Updated Oct 29

International Competition

Both governments are tightening what crosses the border, and Beijing has now put a date on part of it. On 19 October China issued export controls on long-range drones and their engines, autopilots and autonomous-navigation technology, effective 18 November. Its proposed controls on 23 AI technologies, from large models to computing clusters, remain open for comment until 15 November.

In Washington, a Homeland Security order published on 20 October bars DeepSeek’s products from federal civilian agencies, under the supply-chain law also used against Anthropic. DHS says data held in China could give Beijing intelligence on Americans; that is its own assessment. On 19 October the State Department sanctioned Shanghai Zhisuan, a start-up founded by a former Google engineer, and the fund that backed it, for trade-secret theft — the government’s findings, not a court’s. The Treasury has issued its first penalty for an unreported American stake in a Chinese AI company, $200,000, and on 26 October proposed banning such investments outright; that rule is not yet adopted.

Washington and Beijing agreed in September to a standing AI dialogue, with a first exchange due in November.

New Oct 29

The whole story4 chapters

The state of it — as of October 29, 2026

November

when the first exchange of the new US–China AI dialogue is due

6 named, 0 charged

Chinese AI firms accused by three US agencies of distilling American models

83%

of identified federal AI contract dollars, 2019–2025, spent by Defense

Earlier this month

Oct 20, 2026

DeepSeek Is Ordered Out of Washington’s Civilian Agencies, Under the Law Used Against Anthropic

The Department of Homeland Security published an order on October 20 removing DeepSeek’s products from federal civilian agencies’ systems and barring them from civilian procurement. The order also reaches third-party products ‘developed using DeepSeek implementations’. Its authority is the 2018 Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act, the statute also invoked against Anthropic. Accounts differ on when it was signed: CNBC says July 24, while CyberScoop cites a June 26 letter. The law firm Crowell & Moring reports parallel orders covering defense and intelligence agencies. DHS’s reasons are its own assessment, not an independent finding. It says data held in China and open to Beijing ‘could produce actionable intelligence’ on Americans. China’s foreign ministry said it opposes ‘the over-generalization of national security’. Congress had already barred DeepSeek from intelligence-community systems in December 2025.

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Federal RegisterCyberScoopCNBCBBC NewsCrowell & Moring

Oct 19, 2026

Washington Sanctions a Chinese Start-Up It Says Was Built on Google’s Secrets — and the Fund That Seeded It

The State Department on October 19 designated five China-based entities under the 2022 Protecting American Intellectual Property Act: Shanghai Zhisuan Technology, founded in 2023 by former Google engineer Linwei Ding, and the MiraclePlus incubator with three of its funds, which State says seeded Zhisuan after Ding claimed it could replicate Google’s ‘super intelligence’ infrastructure. These are the government’s findings, not a court’s. The five are blocked and cut off from US banking and investment. Ding was convicted in January; AP reports a judge later dismissed the espionage counts, which the government is appealing. Beijing promised unspecified ‘necessary measures’.

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United States Department of StateU.S. Department of the TreasuryU.S. Department of the TreasuryExport Compliance DailyYahoo Finance

NewOct 19, 2026

China Requires Licences to Export Long-Range Drones and Their Autonomy Technology

China’s commerce ministry, customs administration and the military’s equipment department issued Announcement 49 on 19 October: from 18 November, exporting specified drones, engines, autopilots, communications gear, and flight-control and autonomous-navigation technology needs a licence. Coverage includes beyond-line-of-sight drones with three hours’ endurance or 300 km range, and counter-drone and sense-and-avoid technology, according to a trade-compliance notice and an Indian think tank citing Bloomberg. Unlike Beijing’s proposed controls on 23 AI technologies, still open for comment until 15 November, this one is final.

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Expeditors InternationalObserver Research Foundation

Oct 8, 2026

First Guilty Plea in a $2.5 Billion Server-Diversion Case

Ting-Wei ‘Willy’ Sun, a contractor tied to Super Micro Computer, pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court on October 8 to four counts, including conspiracies to violate export controls, smuggle goods and obstruct justice. It is the first plea in a case in which prosecutors say a group diverted about $2.5 billion of servers carrying Nvidia AI chips to China from around October 2023 — an allegation, not a finding. Prosecutors call Sun the scheme’s ‘fixer’, who staged dummy servers and misled a Commerce Department inspector. Co-founder Yih-Shyan ‘Wally’ Liaw and a former sales manager, indicted with him in March, remain charged; the company is not a defendant. The account is Reuters’ court report, relayed second-hand.

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Yahoo Finance

NewOct 7, 2026

Treasury Fines a US Firm for an Unreported Stake in a Chinese AI Start-Up

The Treasury announced on 7 October the first penalty under its program screening American investment in Chinese technology: $200,000 against Amidi, LLC, the parent of Plug and Play Tech Center, imposed in July. A Chinese fund it controls put about $92,478 into Noematrix, a Shanghai developer of AI, robotics and embodied intelligence, in April 2025, and Amidi did not notify the Treasury as the rules require. The Treasury says it found the deal through its own monitoring. The fine is for failing to report, not for a prohibited investment.

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U.S. Department of the TreasuryHolland & Knight LLP

Oct 5, 2026

The Pentagon Says It Has Stopped Using Claude, Weeks Past Its Own Deadline

A Defense Department official told the BBC on October 5 that the department ‘has ceased the use of Anthropic products’. The statement answered a question the BBC put after former officials and contractors said Claude was still widely used as recently as the week before — including inside Palantir’s Maven Smart System in operations against Iran. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had set a six-month phase-out on February 27, which ran out in late August; the BBC says it is not clear why there was a delay. The cessation rests on the department’s word alone. Anthropic declined to comment.

