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Tech News
Counterpoint Research's China Weekly Smartphone Sell-Out Tracker found the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max drove Apple to a 33% share of China's smartphone market in Week 38, making it the top-selling brand. The Pro series saw 12% year-on-year sales growth in its first three days, reversing a 17% decline in overall Chinese smartphone sales since July.
A growing discussion highlights how open-weight AI models can be modified—or 'abliterated'—to remove built-in safety restrictions, allowing users to bypass content moderation. Commentators note this concern extends beyond models originating from China to open-source AI broadly, raising questions about how the industry and regulators should respond.
Reports indicate Huawei and other Chinese smartphone makers saw increased demand for their foldable devices following the announcement of Apple's iPhone Duo. China is emerging as a key battleground where Apple will compete against established domestic foldable brands.
CNBC's Eamon Javers published an investigation into John Harold Rogers, a former senior Federal Reserve official arrested by the FBI in January 2025 on suspicion of passing central bank information to a Chinese government agent. Investigators say a personal relationship exploited by the alleged agent became entangled with Rogers' professional access, though his lawyers maintain he shared no valuable information. The Fed and its Inspector General's office declined to comment, and Rogers declined to be interviewed.
At the UN General Assembly opening on September 22, 2026, twenty countries issued a joint statement demanding that artificial intelligence remain under human direction, oversight and control. The United States did not join the group in signing the statement.
A U.S. Senate investigation described in the Morning Risk Report found that Iran's regime has made extensive use of Tether's dollar-pegged stablecoin, reportedly to move funds despite sanctions. The report also notes that Washington has extended the start of a 50% tariff rule tied to a China trade truce, and that a prospective House Intelligence Committee chair has said he intends to investigate what he called 'nakedly corrupt dealings.'
Rep. Ro Khanna, top Democrat on the House Select Committee on China, sent letters to Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and to DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI. He asked ODNI to assess US readiness for an AI system losing control, similar to an OpenAI agent incident involving Hugging Face, and to evaluate China's approach to catastrophic AI risk. He also asked the three Chinese companies for documentation on their pursuit of 'superintelligence,' recursive self-improvement, and any safety safeguards.
Vita is a new English-language, open-access biology journal jointly funded by China's Higher Education Press and Westlake University, with its first print issue released in July. It waives article-processing charges for authors and is fully Chinese-owned and Chinese-published, unlike many past China-based journals that partnered with international publishers.
China has expanded its overseas travel restrictions on top AI and chip professionals to now include their spouses and children, according to people familiar with the matter. These relatives must now obtain approval from Beijing before traveling abroad, even for short trips, extending curbs previously applied only to executives and researchers at firms like Alibaba and DeepSeek since earlier this year.
According to The Information, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked Alibaba and ByteDance to detail plans for purchasing Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 chips, which are officially gaming GPUs. Sources say Beijing expects these chips could be repurposed into servers to help run China's leading AI models, potentially loosening restrictions on Nvidia hardware.
The U.S. and China published reciprocal lists of products worth roughly $30 billion each that will receive tariff reductions, following a meeting between President Trump and President Xi Jinping in Washington. The items include nonsensitive goods such as fireworks and wooden Christmas ornaments. China's commerce ministry said the move would strengthen bilateral trade cooperation.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC that training AI models on the outputs of other companies' models amounts to competition rather than theft, pushing back on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's July characterization of the practice as theft. Bessent had threatened sanctions against overseas firms using distillation to extract capability from U.S.-built AI models. Huang said companies studying and even reverse-engineering Nvidia's own products is something he'd rather avoid but accepts as part of competition.