Jacob Stokes, a former Obama national security official now at the Center for a New American Security, published a report titled 'Superpowers and AGI' urging the US to prepare drastic responses if China reaches artificial general intelligence first. His proposed options range from cyberattacks to sabotage AI systems up to kinetic military strikes on physical data centers, which he acknowledges carries the highest risk of escalation.
Isar Aerospace has opened a weeklong launch window starting Friday at Andøya Spaceport to try again to send its Spectrum rocket to orbit carrying small CubeSats. The German company's first orbital test failed shortly after liftoff last year, and repeated attempts since January have been delayed by technical issues and range availability. The launch comes as Norway observes a period of mourning for King Harald V, though officials say the mission can proceed as planned.
Lululemon Athletica's stock fell more than 20% in premarket trading Friday after the company reported weaker-than-expected sales in China. The slowdown followed a viral controversy in May involving a promotional drum event that appears to have damaged the brand's standing with Chinese consumers. The stock is now down 42% year-to-date.
CrowdStrike says the China-linked group OVERCAST PANDA physically entered hotel rooms of executives attending an agricultural conference on Hainan Island between March and May 2026, booting their unattended laptops from a USB drive to install the FlowCloud backdoor while the victims were at dinner. No phishing, credential theft, or network intrusion was involved—the attackers relied entirely on physical access to unlocked, unattended devices. CrowdStrike's OverWatch team detected and disrupted the intrusions and expects the group to keep using this method.
Chinese company Niutech has signed a contract with an unnamed global energy major to construct an industrial-scale pyrolysis facility that converts waste plastic into sustainable aviation fuel. The plant is designed to produce between 10,000 and 50,000 tons of SAF annually by heating plastic waste at high temperatures in an oxygen-free chamber.
House Select Committee on China Chair John Moolenaar says TikTok backed out of a planned public roundtable meant to address Chinese government access to US user data and its algorithm. Moolenaar said TikTok withdrew on August 27th, a day after Meta settled with state attorneys general over child safety claims, and cited concerns about facing child safety questions despite that not being the meeting's focus.
Moonshot AI, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup, has confidentially submitted an IPO application to the Hong Kong stock exchange, according to people familiar with the matter. Details on the size of the offering or timing were not disclosed.
Anthropic's threat intelligence chief Jacob Klein says foreign actors, particularly in China, are using illegal methods to extract outputs from its Claude models and train cheaper rival systems, a practice known as distillation. He named Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 model as an example of technology he believes was built this way, describing an organized effort to evade Anthropic's account and access controls at scale.
A newcomer called StartLux, founded by veteran programmer Chen Danyan and formerly known as Yuandian Xinghui, placed second in China's CAICT MCP specialized benchmark with its StartLux-V1.0-27B-Preview model. The 27-billion-parameter model trailed DeepSeek-V4-Pro, a 1.6-trillion-parameter system, by just 1.3 percentage points, despite running locally on consumer-grade PCs rather than in the cloud. Chen has argued that local models will eventually outcompete cloud-based ones on efficiency and market share.
An executive order signed by President Trump declares a national emergency over foreign-made bulk-power equipment, giving the Energy Department authority to block or restrict transactions involving certain grid and data center components. Analysts say Chinese suppliers provide significant portions of the transformers, switchgear, batteries and optical technology that power U.S. data centers, exposing a vulnerability in America's AI infrastructure buildout even as U.S. firms lead in chips and compute hardware.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said 19 G20 members agreed at a finance ministers meeting to address a flood of underpriced exports distorting global trade, with China the sole holdout. He identified China as running the world's largest current account surplus and said its practices were unsustainable for global markets.
A large slate of speculative fiction is arriving this September, including new works from Leigh Bardugo, Tananarive Due, Alice Hoffman, Ken Liu, Josh Malerman, China Miéville and Emily St. John Mandel. The lineup spans multiple genres and formats, reflecting the breadth of the current publishing season for sci-fi, fantasy and horror readers.
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