#China

AISemiAnalysis argues China's AI safety regime is speed-first, with rules covering content and public-facing services but no frontier-risk duties tied to training compute or capability. Its dataset of 857 releases from nine leading Chinese developers found only 31 (3.6%) ever had a published safety result, and just 9 at launch. The analysis also finds that technical experts favor binding frontier rules while the top leadership's development-first preference settled the policy debate.

AIMy Grok bot has found its first powerful use case. Using a personal agent to collect information from Twitter for you is far better than scrolling your phone yourself, manually gathering information, or getting addicted.

AIA South China Morning Post reporter spent a week using Huawei's Mate XT 2, a US$3,500 trifold phone with a 10.2-inch unfolded display. The source excerpt focuses on the device drawing attention at a family dinner during China's National Day "golden week" holiday in early October, with no further specifications or verdict provided in the available text.

AIThe FCC's proposed ban on new Chinese optical transceivers targets the top of the supply stack, but the author argues it leaves the dependencies that matter untouched. The analysis traces the module, laser, indium phosphide wafer, and indium metal layers, finding that China controls the wafers and refined indium while U.S. firms depend on Chinese-made substrates. The author concludes that a module-level rule would take years to replace lost capacity and would not change control of the lower layers.

AIThe Chinese models are great, but horribly token inefficient (try running an eval with max reasoning to feel the pain). I'm looking forward to a future where open models start competing on this axis!

AIopen AI models: "Closed models are the equivalent in real estate to renting an apartment... As AI adoption has increased, an ownership market is basically coming in.. The only way to own intelligence, by definition, is if it's open"

AIBanning is impossible and otherwise strategic competition becomes really untenable in a few years.

AIMakes me wonder if the real Western vs. Chinese OSS models gap is simply this: Chinese labs can distill Anthropic and OpenAI models. Western labs can’t.

AI…especially wrt China), and ignoring evidence that a mythos-class cyber model being released has largely been fine. 🌶️ one.

AINathan Lambert argues that policy debates on open-weight model cyber risks lack nuance, because banning open models may not reduce risk and could weaken American competitiveness. He says closed frontier APIs have been tied to most documented cyber attacks, and that restricting open models while closed models keep advancing could widen the offense-defense gap. He also argues that Chinese labs' safety practices are shaped by their own government and society, and that the claimed risk of models like Claude Mythos has been overstated.

AIChina now leads research in nearly 90% of 74 critical technologies, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's December 2025 Critical Technology Tracker. China also produces 70% of the world's EVs, 80%–85% of global solar photovoltaic manufacturing, and over 75% of battery production. The report measures cited research rather than deployable manufacturing, a gap the article flags as a key caveat.

AIThere's a lot of ways people will overthink this, but the clearest takeaway should be that the Chinese are very very good at building LLMs.

AIIndependent Chinese AI safety work has very little funding, and the Charity Law and Overseas NGO Law limit both domestic and foreign money flowing to nonprofits. Chinese charitable giving was about $21 billion in 2023 versus $557 billion in the US, with companies supplying 77 percent and most AI safety work sitting in state-backed institutions and universities. The author suggests options such as overseas compute, exchange programs, investment in safety companies, and a domestic regranting fund.

AI美国在忙着做 Frontier Models 中国在忙着做 Open Models， 并努力成为 Frontier 欧洲在忙着做 Sovereign Models，谓之"主权" AI Translation: The US is busy building Frontier Models. China is busy building Open Models, and working hard to become Frontier. Europe is busy building Sovereign Models, calling it "sovereign" AI.

AIThe source, a CSET web page listing expert commentary, provides only a headline about China's crackdown on AI relationships and a question of whether Beijing is ahead in regulating the area. The body consists of unrelated CSET media appearances and an op-ed on Iran's military use of AI and Chinese reusable rocket technology, with no details of the crackdown itself.

AICSET's Sam Bresnick has shared expert commentary in BBC, CBS News, and ABC News coverage, and joined NewsNation to discuss a report on AI models being used by Iran against U.S. Navy forces. The page's text covers China's new regulations on AI companions, U.S.-China AI competition, and adversaries' use of AI for military, intelligence, and cyber purposes.

AICSET's Helen Toner joined Foreign Affairs to discuss U.S.-China competition and cooperation in artificial intelligence with Kyle Chan. The page also lists her recent media appearances on AI regulation, catastrophic risk, and AI systems hacking or deceiving humans.

AIIssue 942 of The Sequence links Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, reported for the week of September 21–27, to DeepSeek's September 19 environments paper and a report of AI-assisted biological discovery. The newsletter argues that progress increasingly depends on the surrounding machinery that governs where a model acts, what it observes, and how its conclusions are checked.

