Last November, the Chinese government ordered Ant Group, a business spun out of Alibaba that operates the ubiquitous Alipay mobile payments platform and other financial services, to cancel its hotly anticipated IPO at the last moment. Shortly after ride-hailing giant DiDi went ahead with an IPO in New York this summer despite government concerns, officials removed the company's app from Chinese app stores and ordered it to comply with an extensive cybersecurity review. Soon after, ByteDance, operator of wildly popular news and entertainment apps, as well as the short-video sensation TikTok outside of China, shelved its own plans for an IPO to comply with tighter government rules around data protection and security. So it's a little odd that two titans of China's artificial intelligence industry, SenseTime and Megvii, are proceeding with plans for IPOs seemingly unbothered, with listings on the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges, respectively. After a decade of unchecked growth, many Chinese tech firms now face a stark new reality, with canceled IPOs, stricter regulations, and hefty fines.

Shanghai/Beijing – Huawei Technologies founder Ren Zhengfei's global ambitions are marked in bricks and mortar at a new company campus in southern China, where the buildings are replicas from European cities. Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, the operator of short video app TikTok, has plastered his Beijing headquarters with posters including a cover of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's book "How Google Works," and has long said he will build a global firm that can compete with U.S. tech giants. But the two companies that best exemplify China's ambitions to challenge U.S. tech dominance are now stymied by strains in relations between China and countries including the United States, India, Australia and Britain. Chinese companies with world-beating technology -- including drone-maker DJI, artificial intelligence firms Megvii, SenseTime and iFlytek, surveillance camera vendor Hikvision and e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba Group -- are also among those losing access to markets. Smaller companies are being forced to rethink too. "What we are experiencing now is unprecedented," said a Chinese startup founder who has operations in the United States and India but asked not to be identified as he is now considering walking away.

Donald Trump's latest salvo against China threatens to derail a $1 billion coming-out party for a prominent startup backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., while curtailing the country's broader ambitions of leading artificial intelligence in the coming decade. The US placed eight Chinese technology giants on a US blacklist on Monday, accusing them of being implicated in human rights violations against Muslim minorities in the country's far-western region of Xinjiang. Among those singled out for sweeping American export restrictions were SenseTime Group Ltd., the world's largest AI startup, and Megvii Technology Ltd. -- two giant enterprises Beijing is counting on to spearhead advances into a revolutionary technology, aided by billions of dollars in foreign backing. The White House's actions -- announced days before sensitive trade negotiations resume in Washington -- cast a pall over not just Megvii's capital-raising effort but the burgeoning Chinese sector. Leading players like SenseTime and Megvii, already having trouble securing financing during an economic downturn, had considered international forays to sustain a sizzling pace of growth.

HONG KONG/BEIJING – Donald Trump's latest salvo against China threatens to derail a $1 billion coming-out party for a prominent startup backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., while curtailing the country's broader ambitions of leading artificial intelligence in the coming decade. The U.S. placed eight Chinese technology giants on a U.S. blacklist Monday, accusing them of being implicated in human rights violations against Muslim minorities in the country's far-western region of Xinjiang. Among those singled out for sweeping American export restrictions were SenseTime Group Ltd., the world's largest AI startup, and Megvii Technology Ltd. -- two giant enterprises Beijing is counting on to spearhead advances into a revolutionary technology, aided by billions of dollars in foreign backing. The White House's actions -- announced days before sensitive trade negotiations resume in Washington -- cast a pall over not just Megvii's capital-raising effort but the burgeoning Chinese sector. Leading players like SenseTime and Megvii, already having trouble securing financing during an economic downturn, had considered international forays to sustain a sizzling pace of growth.

Until April, Microsoft boasted of having the largest collection of faces that anyone could use to train facial-recognition algorithms. Since then, the once publicly-available dataset has quietly disappeared. As the Financial Times reports, Microsoft quietly deleted the dataset after the paper called attention to privacy and ethical issues, including use of the dataset by military researchers and Chinese surveillance firms. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune. But it told the Financial Times: "The site was intended for academic purposes. It was run by an employee that is no longer with Microsoft and has since been removed."