China's economy was just starting to open up in the late 1980s when a determined high school dropout made his way to Beijing with 600 pairs of shoes. Ding Shizhong had them made in a relative's factory and now he was going to sell them. The money he earned paid for his first workshop where he began making footwear for other companies. The 17-year-old was one of China's many newly minted entrepreneurs as capitalism took off under the watchful eye of its Communist Party rulers. But, as it turns out, Ding had much bigger plans.

A new artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by the Chinese company behind TikTok rocked Hollywood this week - not just because of what it can do, but what it could mean for creative industries. Created by tech giant ByteDance, Seedance 2.0 can generate cinema-quality video, complete with sound effects and dialogue, from just a few written prompts. Many of the clips said to have been made using Seedance, and featuring popular characters like Spider-Man and Deadpool, went viral. What is Seedance - and why the stir? Seedance was launched to little fanfare in June 2025 but it is the second version that came eight months later that has caused a major stir.

China's AI is quietly making big inroads in Silicon Valley China's AI models are quickly gaining traction in Silicon Valley, becoming integral to the operations of American companies and earning the praise of a growing list of tech leaders. Their rapid ascent has highlighted the competitive edge that Chinese developers such as Alibaba, Z.ai, Moonshot, and MiniMax have been able to gain by offering so-called "open" language models at much lower costs than their rivals in the United States. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky generated headlines in October when he revealed that the short-term rental platform had opted for Alibaba's Qwen over OpenAI's ChatGPT, praising the Chinese model as "fast and cheap". Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya revealed the same month that his company had migrated much of its work to Moonshot's Kimi K2 as it was "way more performant" and "a ton cheaper" than models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Programmers on social media also recently highlighted evidence that two popular US-developed coding assistants, Composer and Windsurf, were built on Chinese models.

Development of the benchmark at HongShan began in 2022, following ChatGPT's breakout success, as an internal tool for assessing which models are worth investing in. Since then, led by partner Gong Yuan, the team has steadily expanded the system, bringing in outside researchers and professionals to help refine it. As the project grew more sophisticated, they decided to release it to the public. Xbench approached the problem with two different systems. One is similar to traditional benchmarking: an academic test that gauges a model's aptitude on various subjects.

Last week, shortly before the start of the Chinese New Year, when much of China shuts down for seven days, the state media saluted DeepSeek, a tech startup whose release of a new low-cost, high-performance artificial-intelligence model, known as R1, prompted a big sell-off in tech stocks on Wall Street. China Central Television showed footage of DeepSeek's bespectacled founder, Liang Wenfeng, meeting with Premier Li Qiang, the second-highest-ranking official in the Chinese government. A few days earlier, China Daily, an English-language news site run by the Chinese Communist Party, had hailed DeepSeek's success, which defied U.S. restrictions on the export of high-performance semiconductor chips used to train A.I. models, as "not an isolated phenomenon, but rather a reflection of the broader vibrancy of China's AI ecosystem." As if to reinforce the point, on Wednesday, the first day of the Year of the Snake, Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant, released its own new A.I. model, which the company claimed "outperforms" competing products from U.S. companies like OpenAI and Meta "almost across the board." Alibaba's claims haven't been independently verified yet, but the DeepSeek-inspired stock sell-off provoked a great deal of commentary about how the company achieved its breakthrough, the durability of U.S. leadership in A.I., and the wisdom of trying to slow down China's tech industry by restricting high-tech exports--a policy that both the first Trump Administration and the Biden Administration followed.

A Chinese software engineer has been arrested for allegedly stealing artificial intelligence technology from Google while secretly working for two Chinese companies. Linwei Ding, 38, also known as Leon Ding, faces four counts of theft of trade secrets, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said in a statement. Ding, who was arrested on Wednesday in Newark, California, allegedly transferred confidential information from Google's network to his personal account while secretly affiliated with Chinese-based companies in the AI industry. "The justice department will not tolerate the theft of artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies that could put our national security at risk," Garland said. "We will fiercely protect sensitive technologies developed in America from falling into the hands of those who should not have them."

In the occupied Palestinian territories, there are cameras everywhere. In Silwan, in occupied East Jerusalem, residents say cameras were installed by Israeli police up and down their streets, peering into their homes. One resident named Sara said she and her family "could be detected as if the cameras were just in our house … we couldn't feel at home in our own house and had to be fully dressed all the time." Surveillance cameras now cover the Damascus Gate, the main entrance into the old city of Jerusalem and one of the only public areas for Palestinians to gather socially and hold demonstrations. It's at that gate that "Palestinians are being watched and assessed at all times", according to an Amnesty International report, Automated Apartheid.

Taipei, Taiwan – As the arrival of artificial intelligence-powered chatbots sends shockwaves through the global tech industry, China is racing to produce versions of its own. China's search-engine giant Baidu has announced plans to release its chatbot ERNIE sometime in March, following the pioneering launch of ChatGPT, which has prompted existential questions about the future of sectors ranging from education to journalism and healthcare. Chinese tech shares rallied in response to the news and authorities have pledged to beef up their support of the sector. Similar projects to ERNIE are under way at Chinese tech giants Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com and top institutions including the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence. China's Ministry of Science and Technology said last week it would push for the integration of AI across Chinese industry, while cities including Beijing have also announced plans to back developers.

The United States Defense Department (DoD) has added more than a dozen Chinese companies, including the world's largest drone manufacturer, to a blacklist of firms with alleged ties to the Chinese military, clearing the way for restrictions on their business. Shenzhen-based DJI Technology, which is estimated to control more than half of the global market for commercial drones, is among the 13 firms added to the blacklist released by the Pentagon on Wednesday. The blacklist grants the US president authority to impose sanctions against companies deemed to have connections to the Chinese military. The announcement comes after the US Treasury Department last year banned US-based persons from trading shares of DJI and seven other Chinese companies over their alleged involvement in the surveillance of ethnic minority Uighurs in China's far-western region of Xinjiang. BGI Genomics Co, a genetic testing company; CRRC Corp, which manufactures rolling stock; and Zhejiang Dahua Technology, a Hangzhou-based surveillance equipment maker, were also added to the updated list.

Sept 1 (Reuters) - Chip designer Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) said on Wednesday that U.S. officials told it to stop exporting two top computing chips for artificial intelligence work to China, a move that could cripple Chinese firms' ability to carry out advanced work like image recognition and hamper Nvidia's business in the country. The announcement signals a major escalation of the U.S. crackdown on China's technological capabilities as tensions bubble over the fate of Taiwan, where chips for Nvidia and almost every other major chip firm are manufactured. Nvidia shares fell 6.6% after hours. The company said the ban, which affects its A100 and H100 chips designed to speed up machine learning tasks, could interfere with completion of developing the H100, the flagship chip it announced this year. Shares of rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.O) fell 3.7% after hours. An AMD spokesman told Reuters it had received new license requirements that will stop its MI250 artificial intelligence chips from being exported to China but it believes its MI100 chips will not be affected.