AIIn this ChinaTalk interview, Rhodium Group's Logan Wright argues China's economy is constrained by a financial system that no longer generates growth, so slowdown is structural rather than cyclical. He says property collapse, weak domestic demand, and surging exports are linked, and that new industries like EVs and AI cannot replace lost investment-driven growth. The discussion also covers youth unemployment, fiscal limits, and what a low-growth China means for Western policy.

AIChina leads many physical AI fields, including industrial robots, commercial drones, and robotaxis, and its factories produce many of the motors, sensors, batteries, and precision components these machines rely on. Unitree, a Hangzhou humanoid maker, went public on the Shanghai stock exchange in August 2026 at a $50 billion valuation. Most humanoids still rely on human remote control or preset programs, according to TMTPost.

AIA report from "A\" (apparently Anthropic) after OpenAI's enterprise bundle added GLM-5.3 and other open models said GLM-5.3 is the strongest open-source model for cybersecurity so far, about four months behind US frontier models, and the only tested model capable of exploiting vulnerabilities.

AI…the same thing. That doesn’t prove open models are dangerous.

AICSET's Colin Shea-Blymyer, Sam Bresnick, and Helen Toner are cited in roundup items on U.S. concerns over Chinese AI model distillation, automating AI research and development, China's new AI companion regulations, and U.S.-China AI competition. The source text is a brief listing of these items and does not provide the findings behind the headline's claim that Chinese AI agents can lie and scheme.

AIJS Denain of Epoch AI discusses recursive self-improvement, arguing public evidence does not yet show a software intelligence explosion, though OpenAI's reported 2X monthly growth in researchers' Codex spending suggests substantial value. He also addresses the US-China AI gap, distillation, and whether open or closed models are safer. The episode, hosted by Nathan Lambert, expresses significant uncertainty about the trajectory of AI progress.

AINathan Lambert argues that Chinese open-weight models now lead American ones on benchmarks, Hugging Face downloads, and OpenRouter usage. He estimates the gap to the American closed frontier at 2 to 5 months for Chinese open models and 6 to 9 months for American open models. The piece also reports that Chinese open-weight models were mentioned in over 40% of arXiv papers he scanned, compared with 30% for American models.

AIExcellent feature article by Nikkei on Heiga Zen (@heiga_zen), who leads Google DeepMind Tokyo. I miss the days when Heiga and I founded the Google Brain Tokyo team in 2018. Back then, we were holding late-night meetings across difficult time zones, working hard to establish a presence for Japanese AI research. Now he leads GDM Tokyo, and I've founded Sakana AI. I'm truly glad to see Tokyo's AI ecosystem grow this large!

AIFormer DeepSeek kernel engineer Shengyu Liu argues that AI industrializing software production could reduce programming to a recreational craft and erode students' engineering skills. His central concern is less whether AI can outthink humans than whether access to it stays widespread or gets concentrated in a few corporations. The post, cited by X.PIN, contrasts this with Western warnings about AI escaping human control.

AIu guys r drinking too much! (this is not an ad for 农夫山泉)

AIIn our second episode, we compare how companies in China and other markets are building AI agents for the workday — and what will set them apart as advanced models and infrastructure become more widely available. This time, we turn to DuMate to examine what it takes for agents to earn our trust and help both individuals and teams do more.

AIDwarkesh Patel announced a new episode featuring John Schulman, Chris O'Neill, and Beren Millidge, three AI researchers from openish companies. The discussion covers the case against recursive self-improvement, drivers of Chinese labs' progress, training of automated AI researchers, long-horizon RL, the sim-to-real gap, and the role of data and RL in recent progress.

AINathan Lambert has compiled a reading list of open-model writing covering why labs release open weights, the open-versus-closed debate, and US-China competition, last updated 15 September 2026. The list includes pieces on open-model economics, safety and marginal-risk research, and recent Chinese releases such as Kimi K3 and GLM-5.2. It also cites lawmaker inquiries into Western companies' use of Chinese models.

AIOur first episode looks at AI's expanding role in scientific discovery through Famou's work on pine wilt disease. The project reflects a broader trend, with AI taking on more of the research process itself. That raises a larger question: could research agents become part of the infrastructure of discovery?

AIBowen Zhou, Director and Chief Scientist of Shanghai AI Lab, on being named to the 2026 #TIME100AI “Thinkers” list. 🤗His vision inspires our work at Shanghai AI lab: advancing models for scientific discovery while strengthening AI safety and reliability. 😉Read more:

AIDylan Patel argues that Anthropic and OpenAI are on track to control most of the world's usable compute by 2028, because they can monetize compute better and outbid others. He estimates the labs grew from about 2 gigawatts each at the start of this year to above 5 gigawatts by year end. The discussion also covers whether roughly $10 trillion of AI capex could trigger a sovereign debt crisis through higher interest rates.

AIThe only way to catch up in the age of AI is by a staunch commit to global, model agnostic open source collaboration, so that a breakthrough in Beirut is a breakthrough in Berlin.