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Bottom Line Up Front Anthropic testing found Zhipu's open-weight GLM-5.3 nearly matches Claude Mythos Preview at writing software exploits, scoring 50 to Claude's 56 on ExploitBench. Huawei put Mate 90 phones on sale running on three in-house Kirin processors, and executive Richard Yu said its phone chips and Ascend AI chips compete for the same limited advanced chipmaking capacity. China-Europe SMILE satellite began science operations after passing its in-orbit test review and released its first images in a mission to study how the solar wind interacts with Earth's magnetic field. |
| Anthropic test finds Chinese developer Zhipu's open model nearly matches Claude at writing exploits Zhipu's GLM-5.3 built working exploits in 50 of 410 attempts on ExploitBench, a public benchmark of attacks on known flaws in Chrome's V8 engine, against 56 for Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview. GLM-5.3's weights, its trained parameters, are public, so anyone can modify them. Anthropic says the model was released without meaningful safeguards and calls for governments to safety test sufficiently capable models, including GLM-5.3's successors. Chinese AI outlet QbitAI says Claude's resistance to the same attacks comes largely from product design and closed weights. Unmodified GLM-5.3 refuses harmful requests about as often as Claude on three public benchmarks in Anthropic's report, QbitAI notes. Zhipu delayed releasing GLM-5.3's weights after its August launch to finish safety evaluation, QbitAI reports. |
| Huawei puts Mate 90 phones on sale with three in-house Kirin chips Huawei unveiled its Mate 90 smartphone line and put it on sale the same day, running on three of its own processors, the Kirin 9030, 9035 and 9050 Pro. Huawei executive Richard Yu said advanced chipmaking capacity remains limited and the phone chips share one pool with Ascend, Huawei's AI chips, so phones and AI chips compete for the same output. Logic folding, which Yu said uses more wafers, stacks layers of circuitry and links them vertically, Huawei's route to more performance without moving to a smaller manufacturing process. Huawei rates the top-end Mate 90 Pro Max, which runs the Kirin 9050 Pro, 31% faster overall than the Mate 80 Pro Max, and the entry Mate 90, on the Kirin 9030, 27% faster than the Mate 80. |
| China-Europe SMILE space weather satellite begins science operations SMILE, a satellite built jointly by China and Europe, passed its in-orbit test review and entered science operations, with its first images released. The mission shows how the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun, interacts with Earth's magnetic field. That interaction drives magnetic storms, which can disrupt satellites, navigation and power grids. Sina Tech's report says SMILE's soft X-ray imager makes it the first spacecraft to observe Earth's magnetic field in X-rays in detail and over long periods. Its ultraviolet camera can photograph the aurora for up to 44 hours without a break, which the report calls the longest continuous run of any spaceborne aurora imager. |
| Guangdong hydropower project completes main installation of a domestically built variable-speed pumped storage unit Crews at the Langjiang pumped storage project in Zhaoqing, Guangdong completed the main installation of its domestically made 300-megawatt-class unit. A variable-speed unit can vary how much power it draws while pumping water uphill for storage, so the plant can soak up fluctuating wind and solar output. Changing its rotation speed by 7% lets the unit adjust its power in real time across a 50% range, according to a Xinhua report carried by Global Times. The unit has been on China's energy sector list of first-of-its-kind major equipment since 2022. The plant is due to run fully in the first half of 2027. |
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| Guangzhou's Guangxin breaks ground on substrate plant for data center processors Guangzhou Guangxin Packaging Substrate began building an advanced packaging substrate plant in the city's Huangpu district, with a first phase covering about 21 hectares, according to the district government. The plant adds capacity for flip-chip ball grid array (FCBGA) substrates, the layered base a large data center processor mounts on to carry its signals and power to the circuit board. Guangxin, in Huangpu since 2021, already makes substrates for radio-frequency chips and FCBGA. Public records show it is a core supplier to several leading global packaging firms. The district hosts more than 150 chip companies, and its semiconductor output topped 31 billion yuan ($4.6 billion) from January through August. |
| Shaanxi materials group refines aluminum to chip-grade 99.9998% purity A Shaanxi new materials group and a Northwestern Polytechnical University team developed zone-refining equipment and methods that stably purify industrial high-purity aluminum ingots to above 99.9998%. PLA Daily, the Chinese military's official newspaper, says domestic ultra-high-purity aluminum helps secure raw materials for semiconductors and other strategic industries and reduces dependence on outside suppliers. Zone refining sweeps impurities to one end of a metal bar by moving a narrow molten band slowly along it, and at this purity impurities make up less than two parts per million. |
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| III | ROBOTICS & AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS | |
| Legged robot contest winners use Chinese firm Zhishen's robot dogs for second straight year A Nanyang Technological University team from Singapore won the legged robot challenge at IROS, the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, in Pittsburgh, using Zhishen Technology's four-legged Tongchui M1. A University of Manchester team won in 2025 on Zhishen's earlier Gangbeng L1, meaning that the challenge's last two winners, from Singapore and Britain, both competed on Chinese-built hardware. Zhishen also sells the robots for power-grid inspection, firefighting, emergency response and security work. Its newest model, the Gangbeng L2, has joint motors with a peak torque about double the previous generation's, the company says. |
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PLA Southern Theater Command sends naval and air forces on Scarborough Shoal patrolThe Southern Theater Command, the People's Liberation Army headquarters for the South China Sea, sent naval and air forces on a new combat readiness patrol around Scarborough Shoal, which China calls Huangyan Dao. The patrol follows the drone and warship drills there that CTD reported in the Sept. 28 edition. The command says its forces have kept strengthening patrols there since September to tighten control of the area, a feature the Philippines also claims. In July, the Philippines deposited a chart of the shoal's baselines and territorial sea with the United Nations, the same week it presented a separate UN bid to extend its seabed claim off western Palawan. |
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Chinese participant says China-U.S. AI talks will turn to specific issues in NovemberA Chinese-side participant told Yuyuan Tantian, a CCTV-affiliated WeChat account, that the first round of China-U.S. talks on AI let each side state its positions, but that the next November engagement is meant to take up specific issues. The account adds detail to the dialogue launch CTD reported Sept. 28, naming an AI incident communication channel and measures to prevent AI misuse as the most ready areas for cooperation, where experts on both sides already broadly agree. Xiao Qian, a deputy director at Tsinghua University's Center for International Security and Strategy and core participant in unofficial China-U.S. talks, confirmed to the author that both items align with China's interests. |
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