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China
China's Cyberspace Administration enforces generative-AI content rules, mandatory algorithm registration, and deepfake labeling requirements as part of a state-directed AI strategy — tracked daily.
Beyond Dubai’s Bling, Chinese Students See a Future
Drawn by affordable international schooling rather than glitz, Chinese students in the UAE are quietly rethinking how they see education, work, and future opportunities.
The Three Nevers: To Invade Taiwan, China Would Have to Make Military History Thrice
The amphibious invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, remains the largest and most complex amphibious operation in history. On the first day alone, Allied forces landed eight divisions, including five amphibious assault and three airborne, totaling roughly 160,000 personnel. That force more than doubled within days.Normandy was unprecedented in scale but not in kind. A Taiwan invasion would present the reverse problem: Taiwan’s size is not the unprecedented part — the operational challenges are.
UBTECH unveils consumer humanoid robot U1, says orders secure 11,000 ahead of first deliveries
Chinese robotics company UBTECH on Tuesday unveiled its first full-sized consumer humanoid robot, the U1 Series, marking a major push into the home robotics market as demand for AI-powered companions gains momentum. The launch event, held in Shenzhen, introduced the U1 Series under UBTECH’s new consumer brand, UWorld. More than 50 robot models with different […]
NVIDIA expands robotics hiring in China, opens roles in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen
US chipmaker NVIDIA announced a major recruitment drive for its robotics team, with openings across four core areas of embodied AI, simulation, deployment, and solution architecture. Positions are available in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. According to NVIDIA, the embodied AI team will focus on key technologies and applications including dexterous manipulation, human body modeling using […]
We Need to Talk About AI: China’s Therapists Lose Patients to Tech
As more Chinese turn to AI tools for counseling, mental health professionals warn that the technology could be making people worse.
Investigation Uncovers China’s Underground Height Surgery Market
The cosmetic procedure has been banned in China for two decades. But underground, a market has continued to flourish.
Is AI Humanity’s Last Exam? (Robert Wright, Curt Mills, and Andrew Day)
Listen now | 0:00 Grandpa Bob and author Bob 3:30 Why Bob stopped being an AI doom skeptic 6:59 Can AI solve China’s demographic crisis? 14:09 The irony of China’s open-source AI strategy 17:12 Recursive self-improvement and the singularity 23:33 The Burkean conservative case against AI 38:00 Are we becoming AI meat puppets? 46:32 Google Maps, AI, and the death of interhuman reliance 51:24 Was Pete Hegseth’s military strategy written by a chatbot? 56:45 Trump and Iran: Peace? Wider war? Other? 1
Trump administration’s AI crackdown opens door for China to close gap
CSET’s Sam Bresnick shared his expert insight in an article published by CNBC. The article examines U.S. AI restrictions and China’s rapid progress in closing the gap with leading American models. The post Trump administration’s AI crackdown opens door for China to close gap appeared first on Center for Security and Emerging Technology .
When cheap AI becomes a secret weapon
CSET’s Sam Bresnick shared his expert insight in a newsletter segment published by Politico. The article examines the evolving U.S.–China AI competition, focusing on how cost-efficient Chinese AI models are beginning to gain traction globally and what that could mean for the long-term balance of technological and economic power in artificial intelligence. The post When cheap AI becomes a secret weapon appeared first on Center for Security and Emerging Technology .
Mapping America’s Domestic Drone Supply Chain
The extent of China’s drone dominance — and how to decouple from it — has long been a source of debate and anxiety in Washington. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reignited controversy by publishing a visual analysis of military quadcopter components, exploring China’s advantages in parts manufacturing and cost. The director of the Defense Innovation Unit objected to the report, stating on X that “By leaving out the dozens of U.S. companies that have plunged into drone component manufacturing
Momenta launches Hong Kong IPO with GIC, Fidelity and BlackRock as cornerstone investors
Chinese autonomous driving company Momenta launched its Hong Kong public offering on June 29, with plans to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange’s main board under the ticker 6880.HK. The company is offering 19.94 million Class A ordinary shares at HK$295.60 each, aiming to raise about HK$5.89 billion ($751 million) before any over-allotment option […]
Import AI 463: Self-improving robots; a 10k Chinese GPU cluster; and an elegiac essay for the human era
What eras bookend our interregnum?
