China slams US claims of'industrial-scale' AI theft Share China slams US claims of'industrial-scale' AI theft on social media China has issued a forceful reply against claims by the United States that top Chinese artificial intelligence companies have engaged in "industrial scale" theft of their US counterparts' AI models. The response on Wednesday comes after three US federal agencies - the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) - accused Chinese AI companies of exploiting American AI models to benefit their own systems. Tokens are the smallest units of text that AI models read, or generate. On Wednesday, China's Commerce Ministry dismissed the allegations and accused the US of seeking a "monopoly of the AI industry". "If the U.S. suppresses Chinese AI companies under the pretext of targeting distillation, China will take resolute countermeasures," the ministry said in a statement to the Associated Press.

American authorities are accusing Chinese companies of "distillation activities at an industrial scale." The National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have issued a joint cybersecurity advisory, warning organizations that Chinese AI companies are extracting the "proprietary functionalities and capabilities" of frontier American models. Specifically, the agencies are accusing DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI of extracting "billions of tokens across millions of exchanges/requests" from American models, including Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT, Google's Gemini and xAI's Grok, since 2024. Distillation is the term for a method in AI development in which the output of a powerful model is used to train newer ones. The warning states that DeepSeek used data and capabilities from various Claude, Gemini, GPT and Grok models to train its own, including the R1.

Cheap energy, abundant land, and proximity to Beijing have turned a city in Inner Mongolia into a crucial hub for data centers. Travel just two hours west of Beijing by train, and you'll find yourself surrounded by the rolling grasslands and ancient cinder cones of Inner Mongolia. This vast, arid land has long been China's capital of sheep farming and coal mining, but over the last few years, it has become the hottest place in the country to build an AI data center. In Ulanqab, a city in Inner Mongolia home to about 1.5 million people, nearly 100 data centers have been opened or begun construction since 2016. Chinese companies have pledged to build projects with a combined estimated capacity of 12.5 gigawatts in the city, and over 70 percent of the total commitments have been announced in just the last year, making it one of the fastest growing compute clusters in Asia, according to a research note published by Goldman Sachs last week.

Semiconductor powerhouse Taiwan has stepped up a campaign against what it sees as underhand methods being used by Chinese companies to poach Taiwanese tech workers. TAIPEI - Taiwan's government said on Wednesday it had searched dozens of locations and interviewed more than 100 people in an investigation into 17 Chinese companies suspected of illegally trying to recruit chip and other high-tech talent. Semiconductor powerhouse Taiwan, which China views as its own territory, has stepped up a campaign against what it sees as underhand methods being used by Chinese companies to poach Taiwanese tech workers. The Taiwan justice ministry's investigation bureau said in a statement that between July 13 and Aug. 4, 330 agents searched 64 locations and questioned 114 people in coordinated raids on Chinese firms suspected of illegally recruiting tech workers and operating unlicensed offices in Taiwan. Countries around the world are devoting resources to artificial intelligence research and development, and Taiwan has advantages "built on a deep foundation," the bureau said. "However, these industries have recently faced the problem of core high-tech talent being targeted and recruited away by Chinese companies, potentially eroding Taiwan's key competitive advantages," it added.

Check your subscription status, update your details and more. Powerful artificial intelligence models built by Chinese companies have gone from inducing widespread panic to being met with a shrug of the shoulders - what changed? When Chinese company DeepSeek released its open-source R1 model in January 2025, it made headlines around the world. The large language model (LLM) was reported to rival some of the most powerful AIs from US companies, but it was completely free for anyone to download. A trillion dollars was wiped off the value of US tech companies and US lawmakers immediately proposed banning it on government devices.

Solid-state batteries are safer and more capable--but harder to mass-produce. They also represent an opportunity for non-Chinese companies to get back in the game. The field of lithium batteries is currently dominated by Chinese companies like BYD and CATL. Not only do they sell the majority of batteries that go into electric vehicles and energy storage projects worldwide, they're also opening up new factories in your backyard . When companies outside China try to compete, like Europe's Northvolt, they quickly realize how hard it is .

Can China repeat its EV success with robotaxis? In Beijing's Yizhuang district, driverless vehicles have become a common sight. Robotaxis weave through traffic alongside ordinary cars, while autonomous delivery vans glide along the inside lane as they carry packages to collection points. The district has become one of China's testing grounds for autonomous driving, with companies including Baidu, WeRide and Pony.ai operating commercial robotaxi services within designated areas. Booking a ride requires little more than opening an app.

How People in China Keep Outsmarting Anthropic's Geolocation Restrictions As Anthropic tightens restrictions on access to Claude in China, users keep finding new workarounds, from proxy services to fake identities sourced on Telegram. Anthropic goes to great lengths to prevent people in China from using its AI models, but in practice, its safeguards have often failed. Over the past year, startups, researchers, and tech enthusiasts across the country have developed increasingly sophisticated workarounds to access Claude. Many of them consider it the world's most capable AI assistant, making the extra effort to obtain it worthwhile. In early June, Anthropic publicly released Fable 5, a safeguarded version of its most powerful AI model to date, Mythos.

The tech giant counts ByteDance, Ant Group, Meituan and Tencent Holdings among its Chinese customers.

LinkerBot makes dexterous robotic hands for as little as $600. It wants to become the standard for humanoids and automated factories--and eventually replace human labor altogether. If you could buy a humanoid robot for less than a smartphone, would you? Would you buy several robots to handle cooking, cleaning, babysitting, and even your job? This is the pitch being made by Zhou Yong, the 40-year-old founder and chief technology officer of LinkerBot, one of China's leading manufacturers of dexterous humanoid hands.