AI Agents
Manus Doubles to $4B With a $500M Raise and Eyes Hong Kong
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.
China AI
AI Models
OpenAI says it disrupted a Moonshot-linked distillation campaign
OpenAI disrupted a coordinated adversarial distillation campaign it links to Moonshot AI / Kimi, after spikes of 16,000 extraction-pattern requests.
AI Models
Light Origins ships Light-O1 — robots learn from 100k hours of human video
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
AI Agents
China Telecom AI drops Xing4.0: a 29B MoE agent that fits on one GPU
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
AI Infrastructure
Alibaba ships Zhenwu V900 and teases a 10-trillion-parameter Qwen
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
China AI
D-Robotics banks $400M for robot brains as Washington bans Chinese humanoids
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
AI Models
Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash: hear more, pay 98% less — weights stay locked
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
China AI
Huawei yanks Ascend 960DT forward nine months — Nvidia’s China headache just got louder
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-
AI Models
ByteDance spins Anew Labs—$290M for AI drugs at $1.5B
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
AI Regulation
Washington Accuses Chinese AI Labs of Industrial-Scale Distillation
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
AI Infrastructure
Washington draws a line in the global AI alliance race
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
AI Agents
Open-Weight AI Is Closing the Capability Gap Faster Than the Safety Gap
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
AI Infrastructure
CXMT’s IPO Turns China’s Memory-Chip Push Into a Market Test
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.
AI Regulation
China’s New AI Alliance Is a Bid to Write the Rules Beyond Washington
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
AI Models
Moonshot’s Kimi K3 Makes the Open-Model Race a Scale Contest
Chinese startup Moonshot AI has unveiled Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter system it calls the world’s largest open-weight AI model. The company says the model performs competitively with leading US systems, according to Reuters’ July 17 report. The important qualifier is open-weight, not merely large. Moonshot is promising developers and companies a model they can inspect, adapt and run through their own infrastructure rather than rent solely through an American lab’s API. The reported scale
AI Models
Apple Clears a Regulatory Gate for iPhone AI in China
Apple Intelligence has been registered with China’s cyberspace regulator for use on iPhones, removing a major regulatory obstacle to the service’s long-delayed Chinese launch. Reuters reported the registration on July 15; Apple still has to turn approval into an actual rollout. The clearance matters because Apple has been selling AI-enabled iPhones elsewhere while its flagship generative features have been absent from one of its most important markets. Reporting from Reuters and other outlets
China AI
Nvidia's AI Chip Sales Stall in China as Huawei Takes the Lead
Nvidia's advanced AI chip sales in China are stalling as domestic competitors led by Huawei capture market share, the Los Angeles Times reports. CEO Jensen Huang visited Beijing during President Trump's May summit with Xi Jinping — his celebrity status drew crowds on the street. It did not translate into chip orders. Controls imposed by Washington have restricted Nvidia's ability to sell its most advanced processors into China, and the gap is being filled by local manufacturers. Huawei's Asc
AI Regulation
Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of 28.8 Million-Exchange Claude Distillation Attack
Anthropic has disclosed to the US government that Chinese technology giant Alibaba executed what it describes as the largest known distillation attack on its Claude AI model, generating 28.8 million exchanges through nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts between April and June 2026. Source: Bloomberg The revelation, first reported by Bloomberg, comes as Anthropic's export restrictions on its Mythos model continue to create tension in global AI markets. Asian AI startups have already begun launchin