🔮 Fifty years of Moore’s Law wasn’t fast enough for AI #580
Plus: The frontier is already agentic; unlocking innovation; new drugs, food apps without food & Chinese AI job market++
Mercedes-Benz reportedly expands job cuts in China to R&D and manufacturing
Beijing Mercedes-Benz Sales & Service Co. plans to reduce its workforce from about 900 to under 600 through two rounds of adjustments, with roughly 10% of the process already completed, according to sources. The move is not an isolated case. Since 2025, Mercedes-Benz’s operations in China have carried out personnel optimization across multiple business units, […]
Forget the score, MWC Shanghai’s humanoid robot penalty shootout put embodied AI to the test
One of the biggest crowd-pullers at MWC Shanghai 2026 was a fully autonomous humanoid robot penalty shootout, rather than a smartphone launch or an AI keynote. Held over two days at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre, the competition drew more than 10,000 spectators as eight Chinese embodied AI teams battled through nearly 100 rounds […]
Cross-Platform Chinese Offensive Comment Detection via Dual-Threshold Hard Example Mining
Cross-platform deployment of offensive comment detection for Chinese social media suffers performance degradation. The paper proposes a dual-threshold hard mining method to address this. First, the clean-Chinese-base RoBERTa is finetuned on COLD to establish a binary baseline for fair comparison. Second, a three-class fine-labeled test set covering Weibo, Xiaohongshu, Tieba, and Zhihu is constructed, domain distances from the source are quantified using Jaccard and Proxy-A Distance, as well as t
Poultry Returns: Botanist Fights Off the Desert With 50,000 Chickens
While studying degraded grasslands in northern China, one scientist started keeping chickens — and discovered a secret weapon against desertification.
STAT+: At BIO 2026, industry wrestled with Washington politics, and making AI work better
Biotech executives reveal concerns over Chinese biotech, the profitability of AI, and the durability of Trump's drug price moves.
JuZhou 1.0 Technical Report: The First Edge-Native Text-to-Image Foundation Model Trained Entirely on China-Developed AI Accelerators
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models typically require substantial computational resources and cloud infrastructure, posing significant challenges for edge deployment in terms of latency, cost, and user privacy. We present JuZhou 1.0, an ultra-lightweight T2I foundation model designed for fully offline, on-device execution. JuZhou 1.0 achieves its efficiency through four key designs: (1) a compact image-generation backbone consisting of a 0.385B-parameter denoising U-Net and a 1.90M-parameter di
NewsBreak: Most downloaded US news app has Chinese roots and 'writes fiction' using AI
LONDON, June 5 (Reuters) - Last Christmas Eve, NewsBreak, opens new tab, a free app with roots in China that is the most downloaded news app in the United States, published an alarming piece about a small town shooting. It was headlined "Ch ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1554#7451)
Designing Drones for Africa
This exclusive Cogs of War interview is with Maxwell Maduka, the co-founder and chief engineer of Terra Industries, an African defense technology company building autonomous drone and counter-drone systems designed for the continent’s operating conditions. As cheap imported airframes flood African markets and non-state actors employ drones across the Sahel, we asked Max why Terra is betting on Africa building its own defense industrial base.Cheap Turkish and Chinese drones and sensor systems hav
Alibaba reportedly seeks sale of gaming unit Lingxi Games, valuation starts at $1.03 billion
Alibaba Group is planning to sell its gaming unit Lingxi Games, according to people familiar with the matter. Alibaba has approached at least five potential buyers, including Chinese game developers 37 Interactive Entertainment, China Ruyi, Century Huatong and Giant Network, as well as two private equity firms, the sources said. The business is being marketed […]
Student Sues Chinese Airline After 10-Minute Flight Change
The 19-year-old said he believed the flight change policy was unfair to customers, who have to bear the burden of changes in departure times, while airlines face no cost.
