DeepSeek reportedly closes a round of up to 106bn yuan at an unchanged valuation, US civilian agencies must rip out DeepSeek products, and Beijing sets out how AI should fit into its jobs policy.
Moonshot's Kimi K3.1 Pro nearly matches Claude Opus 5.5 on Terminal-Bench, with open weights promised by November 4.
DeepSeek open-sources DeepInfer, the inference stack it says runs its production services, under Apache-2.0.
DHS orders civilian agencies to drop DeepSeek, including third-party tools built on its open weights.
China proposed export controls on 23 AI technologies, from frontier model weights to agents, with already open-sourced work exempt.
Anthropic claims new defences cut extracted Claude reasoning by 90 to 99%, and names Zhipu and Moonshot.
The Singapore-based agent startup closes a $500M+ round co-led by Boyu and IDG, with Tencent in, and starts prepping a Hong Kong IPO.
OpenAI disrupted a coordinated adversarial distillation campaign it links to Moonshot AI / Kimi, after spikes of 16,000 extraction-pattern requests.
China's Light Origins just open-sourced an embodied brain that learned to move by watching the internet — not by burning robot hours in a lab. THE GIST Light Origins launched Light-O1, a 4B embodied foundation model pretrained on up to 120B multimodal tokens (~100,000 hours of human action) from internet video. Six scaled versions adapted to human, Unitree G1, and LightBot data; Light-O1-Preview maps language to whole-body actions, with weights and a playground public. THE TAK
China Telecom just open-sourced an agentic 29-billion-parameter MoE that claims to run on a single consumer GPU — and it's already answering customer-service tickets in production. THE GIST China Telecom AI released Xing4.0-29B-A4B: 29B total params, 4B activated, 256K context, ~15GB VRAM after quantization, with multi-step tool use and a claimed 75.0 on SWE-bench Verified; weights are on Hugging Face and GitHub under XingChen-AGI. Report: HPCwire. THE TAKE Single-GPU agents
Alibaba just waved China's 'most powerful' AI chip and a Qwen that could eclipse 10 trillion parameters — then watched its stock jump 5.1%. THE GIST At Apsara in Hangzhou, CEO Eddie Wu said Alibaba will train a next-gen model with 5–10 trillion parameters, over four times today's 2.4T Qwen3.8-Max. The company also unveiled the Zhenwu V900 from T-Head, claiming ~3× prior performance, with mass production expected early 2027, plus a push past 20GW of cloud capacity by 2032 per SCMP
Chinese robot-chip maker D-Robotics closed a $400 million Series C for on-robot inference silicon in the same week Washington's ban on Chinese humanoid imports is still biting. THE GIST D-Robotics — spun from Horizon Robotics — raised $400M led by Mirae Asset on 17 Sep 2026 for its Sunrise chips (5–560 INT8 TOPS), including the dual Brain/Cerebellum S600 at 560 TOPS. Total disclosed funding hits ~$770M; shipments exceed 8M units, with S600 adopted by 20+ embodied AI vendors inclu
Alibaba just made listening to the internet almost free — then kept the model behind its own turnstile. THE GIST Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash, an agentic omni-modal model for text, image, audio and video with a 1M-token window. It claims audio input costs fell over 98% versus Qwen3.5-Omni-Plus, at $0.15/$0.47 per million tokens — hosted only, no open weights. THE TAKE Price is the product. Cutting audio nearly to zero floods the pipe with meeting dumps and two-hour vi
Huawei just yanked its next training chip nine months forward — because waiting politely for Nvidia access was never the plan. THE GIST At Huawei Connect, rotating chairman David Wang said the Ascend 960DT training chip will be ready in Q1 2027, not Q3, with the 960PR inference part following in Q3 2027. A spokesperson told TechCrunch the family is “doubling performance” on an annual cycle, wired through Peerium and UnifiedBus SuperPod clusters. THE TAKE This is not a press-
TikTok's parent just carved out an AI drug lab and priced it like a biotech unicorn—before a single approved medicine. THE GIST ByteDance closed a $290 million round for spun-off Anew Labs at a $1.5 billion valuation, retaining about 56% ownership, Reuters sources say. HSG, IDG, and Hillhouse co-led; the unit keeps Protenix/PXDesign models plus four AI-designed candidates, including an IL-17 inhibitor. THE TAKE Consumer-app cash funding protein design is the quiet China AI-f
Washington just accused Chinese AI firms of stealing American model juice at industrial scale, then scheduled a polite AI safety chat with Beijing. Timing is not a coincidence. THE GIST US law enforcement and intelligence officials said six Chinese companies, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and Alibaba, used distillation — training cheaper models on outputs from larger US systems — against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceX, likely with government awareness. China’s commerce min
The United States is preparing to tell dozens of countries they may have to choose between Washington and Beijing in the global AI race. A draft State Department letter reviewed by Reuters warns the 35 signatories of a US AI statement that joining China’s competing framework could exclude them from a US-led coalition. Reuters reporting via The Jerusalem Post says the letter has not yet been sent and could still change. The pressure campaign turns an already competitive technology relationship
Open-weight AI models are closing the capability gap with leading closed systems, but their safety controls are not keeping pace. TechCrunch reports that SaferAI’s evaluation placed Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 only months behind OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 on cyber and biological capabilities. The same evaluation found that GLM-5.2 refused none of the offensive cyber or dual-use biology tasks it was given through Z.ai’s public API. That combination changes the argument around open weig
China’s largest memory-chip maker CXMT jumped 466% in its Shanghai debut, putting fresh capital behind Beijing’s push for AI-computing self-sufficiency.
China has launched the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation, or WAICO, with 29 founding countries, turning a Shanghai AI conference into a concrete attempt to shape global AI governance. President Xi Jinping used the event to argue for international cooperation and wider access to AI capacity, as Reuters reported. The organisation is to be headquartered in Shanghai, placing its secretariat inside China’s commercial and policy centre. Al Jazeera’s account says the founding gro