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BBC News

Sep 30, 2026

Tencent Rents 100,000 Chips It Cannot Buy

Tencent has signed a five-year lease with Oracle for about 100,000 advanced AI chips that are not available in China, housed in several Oracle data centres in Southeast Asia, the Financial Times reported on September 30. The deal is put at about $7 billion with roughly 30% paid up front, and is Tencent’s largest overseas lease. Such leases are legal under current US rules, the FT says. Reuters could not verify the report and neither company commented. The account rests on the FT’s unnamed sources alone; the chips’ maker and the host countries are not given.

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The Business Times (Singapore)Yahoo FinanceTom's Hardware

This quarter

Our reading

Sep 26, 2026

One Dialogue, Two Names: Washington Says ‘Super Intelligence’, Beijing Says ‘AI’

The two governments published separate accounts of what Trump and Xi agreed on AI, and the sentences run in parallel until the nouns. The White House fact sheet says the countries ‘established the U.S.-China Super Intelligence (SI) Dialogue’, that ‘the next exchange will occur by November 2026’, and that ‘the two leaders agreed to use the term “super intelligence” rather than “artificial intelligence”’. China’s foreign ministry says ‘the two sides agree on the establishment of the China-U.S. AI Dialogue’ and that ‘the next exchange will occur in November 2026’. Its text does not contain the words ‘super intelligence’, and has no sentence about agreed terminology. Each account also carries something the other lacks. Beijing’s says the two militaries ‘agree to conclude a memorandum of understanding on crisis communication and prevention as soon as possible’; Washington’s does not mention it. Washington’s says the president ‘advocated for trilateral arms control negotiations between the United States, Russia, and China’; Beijing’s does not mention that. Neither mentions semiconductors or the Entity List.

Compared

The White HouseMinistry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC

Sep 26, 2026

The two countries established the U.S.-China Super Intelligence (SI) Dialogue to exchange views on risks and benefits related to SI. The next exchange will occur by November 2026.

— The White House

The White House fact sheet on Xi Jinping’s state visit puts a deadline on the new dialogue. Beijing’s account of the same agreement says the next exchange will occur ‘in November 2026’. The precedent is not encouraging: the AI talks the two leaders agreed to at their May summit in Beijing were never formalised.

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The White HouseMinistry of Foreign Affairs of the PRCAsia Society Policy Institute

Sep 25, 2026

Washington and Beijing Agree to Talk About AI, and to Keep a Line Open

Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington on September 23–25 gave the two governments a formal channel on AI: a standing dialogue on the technology’s risks and benefits, a next exchange due in November, and a bilateral line for reporting AI incidents. The AI talks the leaders agreed to in May had never been formalised. There was no joint statement; each side published its own account, and neither mentions chips or the Entity List. The BBC found no indication that semiconductor restrictions would ease. The trade truce was extended two months, to January 10. What counts as an incident, and who must report it how fast, is undefined. A Chinese state-media account says the two sides mainly set out positions and left specifics for November, and that the channel ‘cannot remain merely a verbal commitment’.

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The White HouseMinistry of Foreign Affairs of the PRCBBC NewsAxiosAsia Society Policy InstituteCenter for Strategic and International StudiesPekingnology

Sep 25, 2026

An Appeals Court Lets the Pentagon Blacklist an American AI Lab

A federal appeals panel ruled 2–1 on September 25 that the Pentagon may designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk, barring the military and its contractors from using Claude. Balancing the risks is for ‘the President and the Secretary of War’, Judge Gregory Katsas wrote. Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson dissented: the law does not reach ‘a contractor’s honest and upfront enforcement of restrictions’. Anthropic had sought assurance its models would not be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance; the department wanted all lawful uses. A San Francisco judge ruled a parallel designation illegal in August, and that ruling stands. The panel paused its decision so Anthropic could seek rehearing; it petitioned for one on October 13.

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CNBCABC NewsCNBC

Sep 25, 2026

Taiwan’s Military Intelligence Buys an AI System to Watch the PLA From Orbit

A military intelligence unit in Taiwan’s defence ministry, the Communication Development Office, awarded ThinkTron, a Taiwan–Japan joint venture, a NT$46.55 million (US$1.45 million) contract for an AI system that analyses satellite imagery of Chinese military movements, according to a ministry procurement notice reported by the South China Morning Post. The contract took effect on 25 September, with completion due by the end of April. The ministry’s account of what the system will do — scanning wide areas in minutes — is its own description of the purchase, not a tested result.

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South China Morning Post

Sep 23, 2026

Trump is the very first president who has negotiated away our export controls, our national security, to the Chinese. Put simply, Trump is handing China the technology it needs to win the AI race.

— Chuck Schumer

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, at a news conference with Senators Elizabeth Warren and Andy Kim on the day of Xi’s state visit, pressing for floor votes on three bipartisan chip export-control bills. All three sit in a defence bill that Senate Democrats blocked in July, and none is law. The White House replied that it runs ‘the most rigorous export control regime in modern history’. Nvidia says under 1% of its second-quarter data-centre revenue came from H200 sales in China.

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Roll CallThe Hill

Sep 22, 2026

Where Washington’s AI Contract Money Goes: $4.1 Billion, 83% of It Defense

A CSIS count of federal contract records finds 2,255 AI-related awards between fiscal 2019 and 2025, worth $4.1 billion in obligations — $1.16 billion of it in fiscal 2025 alone. The Department of Defense accounts for 83% of the dollars and about 64% of the contracts. The money is concentrated: Palantir and Scale AI together hold $597 million, about 15% of the total from under 1% of the contracts. CSIS is plain about the limits. The count covers prime contracts only, leaves out grants and Other Transaction Agreements, and likely misses intelligence-community spending, so the real figure ‘may be considerably higher’.

