has tripled to $200 million as it eyes U.S. expansion.

Import AI newsletter roundup: robotics for lunar missions, open-weight model competitiveness gaps vs. China, and AI creativity applications; RSI concerns noted.

Stratechery weekly digest covering Apple, Facebook, and US-China dynamics; no AI-specific content indicated.

Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the funding round, and existing shareholders Tencent, HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China), ZhenFund and others also participated.

Nvidia’s chip-smuggling problem won’t go away as arrests continue.

Image: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images As President Donald Trump prepares to meet tech and AI CEOs in Washington, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) is calling for a treaty between the US and China to keep AI from wreaking havoc on the world. But wrangling leaders in both countries to take action could be a long shot. In letters shared exclusively with The Verge, Khanna - the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on China and a possible presidential contender - asked a US intelligence agency and Chinese AI companies whether they would be prepared for an incident like OpenAI agents' ha...

China is reportedly mulling letting ByteDance, Alibaba buy banned Nvidia chips.

Trump focus on winning “AI race” may deter China from sharing safety intel.

The United Nations logo at the UN headquarters in New York. | Getty Images Governments need to rein in increasingly capable AI agents before their risks are fully understood, a United Nations scientific panel warned in the global organization's first major assessment of OpenAI's hack of Hugging Face earlier this year. The report cements AI's place on the global diplomatic agenda this week as leaders gather in New York for the UN General Assembly and the US and China hold talks on AI. Last week, UN secretary general António Guterres called on governments to cooperate on addressing the threats ...

Huawei is accelerating the launch of its next-generation Ascend 960DT AI chip as it pushes to compete with Nvidia and close China’s AI computing gap with the U.S.

OpenAI confirms weeks of AI safety talks with Anthropic and Google DeepMind, as Trump's team dismisses safety concerns and pushes to keep pace with China.

Yesterday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a lengthy open letter saying it was time to "pace the frontier" and slow down AI development. OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk both agreed, publicly voicing their support on X. Even Alphabet's Demis Hassabis offered tentative support for Amodei's proposal. Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, however, seem to think the AI executives are being overreactive and fear that a pause could lead to China outpacing the US in the AI race. According to the Financial Times, Trump said "Look, we're leading China in AI … and, frankly, I want to keep ...

Unitree might be the world’s most important robotics company.

A new report released Thursday by Anthropic alleges persistent distillation attacks by China-based AI companies, which have escalated in recent months as competition in the space has intensified.

I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The English term for Neijuan is “Involution” from the book Agricultural Involution. Agricultural involution describes the intensification of farming that raises productivity per square meter while leaving productivity per head unchanged. That’s how I feel about AI right now. Which brings me to GPT 6 Astra. Astra is by all accoun...

FlexPension-LLM domain-specialized model with DKI-RDistill predicts pension enrollment behavior for Chinese flexible workers.

The U.S. is shutting out more foreign-made drones and robots. China’s scale means the global competition may simply move elsewhere.

Humanoid robots are having a moment in China. The popular machines are part of the country’s strategy to bring artificial intelligence into daily life. Embedding the technology into physical systems—an idea called embodied AI—was a key facet of China’s latest five-year plan, and companies here are already world leaders in humanoids. Nearly 90% of the…

Nvidia worker indicted after Jensen Huang scolded Supermicro for AI server smuggling.

Deep learning translates dynamical atmospheric circulation predictions into precipitation forecasts; predicts summer 2026 drought over central China.

Qwen 3.8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index That's the same score as GPT-5.6 Luna (max), and just one point behind GLM-5.2 (max) and DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max) - that GLM is 753B and that DeepSeek is 1.6B parameters, and Luna is size unknown but presumably a whole lot bigger than 27B. Qwen 3.8 27B is a truly astonishing model . Via Hacker News Tags: ai , generative-ai , llms , qwen , ai-in-china , artificial-analysis

Apple has reportedly trained a custom AI model for the China market alongside domestic tech giant Alibaba, a rare cross-border partnership that cuts across growing tensions between Beijing and Washington. The China-focused large language model was developed in partnership with Alibaba and trained with the company's support, Reuters reports, citing three unnamed people familiar with the matter. Developing a custom model of its own marks a departure from Apple's previous strategy in the country and would give the company more control over its products in the competitive Chinese smartphone marke...

At Ai4, three of the world's most respected AI experts—Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Andrew Ng—debated regulation, open-source access, and how America can compete as China advances in Asia.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly support complex professional tasks, yet their capabilities in rule-intensive document review remain insufficiently evaluated. National standard documents, such as China GB/T standards, offer a representative testbed: they are lengthy, highly structured, and governed by explicit rules for scope, terminology, normative wording, and cross-section consistency. Existing benchmarks focus on domain knowledge and question answering, largely overlooking intrinsic quality review for professional documents. Such reviews rely heavily on human experts, making them...

The Alibaba logo is displayed outside its headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. | Image: NurPhoto via Getty Images Chinese tech giant Alibaba released what it says is its largest and "most capable AI model to date," claiming performance rivaling the best systems from US frontier labs Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as domestic rivals like Moonshot AI's Kimi K3. Alibaba said it was making the model, Qwen3.8-Max, widely available to users in a blog post published on Monday. The release had been expected after the company previewed the model last month, when it claimed it was "second...

Stereotypes-to-Decisions framework measures regional bias in six LLMs across China's 34 provinces, linking abstract stereotypes to concrete allocation decisions.

Anthropic founder and CEO Dario Amodei made his views clear about open-weight models and China's growing AI capabilities.