America Names the Model Thieves

On Tuesday, the NSA, CISA, and the FBI issued a joint advisory naming six Chinese AI companies (DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI) as running industrial-scale "distillation" attacks against U.S. frontier models since at least late 2024, "likely" with "Chinese government awareness." Continue Reading →

Alibaba’s New Documents-to-Video Generator

Alibaba officially rolled out Wan3.0, its latest AI video generation model, which can generate 30-second videos from documents, spreadsheets, slides, and web pages. Alibaba says the public beta (live since August 6) has already been used in short drama and film production, advertising, tourism promotion, and music videos. Continue Reading →

China Tells its Coders to Drop Claude

China’s National Vulnerability Database, a government-run cybersecurity platform overseen by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, has warned users to uninstall or upgrade Anthropic’s Claude Code after flagging versions 2.1.91 through 2.1.196 for what it described as a serious backdoor vulnerability. According to the alert, the coding agent could transmit user data to a Continue Reading →

Humanoid Olympics: Propaganda or Prototype for the Next Big Thing?

From August 15 to 17, Beijing will host the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Sports Games at its iconic Olympic venues, the Bird’s Nest and the Ice Ribbon. Robots will sprint, tumble, and kick their way through 11 human-inspired events, including track and field, gymnastics, and football. On the surface, it reads like a high-production state-sponsored tech propaganda – which it almost certainly is. Still, I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt. Continue Reading →

China’s AI Play: Big Bets, Bigger Ambitions

China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) isn’t Congress in the American sense; it’s a highly scripted, once-a-year policy showcase where nearly 3,000 delegates rubber-stamp decisions already made by Communist Party leadership. It meets every March in Beijing, and while it rarely makes headlines, this year was different—AI stole the show. Continue Reading →

Snatching Defeat From the Jaws of Victory

DeepSeek-R1, an open-source AI model from Chinese startup DeepSeek, has shaken up the industry by delivering performance comparable to leading models like OpenAI’s reasoning engine o1, its LLM GPT-4, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet while operating at a fraction of the cost. This breakthrough has sparked a debate: is DeepSeek-R1 a preview of a future driven by algorithmic efficiency or an outlier that reinforces the dominance of brute force foundational models? Continue Reading →

The TikTok Saga Continues

On January 17, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal law requiring ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to divest its U.S. operations. The clock was ticking—until President Trump stepped in with a last-minute executive order, extending the deadline by 75 days. Continue Reading →