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Center for Strategic and International Studies

Sep 21, 2026

On Three Public Measures, Open-Weight AI Is Now Mostly Chinese

Three counts published on September 21 by the researcher Nathan Lambert show where open-weight AI comes from. On OpenRouter, weekly traffic through open models grew from about 1 trillion tokens to about 80 trillion in a year, and the Chinese share rose from about 70% to more than 80%. On the Artificial Analysis index as of September 14, the best American open models scored 26, behind fifteen Chinese ones led by GLM-5.3 at 45. On Hugging Face, Chinese open models have about 3.2 billion cumulative downloads, twice the American total. Lambert’s own caution: OpenRouter is an approximation, not a census.

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Nathan Lambert

Sep 19, 2026

AI Governance Is One Item on a Three-Item Agenda

Scott Bessent and Jamieson Greer met Vice Premier He Lifeng in New York over the weekend of September 19–20, the last preparatory round before Trump hosted Xi. AI governance shared the agenda with critical minerals and a tariff truce then due to expire on November 10. Bessent said afterwards that the US had proposed a mechanism for the two governments to notify each other of AI incidents that reach ‘a national security level’. Xinhua’s account called the talks ‘candid, in-depth and constructive’ and did not mention it. Greer said export controls ‘were not on the agenda’. Going in, the high-level AI talks Trump and Xi agreed to in May had never been confirmed. In the same weeks China barred some technology workers from leaving the country, and Anthropic reported Chinese labs secretly routing requests to Claude.

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Tech TimesAxiosNBC NewsBBC NewsThe HillAxios

Sep 16, 2026

The United States remains the leader in AI. And we are open to discussions on avoiding shared risks and avoiding bifurcation of our two systems. We expect our discussions to cover both open and closed weight models.

— Scott Bessent

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AxiosNBC NewsThe White HouseMinistry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC

Sep 8, 2026

Three US Agencies Name Six Chinese AI Companies. It Is an Advisory, Not a Case.

The NSA, CISA and FBI jointly named DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI on September 8. Their advisory says that, ‘likely with Chinese government awareness’, the six extracted ‘billions of tokens across millions of exchanges’ from American frontier models since at least late 2024, through ‘aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities at an industrial scale’. It lists twelve US models for DeepSeek in its text and fourteen in its table, eighteen for Moonshot, and says Moonshot used Claude Fable 5 data to train Kimi-K3. The conduct it describes is a breach of the companies’ terms of use through proxy resellers, and a threat to ‘U.S. technological leadership’; the text cites no statute, publishes no evidence and says nothing of China’s military. No charge, sanction or penalty accompanies it. Its advice to American labs is to quietly serve suspected distillers degraded answers. China’s commerce ministry called the allegations groundless.

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US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security AgencyUS National Security AgencyTech Times

Sep 2, 2026

The president showed an olive branch, and it hasn't been taken up. So I think we're just going to let it lie.

— Howard Lutnick True

At a G20 press conference on September 2, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Beijing has not taken up January's eased H200 licensing — "The Chinese haven't really taken it up" — because it is steering firms toward domestic chips, so "I don't think it accomplishes what it was intended to." He added that the coming Trump-Xi meeting will not cover export controls, and that Commerce is instead expediting AI-export licenses to spread "the American AI stack" to allies. On the remote-access loophole he promised "whack-a-mole" using AI detection tools, without saying when a rule lands. His account sits against the August 19 report that ByteDance and Tencent had each quietly taken about 10,000 H200s offshore in Hong Kong.

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Export Compliance DailyExport Compliance DailyRoll Call

Sep 2, 2026

China and Russia sit down at an American G20 table — and agree to a text that binds no one

G20 ministers meeting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on September 1 and 2, hosted by the Commerce Department and the White House science office, closed with a consensus Innovation Ministerial Statement. The published list of those present runs to twenty nations and unions and includes the People's Republic of China and the Russian Federation — Washington's two named rivals inside the same AI document rather than across a line from it. What they met over is thin by design. Its six pillars call on members to 'preserve national sovereignty in the governance of emerging technologies', warn that 'outdated or inflexible regulatory approaches can unintentionally restrict innovation', and hold that 'consumers will determine which AI models best meet their needs through free market competition'. Every deliverable is voluntary, export controls go unmentioned, and neither the statement nor the White House release records which of those present actually joined the consensus.

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The White HouseSTPI Science and Technology Policy Outlook (NARLabs, Taiwan)

Sep 1, 2026

America's national AI research resource stops being a pilot

The National Science Foundation set up an operations center for the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource, the public-private program that gives American academic researchers compute, data and models they could not otherwise buy. The pilot launched in January 2024 and was due to expire in January 2026; the center makes it permanent national infrastructure, coordinating resource providers, running the portal and training users. It will be led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego with the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin. The pilot has backed more than 800 research projects. No dollar figure was published.

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U.S. National Science FoundationGovernment Executive

Aug 28, 2026

Washington Starts Drafting the Rule That Would Follow the Compute, Not the Chip

The Commerce Department is working on an export control aimed at Chinese remote access to AI compute hosted in Thailand and Singapore, and could put it to trade groups as early as September. It would be the first instrument to attach to the use of compute rather than to who owns it. One driver, per The Information, is Moonshot's Kimi K3. The objection is now specific: BIS advisory opinions since 2009 hold that remote access to a chip is not an "export" under 15 CFR 734.2 and bind the agency, so closing the gap by rule rather than statute invites a major-questions challenge under West Virginia v. EPA. The durable fix is legislation — the Remote Access Security Act (H.R. 2683, passed the House 369-22; Senate companion stalled) and the Chip Security Act (H.R. 3447) — neither yet law. The likelier near-term route is know-your-customer rules, one of which already exists, unenforced, from January 2025.

