Tech war: Huawei executive claims victory over US sanctions with computing, AI ecosystem
Huawei has already ‘built an ecosystem entirely independent of the United States’, according to a senior executive. South China Morning Post scmp.com Coco Fengin Guangdong Published: 9:00pm, 29 Aug 2025 China has virtually overcome crippling US tech restrictions, according to a senior executive at Huawei Technologies, as mainland-developed computing infrastructure, AI systems and other software now rival those from the world’s largest economy. Shenzhen-based Huawei, which was added to Washington’s trade blacklist in May 2019, has already “built an ecosystem entirely independent of the United States”, said Tao Jingwen, president of the firm’s quality, business process and information technology management department, at an event on Wednesday in Guiyang, capital of southwestern Guizhou province. Tao highlighted the privately held company’s resilience at the event, as he discussed some of the latest milestones in its journey towards tech self-sufficiency. That industry-wide commitment to tech self-reliance would enable China to “surpass the US in terms of artificial intelligence applications” on the back of the country’s “extensive economy and business scenarios”, he said. His remarks reflected Huawei’s efforts to surmount tightened US control measures and heightened geopolitical tensions, as the company pushes the boundaries in semiconductors, computing power, cloud services, AI and operating systems. Tao’s presentation was made on the same day that Huawei said users of token services on its cloud platform had access to its CloudMatrix 384 system, which is a cluster of 384 Ascend AI processors – spread across 12 computing cabinets and four bus cabinets – that delivers 300 petaflops of computing power and 48 terabytes of high-bandwidth memory. A petaflop is 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
nytimes.com - Documents examined by researchers show how one company in China has collected data on members of Congress and other influential Americans. The Chinese government is using companies with expertise in artificial intelligence to monitor and manipulate public opinion, giving it a new weapon in information warfare, according to current and former U.S. officials and documents unearthed by researchers. One company’s internal documents show how it has undertaken influence campaigns in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and collected data on members of Congress and other influential Americans. While the firm has not mounted a campaign in the United States, American spy agencies have monitored its activity for signs that it might try to influence American elections or political debates, former U.S. officials said. Artificial intelligence is increasingly the new frontier of espionage and malign influence operations, allowing intelligence services to conduct campaigns far faster, more efficiently and on a larger scale than ever before. The Chinese government has long struggled to mount information operations targeting other countries, lacking the aggressiveness or effectiveness of Russian intelligence agencies. But U.S. officials and experts say that advances in A.I. could help China overcome its weaknesses. A new technology can track public debates of interest to the Chinese government, offering the ability to monitor individuals and their arguments as well as broader public sentiment. The technology also has the promise of mass-producing propaganda that can counter shifts in public opinion at home and overseas. China’s emerging capabilities come as the U.S. government pulls back efforts to counter foreign malign influence campaigns. U.S. spy agencies still collect information about foreign manipulation, but the Trump administration has dismantled the teams at the State Department, the F.B.I. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that warned the public about potential threats. In the last presidential election, the campaigns included Russian videos denigrating Vice President Kamala Harris and falsely claiming that ballots had been destroyed. The new technology allows the Chinese company GoLaxy to go beyond the election influence campaigns undertaken by Russia in recent years, according to the documents. In a statement, GoLaxy denied that it was creating any sort of “bot network or psychological profiling tour” or that it had done any work related to Hong Kong or other elections. It called the information presented by The New York Times about the company “misinformation.” “GoLaxy’s products are mainly based on open-source data, without specially collecting data targeting U.S. officials,” the firm said. After being contacted by The Times, GoLaxy began altering its website, removing references to its national security work on behalf of the Chinese government. The documents examined by researchers appear to have been leaked by a disgruntled employee upset about wages and working conditions at the company. While most of the documents are not dated, the majority of those that include dates are from 2020, 2022 and 2023. They were obtained by Vanderbilt University’s Institute of National Security, a nonpartisan research and educational center that studies cybersecurity, intelligence and other critical challenges. Publicly, GoLaxy advertises itself as a firm that gathers data and analyzes public sentiment for Chinese companies and the government. But in the documents, which were reviewed by The Times, the company privately claims that it can use a new technology to reshape and influence public opinion on behalf of the Chinese government.
