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Three charged in the US with smuggling AI chips into China

Al Jazeera

Three people associated with artificial intelligence server maker Super Micro Computer, including its cofounder, have been charged with helping smuggle at least $2.5bn-worth of United States AI technology to China in violation of export laws, according to the US Department of Justice. US prosecutors did not name Super Micro in the complaint, referring only to a "US manufacturer", but San Jose, California-based Super Micro said it was informed by federal prosecutors of the indictment on Thursday. The Justice Department said it had charged Yih-Shyan Liaw, Ruei-Tsang Chang, and Ting-Wei Sun in an indictment unsealed in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday, on allegations of a complex scheme to send US-made servers through Taiwan to other countries in Southeast Asia, where they were swapped into unmarked boxes and sent on to China. The US has had export restrictions on China for advanced AI chips since 2022. In a release, FBI Assistant Director in Charge James Barnacle said the defendants used fabricated documents, staged bogus equipment to pass audit inventories, and used a pass-through company to conceal their misconduct and true clientele list.


Visual Concepts Tokenization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Obtaining the human-like perception ability of abstracting visual concepts from concrete pixels has always been a fundamental and important target in machine learning research fields such as disentangled representation learning and scene decomposition. Towards this goal, we propose an unsupervised transformer-based Visual Concepts Tokenization framework, dubbed VCT, to perceive an image into a set of disentangled visual concept tokens, with each concept token responding to one type of independent visual concept. Particularly, to obtain these concept tokens, we only use cross-attention to extract visual information from the image tokens layer by layer without self-attention between concept tokens, preventing information leakage across concept tokens. We further propose a Concept Disentangling Loss to facilitate that different concept tokens represent independent visual concepts. The cross-attention and disentangling loss play the role of induction and mutual exclusion for the concept tokens, respectively. Extensive experiments on several popular datasets verify the effectiveness of VCT on the tasks of disentangled representation learning and scene decomposition. VCT achieves the state of the art results by a large margin.


Meta AI agent's instruction causes large sensitive data leak to employees

The Guardian

The data leak triggered a major internal security alert inside Meta. The data leak triggered a major internal security alert inside Meta. Fri 20 Mar 2026 02.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 20 Mar 2026 03.03 EDT An AI agent instructed an engineer to take actions that exposed a large amount of Meta's sensitive data to some of its employees, in the latest example of AI causing upheaval in a large tech company. The leak, which Meta confirmed, happened when an employee asked for guidance on an engineering problem on an internal forum. An AI agent responded with a solution, which the employee implemented - causing a large amount of sensitive user and company data to be exposed to its engineers for two hours.


Chaos unleashed by Trump has Europeans building bridges with China

The Japan Times

Two robots box while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz visits Unitree Robotics in Zhejiang Province, China. In the exhibition hall at Unitree Robotics in Hangzhou, Friedrich Merz smiled and applauded the martial arts display by a platoon of humanoid warriors. But when a robot boxer advanced toward him, punching the air with its red-gloved fists, the German chancellor flinched, a look of alarm crossing his face as he appeared to realize the danger posed by an autonomous fighting machine. It was also a moment that crystallized for Merz the power of China's technology, according to a person familiar with his thinking. He saw it, too, as a sign of how far behind Germany has fallen and how European Union regulation holds back their efforts to catch up, the person said, asking not to be named discussing the chancellor's private views. The trip, last month, has triggered a broader reckoning that is starting to settle in across Europe: Maybe de-risking from China is just too big a task.


Feds charge 3 in 2.5b scheme to smuggle us AI tech to China using dummy servers

FOX News

Federal prosecutors charged three men linked to Supermicro with allegedly smuggling $2.5 billion in U.S. AI technology to China using fake documents, dummy servers, and shell companies.


Trio charged over alleged plot to smuggle Nvidia chips from US to China

BBC News

A trio linked with a US technology supplier have been charged over a ploy to smuggle American artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China, the Department of Justice said on Thursday. The individuals allegedly conspired to sell billions of dollars' worth of technology to buyers in China by faking documents and using dummy equipment to slip past audits, according to the DOJ. The goods in question included Nvidia-made semiconductors, highly coveted AI chips which are subject to export controls. In August 2025, two Chinese nationals were also arrested and charged with illegally shipping millions of dollars' worth of Nvidia chips to China. The DOJ said in a statement on Thursday that it had arrested US-citizen Yih-Shyan Wally Liaw and Taiwanese citizen Ting-Wei Willy Sun, while Ruei-Tsang Steven Chang, a Taiwanese citizen, remains a fugitive.


BTS Arirang review: K-pop idols rekindle their fire

BBC News

The return of BTS is a big deal. In case you were in any doubt, just look at the frenzy surrounding the South Koreans' comeback. On Saturday, the band will kick off a sold-out, 82-date world tour with a free concert in Seoul, which is expected to be attended by more than 250,000 in-person fans and will be live-streamed on Netflix to more than 190 countries. When the tour wraps up in 2027, BTS are expected to have generated more than $1billion in revenue. Some more outlandish estimates suggest they will eclipse the $2billion haul of Taylor Swift's Eras tour.


OpenAI is putting ChatGPT, its browser and code generator into one desktop app

Engadget

The company is reportedly making a unified app to streamline the user experience. OpenAI is developing a "super app" for desktop that unifies ChatGPT, its browser and its Codex app, according to the and . A company spokesperson told the publications that OpenAI Chief of Applications Fidji Simo will lead the application revamp with assistance from OpenAI President Greg Brockman. Simo will also help the marketing team advertise the app when it comes out. OpenAI's leadership is apparently hoping that combining several products can help it streamline user experience and dedicate its resources to one project.


As OpenClaw enthusiasm grips China, school kids and retirees alike raise 'lobsters'

The Japan Times

As OpenClaw enthusiasm grips China, school kids and retirees alike raise'lobsters' Zhipu staff members help residents install and setup AutoClaw, a local version of the AI agent OpenClaw developed by Zhipu, at an office building in Beijing. BEIJING - Fan Xinquan, a retired electronics worker in Beijing, has recently started raising a lobster, hoping that the AI agent he has been training can help organize his specialized industry knowledge better than chatbots like DeepSeek. OpenClaw can actually help you accomplish many practical things, the 60-year-old said at a recent event hosted by AI startup Zhipu to teach people how to use and train the AI agent, which has gone viral in China, with its various local versions earning the lobster nickname. In the past month, OpenClaw, which can connect several hardware and software tools and learn from the data produced with much less human intervention than a chatbot, has captured the imaginations of many in China, from retirees looking for side income to AI firms hoping to generate new revenue streams. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.


14 silly, never-before-seen images from the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards

Popular Science

I witnessed this scene in the Masa Mara park where two young lions were playing with their mother, they were rolling around with her until one of them found himself in a rather uncomfortable and incongruous situation. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Accidentally running face-first into your mom's butt is funny, no matter your species. The Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards opened for entries this week and to hype up the 2026 competition, the top wildlife photography competition for not-so-serious animals has released outtakes from last year's contest. We get a caiman with butterfly accessories, a friendly damselfly, and two baboons caught in a compromising position.