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Tom's HardwareThe InformationTech TimesForbesUnited States SenateU.S. Department of Commerce / BIS

Aug 28, 2026

A Chinese memory-chip maker takes the Pentagon's military-companies list to court

ChangXin Memory Technologies sued the Department of Defense in Washington on August 28, asking a judge to set aside its designation as a Chinese Military Company under Section 1260H — the same annual list that added Alibaba and Baidu in June. CXMT makes DRAM, the ordinary memory chip in consumer electronics, and calls the listing arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. Its complaint also says the Pentagon published a notice on February 13 removing CXMT, withdrew it the same day without explanation, then relisted the company on June 8 — an account sourced only to the plaintiff's filing.

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Export Compliance DailyExport Compliance Daily

Aug 19, 2026

The H200 finally reaches China — and Beijing keeps it just offshore

After eight months in which export licences moved almost nothing, Nvidia's H200 accelerators have begun arriving at Chinese technology companies: ByteDance and Tencent have each taken about 10,000 in recent weeks, the Financial Times reports, with others expected. It is the first real movement in a stop-start year — China blocked H200s at customs in January, cleared ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent for more than 400,000 units a fortnight later, and Washington narrowed the field again in May. What makes the flow strange is where the chips sit: Beijing has told firms to keep the hardware off the mainland to protect its own chipmakers, routing the processors to Hong Kong, outside the mainland customs border, where mainland engineering teams reach the compute over cross-border links — a mirror of the Southeast-Asia remote-access loophole Washington is separately trying to close. One figure is unsettled: the FT puts the US per-company ceiling at 100,000 chips where earlier reporting had 75,000, with no revision documented, so the higher number rests on the FT alone.

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The Next WebCNBC

Aug 19, 2026

The Chips Cannot Be Exported. The Compute Can Be Rented.

Chinese AI firms are reportedly reaching the compute of Nvidia's most advanced chips, GB300s among them, through data centres in Southeast Asia. Less than a week after Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 in July, White House official Michael Kratsios accused the company of using GB300s through a facility in Thailand. The important part is not that a rule was broken but that it was not: Cassia King of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy says the arrangement is legal "so long as Moonshot isn't actually buying and owning the physical hardware directly", because the export-control regime attaches to ownership of physical chips, not to remote access to what they compute. Legislation to give the government authority over cloud access to controlled technology is under discussion, with hurdles before it could bite.

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CNBC

Aug 18, 2026

Washington's China Commission Says the Contested Resource Is Now Data That Cannot Be Scraped

The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission published a report on China's data economy, and its most consequential claim is about scarcity rather than scale. China designated data a factor of production in 2020 and has since built exchanges, accounting rules and industrial data programmes to commercialise it — aimed, the Commission argues, at exactly the enterprise, operational and physical-world data that cannot be scraped, now that the open web is largely exhausted as a training resource. The Commission exists by statute to report risks arising from China, so this is its assessment rather than a neutral finding; it also records low data quality and private-firm reluctance as continuing obstacles.

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US-China Economic and Security Review Commission

Our reading

Aug 17, 2026

BIS reports a 62-day licence average to Congress, and benchmarks it against the one year it has not published

The Bureau of Industry and Security — the agency that writes and enforces every chip control on this record — filed its FY2025 annual report to Congress, and three of its own documents can be read side by side. The new report says: "BIS also processed export licenses expeditiously. In calendar year 2025, BIS processed approximately 30,500 license applications. The average processing time for these licenses was 62 days – significantly less than the 90-day statutory benchmark, and approximately the same as in calendar year 2024 (60 days). This is despite the 43-day government shutdown in Q4 2025." The bureau's FY2023 report says it "processed 37,943 license applications" with an "average license application processing time in FY 2023 [of] 38 days." Its FY2022 report says it processed 40,765 with an average of 37 days. On the bureau's annual-reports page, those are the only other reports published: FY2025, FY2023 and FY2022. There is no FY2024 report there, and calendar year 2024 — the one year the new report compares itself to — appears in no published report on that page. Two caveats belong in the same breath, and readers can check both against the documents. The FY2025 report states its licensing figures by calendar year while the two earlier reports state theirs by fiscal year, so the comparison is not unit-identical. And the FY2025 report volunteers the 43-day shutdown as a drag on its own number. What the three published figures say together is that average processing time is 62 days against 38 two years earlier, and that volume fell from roughly 38,000 applications to roughly 30,500. Industry reports the same direction independently: the US-China Business Council's July survey found 66% of respondents with licences pending past the 90-day statutory benchmark.

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U.S. Department of Commerce / BISU.S. Department of Commerce / BISU.S. Department of Commerce / BISU.S. Department of Commerce / BISExport Compliance DailyUS-China Business Council

Aug 14, 2026

A Draft Cable Tells Thirty-Five Countries to Pick a Side

A State Department letter in draft, reported by Reuters, would tell the 35 signatories of June's AI Opportunity Statement that they cannot belong to both the American and Chinese AI ecosystems. “To be part of everything is to be part of nothing,” it reads. Membership brings access to investment opportunities reserved for members; joining China's competing framework would mean exclusion. About two dozen countries have signed, among them Japan, Australia and South Korea. Kazakhstan is the only one inside both coalitions, and a significant source of the critical minerals Pax Silica exists to secure. A US official said it is hard to see how a country can credibly be a trusted partner in one ecosystem while joining an initiative China designed to advance a competing vision. The State Department declined to comment on “purportedly leaked internal documents”. It is a draft and may be softened.