Seeking Deeper: Assessing China’s AI Security Ecosystem
cetas.turing.ac.uk/ Research Report As AI increasingly shapes the global economic and security landscape, China’s ambitions for global AI dominance are coming into focus. This CETaS Research Report, co-authored with Adarga and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, explores the mechanisms through which China is strengthening its domestic AI ecosystem and influencing international AI policy discourse. The state, industry and academia all play a part in the process, with China’s various regulatory interventions and AI security research trajectories linked to government priorities. The country’s AI security governance is iterative and is rapidly evolving: it has moved from having almost no AI-specific regulations to developing a layered framework of laws, guidelines and standards in just five years. In this context, the report synthesises open-source research and millions of English- and Chinese-language data points to understand China’s strategic position in global AI competition and its approach to AI security. This CETaS Research Report, co-authored with the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and Adarga, examines China’s evolving AI ecosystem. It seeks to understand how interactions between the state, the private sector and academia are shaping the country’s strategic position in global AI competition and its approach to AI security. The report is a synthesis of open-source research conducted by IISS and Adarga, leveraging millions of English- and Chinese-language data points. Key Judgements China’s political leadership views AI as one of several technologies that will enable the country to achieve global strategic dominance. This aligns closely with President Xi’s long-term strategy of leveraging technological revolutions to establish geopolitical strength. China has pursued AI leadership through a blend of state intervention and robust private-sector innovation. This nuanced approach challenges narratives of total government control, demonstrating significant autonomy and flexibility within China’s AI ecosystem. Notably, the development and launch of the DeepSeek-R1 model underscored China's ability to overcome significant economic barriers and technological restrictions, and almost certainly caught China’s political leadership by surprise – along with Western chip companies. While the Chinese government retains ultimate control of the most strategically significant AI policy decisions, it is an oversimplification to describe this model as entirely centrally controlled. Regional authorities also play significant roles, leading to a decentralised landscape featuring multiple hubs and intense private sector competition, which gives rise to new competitors such as DeepSeek. In the coming years, the Chinese government will almost certainly increase its influence over AI development through closer collaboration with industry and academia. This will include shaping regulation, developing technical standards and providing preferential access to funding and resources. China's AI regulatory model has evolved incrementally, but evidence suggests the country is moving towards more coherent AI legislation. AI governance responsibilities in China remain dispersed across multiple organisations. However, since February 2025, the China AI Safety and Development Association (CnAISDA) has become what China describes as its counterpart to the AI Security Institute. This organisation consolidates several existing institutions but does not appear to carry out independent AI testing and evaluation. The Chinese government has integrated wider political and social priorities into AI governance frameworks, emphasising what it describes as “controllable AI” – a concept interpreted uniquely within the Chinese context. These broader priorities directly shape China’s technical and regulatory approaches to AI security. Compared to international competitors, China’s AI security policy places particular emphasis on the early stages of AI model development through stringent controls on pre-training data and onerous registration requirements. Close data sharing between the Chinese government and domestic AI champions, such as Alibaba’s City Brain, facilitates rapid innovation but would almost certainly encounter privacy and surveillance concerns if attempted elsewhere. The geographical distribution of China's AI ecosystem reveals the strategic clustering of resources, talent and institutions. Cities such as Beijing, Hangzhou and Shenzhen have developed unique ecosystems that attract significant investments and foster innovation through supportive local policies, including subsidies, incentives and strategic infrastructure development. This regional specialisation emerged from long-standing Chinese industrial policy rather than short-term incentives. China has achieved significant improvements in domestic AI education. It is further strengthening its domestic AI talent pool as top-tier AI researchers increasingly choose to remain in or return to China, due to increasingly attractive career opportunities within China and escalating geopolitical tensions between China and the US. Chinese institutions have significantly expanded domestic talent pools, particularly through highly selective undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. These efforts have substantially reduced dependence on international expertise, although many key executives and researchers continue to benefit from an international education. Senior scientists hold considerable influence over China’s AI policymaking process, frequently serving on government advisory panels. This stands in contrast to the US, where corporate tech executives tend to have greater influence over AI policy decisions. Government support provides substantial benefits to China-based tech companies. China’s government actively steers AI development, while the US lets the private sector lead (with the government in a supporting role) and the EU emphasises regulating outcomes and funding research for the public good. This means that China’s AI ventures often have easier access to capital and support for riskier projects, while a tightly controlled information environment mitigates against reputational risk. US export controls have had a limited impact on China’s AI development. Although export controls have achieved some intended effects, they have also inadvertently stimulated innovation within certain sectors, forcing companies to do more with less and resulting in more efficient models that may even outperform their Western counterparts. Chinese AI companies such as SenseTime and DeepSeek continue to thrive despite their limited access to advanced US semiconductors.
Exclusive: DeepSeek aids China's military and evaded export controls, US official says
AI firm DeepSeek is aiding China's military and intelligence operations, a senior U.S. official told Reuters, adding that the Chinese tech startup sought to use Southeast Asian shell companies to access high-end semiconductors that cannot be shipped to China under U.S. rules. The U.S. conclusions reflect a growing conviction in Washington that the capabilities behind the rapid rise of one of China's flagship AI enterprises may have been exaggerated and relied heavily on U.S. technology. Hangzhou-based DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the technology world in January, saying its artificial intelligence reasoning models were on par with or better than U.S. industry-leading models at a fraction of the cost. "We understand that DeepSeek has willingly provided and will likely continue to provide support to China's military and intelligence operations," a senior State Department official told Reuters in an interview. "This effort goes above and beyond open-source access to DeepSeek's AI models," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to speak about U.S. government information. The U.S. government's assessment of DeepSeek's activities and links to the Chinese government have not been previously reported and come amid a wide-scale U.S.-China trade war.
A Chinese AI video startup appears to be blocking politically sensitive images | TechCrunch
A Chinese startup, Sand AI, appears to be blocking certain politically sensitive images from its online video generation tool. A China-based startup, Sand AI, has released an openly licensed, video-generating AI model that’s garnered praise from entrepreneurs like the founding director of Microsoft Research Asia, Kai-Fu Lee. But Sand AI appears to be censoring the hosted version of its model to block images that might raise the ire of Chinese regulators from the hosted version of the model, according to TechCrunch’s testing. Earlier this week, Sand AI announced Magi-1, a model that generates videos by “autoregressively” predicting sequences of frames. The company claims the model can generate high-quality, controllable footage that captures physics more accurately than rival open models.