The impact of generative artificial intelligence on academic development of Chinese students in humanities and social sciences
Generative artificial intelligence(GenAI) is reshaping learning in higher education, with particularly pronounced implications for the humanities and social sciences(HSS), where learning outcomes are commonly expressed through written and interpretive forms that align closely with GenAI's capabilities. Yet, systematic evidence on the educational impacts of GenAI on HSS students remains limited. Addressing this gap, this study draws on a large-scale survey of HSS students in China to examine its
World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO): Mapping an Emerging Institution in the Global AI Governance Regime Complex
Who sets the rules for artificial intelligence, and on what terms, has become a defining question of global governance. For several years that contest ran through principles and ethics codes; it now runs through institutions. China's proposed World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) is the most consequential recent entrant and the least examined. We place WAICO within the emerging regime complex for AI and argue that its importance lies not in any single commitment but in t
Cultural Targets, Structural Frames, Binding Morals: A Cross-Lingual Audit of Online Hate in Multicultural Singapore
Multicultural Singapore hosts overlapping language publics (English, Chinese, and Malay) that discuss the same out-groups in parallel, a natural setting to ask whether online hate shares a structure across languages and whether what a community $\textit{produces}$ is what it $\textit{amplifies}$. From a Singapore-centric 2025 Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube corpus (31.0M items; 1.76M comments mentioning eleven identity groups), we benchmark eight open large language models as hate annotators again
Understanding the "Airport" Censorship Circumvention Ecosystem in China
In China, a burgeoning underground market sells citizens subscription-based censorship circumvention proxies known as ''airports''. We present the first systematic study of this ecosystem, combining user surveys, social media analysis, and active network measurements. We find that airports are by far the most popular off-the-shelf censorship circumvention tool in China, used by over half of our 1,667~survey respondents, who cite their ease of use, performance, and access to geo-restricted servic
From Democracies to Autocracies: How AI Systems Enable Authoritarianism by Design
AI-enabled authoritarianism is not confined to autocracies. In this paper, we provide greater transparency by investigating and mapping the lifecycles of six AI systems deployed in different political regimes, ranging from the US to China. By drawing on an extensive range of sources (academic publications, investigative research reports, third-party evaluations, media interviews, government procurement notices), we conduct a systematic, qualitative comparison across systems to identify the criti
CHILLGuard: Towards Fine-Grained Chinese LLM Safety Guardrail with Scalable Data Construction and Model-aware Preference Alignment
Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns. While existing LLM safety guardrails excel in English or multilingual settings, they lack adaptation to Chinese-specific regulatory policies, cultural context and linguistic nuances, failing to support fine-grained risk classification for diverse deployment needs. In this paper, we introduce a 5-macro, 31-micro category fine-grained risk taxonomy for Chinese scenarios, and build CHI
Jury Duty: Calibration and Orientation Failures in MLLM-as-a-Judge Under Cultural Ambiguity
MLLM-as-a-Judge is conventionally validated by agreement with human annotations, but this metric is undefined when the human pool is culturally heterogeneous. We introduce VOIR DIRE, a multimodal benchmark of 626 culturally paired image--prompt artifacts spanning U.S. and mainland Chinese contexts across food, fashion, and architecture, with annotator pools that are within-pool reliable (a = 0.86/0.74) but cross-pool divergent on evaluation (Q1 r = -0.12). Across six MLLMs, the bias decomposes i
System Report for CCL25-Eval Task 5: New Dataset and LoRA-Fine-Tuned Qwen2.5
Recently, large language models (LLMs) have achieved promising progress in the fields of classical Chinese translation and the generation of classical poetry. However, domain-specific research on precise translation and affective-semantic understanding of classical poetry remains limited. The main challenge is that most studies treat the poetic appreciation task as a general-domain problem, neglecting the distinctive features of poetic appreciation, while high-quality and domain-specific dataset
Charting cross-cultural AI perception: An exploratory study of expectations, risk–benefit trade-offs, and values in Germany and China
=.839). Visual cognitive maps illustrate these contrasts, offering new perspectives on how cultural contexts shape AI acceptance. Our findings suggest factors influencing public perception and provide pointers for future research to align AI with societal values and promote equitable and culturally sensitive integration of AI technologies.