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The Next WebThe Daily Star (Bangladesh)

Aug 12, 2026

The first money behind Pax Silica: $50 million for a supply-chain credentialing platform in Panama

The State Department published a competitive Notice of Funding Opportunity for the Pax Silica AI Assistance Project, announced at June's summit and now open to bidders until August 20. "Working with Congress," the department says, it "seeks to commit up to $50 million in foreign assistance funding" to build an AI supply-chain credentialing and provenance platform that speeds semiconductors, AI infrastructure, critical minerals and related goods through customs. It begins as a pilot with Panama's ports and customs authorities, integrating with existing customs, port-operator and shipper tracking systems, and would expand to other Pax Silica economies only if the pilot works. It is the first disclosed money behind an initiative that had until now consisted of a declaration and a signatory list — and it is aimed at logistics rather than at capability: the American bloc's opening expenditure is on knowing which containers to wave through.

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United States Department of StateUnited States Department of State

Aug 12, 2026

Thirty-eight countries have become founding members of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization.

— Wang Yi

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi gave the figure in a signed article in the People's Daily, relayed in English by China Daily, crediting China with having put forward the Global AI Governance Initiative and initiated the organization's establishment. The article restates that the founding agreement was signed in Shanghai on July 16. The count has moved: every account of the signing itself — The Diplomat, Al Jazeera, The Straits Times and China Daily alike — reported 29 signatories.

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China DailyCenter for Strategic and International Studies

Aug 11, 2026

Most pending export licenses are for items that are already available in China from Chinese or international suppliers — effectively sidelining American companies for no strategic gain.

— US-China Business Council Mixed

The US-China Business Council, the trade association of American companies operating in China, published the results of a July flash survey of 31 member firms in technology, industrial manufacturing, energy and healthcare. Its reported findings: 95% cite long licence review times; 66% have had licences pending for at least three months, past the Commerce Department's 90-day statutory benchmark, and 31% for one to two years; 82% say their pending licences cover items with comparable alternatives from non-US suppliers; 36% put their losses from delay at tens of millions of dollars or more, with some naming hundreds of millions or billions; 73% report sales lost to Chinese competitors. Half cite the absence of Technical Advisory Committee meetings, the standing industry-feedback channel, which the council says has been cut back since 2025 except for the Emerging Technology committee. The council is the interested party in this argument — its members' business is the trade the controls restrict — and several of the percentages rest on 20 or 21 answers rather than all 31.

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US-China Business CouncilUS-China Business CouncilSouth China Morning Post

Aug 9, 2026

Israel launches a National AI Program, bidding to be a ‘global AI superpower’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the head of the Prime Minister's Office National AI Directorate, Brig.-Gen. (res.) Erez Eskel, launched Israel's National AI Program at a government conference, moving Government Decision #4255 into an operational phase after several months of inter-ministerial drafting. The published strategic plan (National AI Directorate, August 2026) sets two declared goals — securing Israel as a "global superpower" in AI and lifting the wider economy — and names the country's chosen fields of differentiation: cyber, "physical AI" (robotics and embodied systems), compute and "powerhouse" computing infrastructure, a national quantum computer, and human capital. Notably, the plan states it will be financed "through investment rather than full state budgeting" and carries no single headline appropriation, relying instead on blended public-private funding and shared infrastructure. It positions Israel explicitly against a global field it describes as shaped by "export controls, concentrated supply chains, corporate allocation decisions and strategic alliances" — a new national entrant alongside the U.S. (Stargate, NSF), the EU (InvestAI) and China already on this record, and the first sovereign AI strategy this page has tracked from a mid-sized state defining its bid around cyber and embodied AI rather than frontier chips.

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Israel Ministry of Foreign AffairsIsraeli Government Publication Portal (PMO)The Jerusalem Post

Aug 7, 2026

Washington opens a review of the chip-rental loophole — and finds it may be legal

The enforcement arm of the Bureau of Industry and Security launched a formal review of how Chinese AI firms reach controlled Nvidia chips they cannot buy: not by importing them, but by renting the computing power in third countries. According to Bloomberg (relayed here by The Next Web and ROIC, the primary report being paywalled by DataDome), the review is building two lists — countries hosting black markets that move restricted chips physically into China, and countries where Chinese firms tap the chips remotely. The second list is the unusual one, because remote access is not, at present, illegal: BIS built its powers around the movement of physical goods, and it is unclear whether it can police a cloud-computing arrangement at all. The structure at issue is deliberately hard to trace — Alibaba, for one, reaches Nvidia chips in Malaysia through Megaspeed, a Singaporean firm already under U.S. diversion investigation, via a Singapore shell owned by a Cayman entity Alibaba controls; the chips never move, only the workloads do. The legislation that would grant BIS explicit remote-access authority, the Remote Access Security Act, passed the House in January 2026 and has sat in the Senate since. So the week's action is an investigation into conduct the rules currently permit — the export-control regime discovering that its central 2026 evasion may be one it has no authority to stop.

