GoKawiil
Tech News
U.S. security agencies have publicly accused six Chinese artificial intelligence companies of systematically using American AI models to train their own systems through a technique known as distillation. The practice allows a smaller model to learn from the outputs of a larger, more advanced one, effectively transferring capabilities without the original research investment.
Responding to Ming Li's proposal to separate academic 'titles' from resource allocation in Chinese universities, a Nature correspondence argues the reform is unlikely to succeed. The author agrees that suppressed performance indicators tend to resurface under different labels, but contends university administrators benefit from the current metric-based system and thus have little incentive to change it.
Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences used a machine learning algorithm to sift through seismic data from over two million earthquakes recorded between 1990 and 2024, uncovering nearly 175,000 so-called PKP precursor signals. These faint seismic echoes, arriving before the main earthquake waves, point to small irregular structures located roughly 1,800 miles underground near the boundary between Earth's solid mantle and liquid outer core.
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, representing major automakers, has formally asked Congress to permanently ban the sale, import and manufacture of Chinese-made cars, parts and software. CEO John Bozzella cited concerns over unfair trade practices, subsidies, IP theft and surveillance, urging lawmakers to act before the current session ends. The request aligns with existing bipartisan legislation, the Connected Vehicle Security Act of 2026, targeting vehicle tech tied to China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Domestic auto manufacturers are lobbying the US government to prohibit the import and sale of cars produced in China. The push reflects growing concern within the industry over competition from lower-cost Chinese vehicles, particularly electric models, entering Western markets.
Windrose, an electric trucking startup positioning itself as a Tesla rival with China-Europe operations, has lost roughly 100 employees in China after failing to pay them on time. The mass departures represent a significant portion of its Chinese workforce and point to deeper financial strain at the company.
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.
GoKawiil's summer analysis of Hugging Face data shows public model repositories rose from 2.43M to 2.96M between January and August 2026, with datasets and Spaces also expanding sharply. Despite that growth, download activity remains concentrated in a tiny fraction of repositories, and Chinese labs including Moonshot, MiniMax, Xiaomi and Z.ai are releasing massive models, some exceeding a trillion parameters, without first publishing smaller versions.
Security firm VulnCheck discovered three separate backdoor-like implants embedded in firmware made by Shenzhen Zhibotong Electronics (ZBT), whose hardware is resold globally under numerous brand names. The most severe, dubbed ENDLESSDOORS, disguises itself as a Linux kernel process, phones home to a hard-coded command server without authentication or encryption, and grants attackers root-level control over the router. VulnCheck confirmed the flaw is real by hijacking a test router's command channel themselves, and identified it across 20 ZBT-based router models.
X's Global Government Affairs team says it uncovered a network of roughly 200,000 accounts, suspected to be linked to Chinese operators, with about 200 of them actively posting content meant to sway American discourse on AI and energy policy. The flagged accounts used American-sounding names and shared legitimate news alongside inflammatory commentary and AI-generated images claiming data centers drive up electricity bills and strain the power grid.
Waymo has begun adding electric vehicles manufactured in China, made by Zeekr, to its robotaxi fleet even as the U.S. maintains steep tariffs and restrictions that effectively block most Chinese-made EVs from American consumers. The vehicles are imported and retrofitted with Waymo's self-driving technology before entering commercial service.
Nvidia announced hardware optimizations for popular Chinese open-source AI models, including DeepSeek's V4 Flash and Alibaba's Qwen 3.8, as part of a broader push to support open-weight systems. Alongside the announcement, an SEC filing tied to its quarterly earnings warned that potential White House restrictions on Chinese-origin AI could hurt its business by limiting its ability to support apps built on those models.