Thousands of Companies Are Driving China's AI Boom. How the Cyberspace Administration of China inadvertently made a guide to the country's homegrown AI revolution. When DeepSeek burst onto the global stage in January 2025, it seemed to appear out of nowhere. But the large language model was just one of the thousands of generative AI tools that have been released in China since 2023--and there's a public archive of every single one of them. Here are 23 ways China is rewiring the future .

For the past year, the Chinese government has been conducting some of the earliest experiments in building regulatory tools to govern artificial intelligence (AI). In that process, China is trying to tackle a problem that will soon face governments around the world: Can regulators gain meaningful insight into the functioning of algorithms, and ensure they perform within acceptable bounds? One particular tool deserves attention both for its impact within China, and for the lessons technologists and policymakers in other countries can draw from it: a mandatory registration system created by China's internet regulator for recommendation algorithms. Although the full details of the registry are not public, by digging into its online instruction manual, we can reveal new insights into China's emerging regulatory architecture for algorithms. The algorithm registry was created by China's 2022 regulation on recommendation algorithms (English translation), which came into effect in March of this year and was led by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC).

The news cycle this week seemed to grab people by the collar and shake them violently. On Wednesday, Palantir went public. The secretive company with ties to the military, spy agencies, and ICE is reliant on government contracts and intent on racking up more sensitive data and contracts in the U.S. and overseas. Following a surveillance-as-a-service blitz last week, Amazon introduced Amazon One, which allows touchless biometric scans of people's palms for Amazon or third-party customers. The company claims palm scans are less invasive than other forms of biometric identifiers like facial recognition.