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The Next WebROIC.aiBaker McKenzie Sanctions & Export Controls Update

Aug 3, 2026

China's air force reveals an AI system that plans mass air strikes

A state-television documentary broadcast for the 99th anniversary of the People's Liberation Army disclosed that the PLA Air Force has used an "intelligent strike planning system" to draw up battle plans for operations involving more than a hundred units — prioritising targets, sequencing attack waves and allocating tasks to individual formations. The system, developed by a team led by Senior Colonel Deng Jianping, was described as having been used "multiple" times in training exercises whose scale, the programme said, had outrun what commanders could plan by hand. The account is Chinese state media (CCTV, relayed by the South China Morning Post and Global Times), which the record treats as partisan: it establishes what Beijing is willing to claim about fielding decision-support AI, not an independently verified operational capability. It is the clearest Chinese-side counterpart to date of the American military-AI programs already on this record — the Pentagon's Replicator and its 2026 supply-chain order.

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South China Morning PostArmy RecognitionGlobal Times

Aug 2, 2026

Kimi K3 was trained on 20,000 Nvidia chips — leased through Alibaba's cloud

A Bloomberg investigation, relayed by Tech Times, reported that Moonshot AI trained Kimi K3 on roughly 20,000 Nvidia Hopper-generation chips leased through Alibaba's cloud infrastructure — and that the Bureau of Industry and Security is examining the arrangement's compliance as part of a broader look at Chinese cloud access to controlled silicon, in light of BIS's May guidance that data centers already deploying controlled items need licenses for Chinese-party access. The finding reframes July's marquee capability story: the Chinese model graded frontier-class by independent indices was built on American accelerators reached through a rental arrangement, which makes K3 evidence for both sides of the export-control argument — Chinese labs can reach the frontier despite the controls, and they still need American silicon to do it.

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Tech Times

Our reading

Jul 30, 2026

A 29-state AI organization has been founded, and the record of its founding is missing its own documents

Four things about the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization can be checked against documents that exist, and each comes back short. The agreement said to have been signed in Shanghai on July 16 is neither published nor linked by any account of it, Chinese, analyst or Western. Xi Jinping's own address, published in full in English by China's foreign ministry, gives no signatory count and no signing date, and does not say the body is headquartered in Shanghai. A search of the full text returns no “29”, no “16 July”, and none of “sign”, “signed”, “signatory”, “charter” or “agreement”. Xi says only that the organization “has come into being in Shanghai.” The four accounts that name founding members do not agree on who they are, and no two lists match. Forbes prints Russia, Belarus, Serbia, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela and Pakistan; The Diplomat prints Russia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia and Myanmar; Al Jazeera prints Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia, South Africa, Senegal, Russia and Pakistan; The Straits Times prints Brazil, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Russia, Laos and Indonesia. Only Russia, Brazil and Pakistan appear on all four, against a claimed membership of 29. Forbes is the only source for Belarus, Serbia, Cuba and Venezuela, and cites Wikipedia for its central facts. And the accounts disagree about what kind of body it is. The Straits Times describes it as a non-governmental organisation; The Diplomat, Al Jazeera and China Daily all describe it as intergovernmental. On July 31 China's UN ambassador briefed member-state representatives on the organization, presenting it as the first intergovernmental body dedicated to AI cooperation — the diplomatic rollout moving from founding announcement to recruitment inside a week.

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Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRCThe DiplomatAl Jazeera EnglishThe Straits TimesChina DailyForbesChina Daily

Our reading

Jul 30, 2026

The June order disclaims any licensing requirement for releasing a model; ten days later, export-control authority reached one

Executive Order 14409 of June 2, 2026 says, in Section 3(c): “Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize the creation of a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement for the development, publication, release, or distribution of new AI models, including frontier models.” A case-insensitive search of the full text of the order returns no occurrence of “export control”, “Bureau of Industry and Security” or “Export Administration Regulations”; “licensing” and “preclearance” each appear once, in the sentence quoted, and the disclaimer is scoped to Section 3 by its own terms. Ten days after the order was signed, export-control authority did reach a particular frontier model: on June 12 the government required Anthropic to cut off access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every foreign national, including those inside the United States. Eighteen days after that it was withdrawn. Neither decision was published, and no account of either names the classification, regulation or notice it was made under — where BIS restrictions, as the Atlantic Council notes, ordinarily carry a public explanation in the Federal Register. The two documents do not contradict each other on their face: an export control is not a licensing regime for release, and the disclaimer covers only Section 3. The observable point is narrower. The authority that reached a frontier model in June appears nowhere in the order that addresses frontier models, and it operated without a published instrument at either end.

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The White HouseAnthropicAtlantic Council

Earlier this year

Jul 28, 2026

The FCC bars new foreign-made humanoid robots from the American market

On July 28, 2026 the Federal Communications Commission added two categories to its Covered List: “advanced robotic devices” — defined as mobile robots such as humanoids and quadrupeds — and connected power inverters, in each case those produced in foreign countries. Equipment on the Covered List cannot obtain the equipment authorisation a device needs before it may be imported, marketed or sold in the United States. The Commission can add to that list only at the direction of national security authorities, under the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act, and its fact sheet records the trigger: determinations by a White House-convened Executive Branch interagency body that these foreign-made products, “regardless of the nationality of origin,” pose “unacceptable risks to the national security of the United States or the safety and security of United States persons.” Three limits sit on the face of the document and are absent from the coverage of it. The bar applies only to new device models, not to models already authorised or devices already bought. It “does not impact purchase or use by the federal government at all.” And producers may apply to the Department of War or the Department of Homeland Security for what the Commission calls Conditional Approval. The FCC has made comparable Covered List additions in recent months for uncrewed aircraft systems and consumer-grade routers. The market at stake is lopsided. Of roughly 15,000 humanoid robots shipped worldwide in 2025, the Chinese firms Unitree and AGIBOT each shipped more than 5,000, while Tesla and Figure AI each shipped a few hundred or fewer — figures the research group Omdia supplied to the Associated Press. Neither determination names China, or any other country; the AP account of the action was headlined “U.S. bans foreign-made humanoid robots, targeting China over national security.” China's foreign ministry answered on July 29, spokesperson Mao Ning saying that “protectionism does not make the U.S. more competitive, and it will only hurt the interests of U.S. companies and consumers,” and that China would take all measures necessary to defend its firms.