AlignAtt4LLM: Fast AlignAtt for Decoder-Only LLMs at IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation Task
We describe AlignAtt4LLM, an IWSLT 2026 simultaneous speech translation system for English to German, Italian, and Chinese. The system is a synchronous cascade: Qwen3-ASR with forced alignment produces an incrementally updated source transcript, and Gemma-4 E4B-it translates that prefix under an MT-side AlignAtt policy. To our knowledge, this is the first application of AlignAtt to a decoder-only LLM, where the encoder-decoder cross-attention used by earlier AlignAtt systems is absent. We recove
Institutional Trust and the Domestic AI Advantage: Evidence from DeepSeek and ChatGPT Users in China
Public trust in generative artificial intelligence exhibits increasingly divergent patterns across national contexts, yet prevailing research largely overlooks the macro-structural forces underlying this divergence. This study argues that trust in AI is not merely a technical response to performance but a product of institutional refraction. We propose an ``Institutional Prism'' framework to demonstrate how institutional trust shapes user trust in domestic (DeepSeek) and global (ChatGPT) large l
AI Sovereignty as National Learning Capacity: A Human-Centered Learning Mechanics Viewpoint on France, the United States, and China
Artificial intelligence in France is often discussed through separate dimensions such as investment, compute, regulation, employment, sovereignty, and education. This viewpoint paper proposes a unified interpretation: France can be analyzed as a national AI learning system. Building on Human-Centered Learning Mechanics (HCLM), we use HCLM not as a validated econometric model, but as a conceptual and diagnostic lens for interpreting national AI development as a balance between information injecti
SuiChat-CN: Benchmarking Contextual Suicide Risk Assessment in Chinese Group Chats
Suicide is a critical global public health challenge, causing approximately 720,000 deaths each year and calling for timely, effective prevention strategies. Existing computational studies primarily focus on post-based social media platforms such as Twitter and Weibo, leaving instant messaging environments such as Telegram underexplored. Yet group chats pose distinct challenges: messages are short, fragmented, multi-party, and often rely on implicit or culturally specific expressions, making iso
Snippet-Driven Supply Chain Discovery with LLMs: Scaling Visibility in China
Financial and economic research often relies on structured supply-chain disclosures and commercial databases. In China, supplier--customer disclosure is typically limited to major partners of listed firms, leaving unlisted firms and long-tail inter-firm links poorly captured in structured data. Public web evidence can partly complement this gap through corporate, government, and trade-media disclosures; however, full-text web mining at scale is costly because pages are often inaccessible or expe
Generative AI impacts on intra-urban inequality and skill premium in Beijing
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is the first automation wave to reach high-cognitive tasks at scale, yet its effects on intra-urban inequality remain largely unknown. Using 5 million job postings from Beijing (2018--2024), we construct a neighborhood-level GenAI Exposure Index by aggregating task-level assessments from five leading large language models. We examine the spatial, structural and causal mechanisms of this shock. We find that GenAI exposure is highly concentrated in the ci
It's the humans, not the data: Geopolitical bias in LLMs originates in post-training, amplified by the language of the prompt
It has generally been assumed that geopolitical bias in language models originates from the training data used during the pre-training phase. We tested seven open-weight LLM pairs consisting of the base model (pre-training only) and the chat model (pre-training and post-training) from seven labs on a paired-scenario forced-choice probe over 28 country pairs in English, French, and Chinese, and found that geopolitical bias originates in post-training rather than in pre-training. Across seven AI l
Brain-LLM Alignment Tracks Training Data, Not Typology
Brain-LLM alignment is well established in English, yet the brain's language network is neuroanatomically universal across languages. Does alignment also generalize cross-linguistically, and what governs the variation? We test this using fMRI data from 112 participants across English, Chinese, and French (the Le Petit Prince corpus) and seven LLMs spanning English-dominant, Chinese-dominant, and multilingual architectures. Our central finding is that training-language dominance, not an inherent