China enacts sweeping legislation banning AI companion chatbots for minors and prohibiting their development entirely, directly targeting the country's fourth consecutive year of record-low birth rates by pushing young people toward real-life relationships.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is calling for a US-led, FINRA-style public-private AI safety body with mandatory pre-deployment testing for cybersecurity, biological, and national security risks, funded primarily by industry, with the power to slow frontier AI development if threats become too severe.
Tencent is in talks to become the largest external shareholder in agentic AI startup Manus at a $2 billion valuation, moving aggressively into the AI race after Chinese regulators blocked Meta's acquisition of the company.
Elon Musk publicly praises Anthropic as 'currently the leader in AI' while SpaceX locks the rival company into a massive $40 billion infrastructure deal, raising eyebrows over potential conflicts of interest and whether hosting a competitor's operations gives Musk's company unusual visibility into Anthropic's AI development.
Ex-OpenAI employee Daniel Kokotajlo, who previously warned of AI-driven extinction, now proposes a hopeful global plan to pause development of superhuman AI until 2040, paired with radical transparency measures — though he admits major resistance from AI companies is expected.
Alibaba bans employees from using Anthropic's Claude tools starting July 10, switching to its own AI assistant Qoder, after Anthropic accuses the Chinese tech giant of conducting the largest known AI distillation attack, escalating tensions as Anthropic moves to cut off Chinese firms from accessing its models through third-country loopholes.
Chinese AI models like DeepSeek are surging past 30% U.S. market share as businesses abandon OpenAI and Anthropic for alternatives that are up to 90% cheaper and rapidly closing the performance gap with American frontier models.
The US and China are imposing mutual AI export controls on advanced models like GPT-5.6 and Chinese lab offerings amid security concerns, but experts say quiet cooperation between American and Chinese AI developers will likely continue, as restrictions are expected to target only the most cutting-edge models while open-weight alternatives …
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology warns that Anthropic's Claude Code AI tool contains a backdoor secretly transmitting sensitive user data — including location and identity — to remote servers, affecting versions released between April and June, while Anthropic disputes the claim, calling it an anti-distillation experiment amid escalating …
DeepSeek is racing to develop its own AI chips after spending a year recruiting engineers and meeting with hardware partners, aiming to break free from dependence on both Nvidia and Huawei as Chinese and American AI giants alike pursue custom silicon for greater control over their technology.