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Federal Communications CommissionPBS NewsHour

Jul 27, 2026“The U.S. accusations "lack any actual evidence, have no legal backing, and effectively amount to a double standard. It is a classic case of hegemonic behavior in the AI sphere."” — Chinese Ministry of Commerce^{±Fact check: mixed}

Jul 23, 2026

Two governments measure Kimi K3 — and get an answer the week’s rhetoric did not

The UK AI Security Institute and the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation, a Commerce Department body, published a joint preliminary assessment of Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 on July 23, the first bilateral state evaluation of a Chinese frontier model. On ExploitBench — a 41-task Carnegie Mellon benchmark over post-2023 vulnerabilities in Chrome's V8 engine — K3 scored 32% against 24% for GLM-5.2, then the most cyber-capable open-weight model; but it achieved arbitrary code execution, the benchmark's highest-severity outcome, on 0 of 41 tasks, where the most cyber-capable models averaged 20 of 41. On "The Last Ones," a 32-step simulated corporate-network attack, K3 reached step 17 on average against 28.5 for the most cyber-capable U.S. models, and completed the range in 1 of 10 attempts against 6/10 and 7/10 for the leaders. The institutes state their own limits: preliminary results, K3's aggregate score estimated from a single benchmark and so carrying a wider confidence interval, a selective task set because of K3's hosting, and — importantly — U.S. closed-weight models evaluated with system-level safeguards disabled to measure maximal capability, which shipping versions do not permit. They also found K3's own safeguards did not stop it attempting exploit development. Set beside the week's other U.S. government artifact, the picture is discordant: on July 22 the OSTP director said Moonshot had run "large scale distillation against U.S. models" to build K3; on July 23 two governments jointly reported that "Kimi K3 performs significantly below the most recent frontier cyber-capable models." The two address different questions — where capability came from, and how much of it there is — and neither resolves the other.

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UK AI Security InstituteNational Institute of Standards and TechnologyCouncil on Foreign RelationsX (self-published post)

Jul 23, 2026A statutory demand tests whether the 2025 rescission left a foundry loophole open

Jul 23, 2026Twenty-one economies, the United States among them, sign a statement encouraging support for open-source AI

Jul 22, 2026““We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model.”” — Michael Kratsios

Jul 21, 2026““We are finding watermarks of our US large language models on many Chinese models, and that’s unacceptable.”” — Scott Bessent

Jul 20, 2026An executive order lets the Pentagon point AI at its own supply chain — and the headline outruns the text

Jul 19, 2026“The leading closed labs, already a duopoly in terms of AI model revenue, want the government to eliminate their open-source competition.” — David Sacks

Jul 17, 2026“I hereby announce that in the next five years, China will provide developing countries with 5,000 opportunities in AI training and seminar programs; develop international AI application cooperation centers with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the League of Arab States, the African Union, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and BRICS; and enable 30 countries to use the AI-powered meteorological warning system, or MAZU, to safeguard homes around the world.” — Xi Jinping

Jul 16, 2026

Twenty-nine states found a world AI organization in Shanghai, and no Western government is among them

Representatives of 29 countries signed an agreement in Shanghai on July 16, 2026 establishing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, the day before the 2026 World AI Conference opened in the same city. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi signed for China, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres attended. China first proposed the body at the 2025 edition of the same conference, where Premier Li Qiang unveiled it and named Shanghai as its intended seat. The count of 29 and the July 16 date are carried alike by The Diplomat, Al Jazeera, The Straits Times and China Daily; the details about Wang Yi and Guterres rest on The Diplomat alone, which attributes them to Xinhua and to China's foreign ministry. What the founding does not have is a published text: no account of it, Chinese or Western, links or quotes the agreement.

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The DiplomatAl Jazeera EnglishThe Straits TimesChina Daily

Jul 10, 2026Washington moves the UAE into its trusted tier for advanced chips

Jun 30, 2026The first model-level export control is lifted after eighteen days, and neither the order nor its withdrawal was published

Jun 30, 2026A Bill to Let Clouds Report Their Own Customers

Jun 26, 2026

The American bloc has a name, a text and a published membership: Pax Silica reaches 24 signatories

Three weeks before 29 states signed China's AI organization into being in Shanghai, the United States held the second summit of its own AI-and-supply-chain bloc in Washington. Pax Silica — launched in December 2025 by Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg and described by the State Department as its "flagship effort on AI and supply chain security" — took ten new signatories over June 25-26, and the same summit produced a separate Joint Statement on AI Opportunity signed by 35 economies including the United States. The declaration itself is short and non-binding, and it reaches further up the stack than the chip rules do: signatories "encourage efforts to partner on strategic stacks of the global technology supply chain, including, but not limited to, software applications and platforms, frontier foundation models, information connectivity and network infrastructure, compute and semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, transportation logistics, minerals refining and processing, and energy." It commits no money and creates no institution, and its operative verbs are the diplomatic ones — encourage, seek, intend, endeavor. What it does do is name a roster. The signatory page lists all 24 by name: Argentina, Australia, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, the European Union, Finland, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Norway, Panama, the Philippines, Qatar, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. Taiwan endorsed the declaration's principles as a "non-signatory participant" through a separate January 2026 joint statement. Italy joined on July 31. The two State Department documents both give the total as 24 while listing different sets — the summit fact sheet counts the United States and not Italy, the standing signatory page counts Italy and not the United States. One name on that roster explains the argument that followed. Kazakhstan, admitted in June as the first Central Asian member and a significant source of the critical minerals the initiative is built around, is also reported to have joined the Chinese organization founded three weeks later.

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United States Department of StateUnited States Department of StateUnited States Department of State

Jun 12, 2026Export control reaches inside the United States: a frontier model cut off from foreign nationals

Jun 8, 2026Alibaba and Baidu join the Pentagon's Chinese-military-companies list — on ministerial affiliation, not AI

Apr 1, 2026Stanford’s 2026 AI Index: the U.S.–China frontier gap narrows to 2.7%

Jan 14, 2026“No AI-chip export policy to China can be “permissive, implementable, enforceable, and protective of US national security” at once.” — Chris McGuire

Jan 13, 2026The controls loosen: BIS moves H200-class chips from denial to case-by-case review

Nov 20, 2025The Gulf corridor opens: U.S. approves advanced-chip exports to the UAE’s G42

Earlier

Aug 11, 2025
An unprecedented cut: Nvidia and AMD to hand the U.S. 15% of their China AI-chip revenueOn August 11, 2025, Nvidia and AMD agreed to remit 15% of their revenue from AI-chip sales to China — Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 — to the U.S. government in exchange for export licenses. President Trump confirmed the terms, saying he had wanted 20% before Huang negotiated him to 15%. Framing a national-security export control as a revenue share for the Treasury was without clear precedent, and drew objections from China-hawks in both parties who called it a tax on selling China the very chips the controls were meant to deny.
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Associated Pressapnews.com95% credibility · not yet testedAn opening estimate from its institutional history — none of its claims checked yet.
Jul 15, 2025Reversal: the U.S. clears Nvidia to resume H20 sales to China
Jul 15, 2025“Sell China the fourth-best chip so “their developers get addicted to the American technology stack.”” — Howard Lutnick
Jul 14, 2025Frontier labs enlist: the Pentagon awards up to $200M each to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI
May 13, 2025Trump’s Commerce Department rescinds the AI Diffusion Rule
Apr 15, 2025Even the compliance chip gets caught: U.S. requires a license for Nvidia’s H20
Mar 7, 2025“DeepSeek’s models are “broadly comparable to the best U.S.-developed AI models introduced in mid-2024.”” — Center for Strategic and International Studies✓Fact check: true
Feb 11, 2025Europe’s answer: InvestAI mobilizes €200 billion and four ‘gigafactories’
Jan 21, 2025Stargate: a pledged $500 billion for U.S. AI infrastructure
Jan 20, 2025
DeepSeek-R1: a Chinese model at the frontier, and a $600 billion jolt to the arms-race storyOn January 20, 2025 — inauguration day — the Chinese lab DeepSeek released its R1 reasoning model, days after its V3 base model. Built despite export controls, R1 performed comparably to leading U.S. reasoning models and, within a week, DeepSeek’s app had overtaken ChatGPT atop the U.S. App Store while Nvidia shed more than $600 billion of market value in a single session. Widely dubbed a ‘Sputnik moment,’ R1 became the central exhibit in the debate over whether controls were slowing China or spurring it to do more with less. (DeepSeek’s own claim that its final training run cost only ~$5.6M is recorded, and fact-checked, as a separate statement.)
Read
Center for Strategic and International Studiescsis.org92% credibilityEarned from 1 checked claim.
Jan 13, 2025The Biden endgame: an ‘AI Diffusion’ framework and a foundry crackdown
Dec 26, 2024“DeepSeek says its V3 model’s final training run used 2,788,000 H800 GPU-hours — about $5.6 million.” — DeepSeek±Fact check: mixed
Jul 23, 2024“Some people argue that we must close our models to prevent China from gaining access to them, but my view is that this will not work and will only disadvantage the US and its allies. Our adversaries are great at espionage, stealing models that fit on a thumb drive is relatively easy...” — Mark Zuckerberg
Oct 17, 2023The October 2023 update: closing the workaround chips and going worldwide by headquarters
Sep 19, 2023“The United States has seen “no evidence” that China can produce advanced 7nm chips at scale.” — Gina Raimondo±Fact check: mixed
Sep 4, 2023A 7nm chip in the Huawei Mate 60 Pro: proof China cleared a barrier the controls aimed to hold
Aug 28, 2023Pentagon launches ‘Replicator’ to counter China’s mass with attritable autonomy
Oct 7, 2022
The October 7 controls: the U.S. moves to choke off China’s access to AI computeOn October 7, 2022, BIS issued the interim final rule that became the foundation of the AI chip-control regime. It created new control classifications (ECCNs 3A090/4A090) for high-performance chips headed to China and two new Foreign Direct Product rules; it set fab-level thresholds (logic at 16/14nm FinFET or below, DRAM at 18nm half-pitch, NAND at 128 layers or more) with a presumption of denial for PRC-owned facilities; and, for the first time, it barred ‘U.S. persons’ from supporting advanced-chip production at Chinese fabs. The rule took effect in phases through October 21, 2022.
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Federal Registerfederalregister.gov95% credibility · not yet testedAn opening estimate from its institutional history — none of its claims checked yet.U.S. Department of Commerce / BISbis.gov90% credibility · not yet testedAn opening estimate from its institutional history — none of its claims checked yet.
Aug 9, 2022CHIPS and Science Act becomes law: $52B to reshore semiconductor manufacturing
Aug 17, 2020U.S. tightens the Huawei net: Entity List additions and a broadened Foreign Direct Product Rule

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