Huawei backed router says it nearly halves agent costs | Cloudflare builds on Qwen | CO2 power bank joins the grid

Your morning brief on Chinese technology.

Bottom Line Up Front

Huawei backed openJiuwen team released x-router, software that picks which AI model answers each agent request, and reports that it cut model costs by about 44.6%. U.S. firm Cloudflare released Qwen based classifiers called Clef and Clef-flash, two open-source content classification models built on Alibaba's Qwen model family. State-owned China Huadian connected a compressed CO2 energy storage plant in Mulei, Xinjiang, to the grid, calling it China's first at the 100-megawatt class, able to deliver more than six hours of continuous power at peak demand.

The openJiuwen team released x-router, software that picks which AI model answers each request an agent sends, and reports that it cut model costs by about 44.6% at nearly the same benchmark score. Agents, AI programs that carry out multistep tasks on their own, send many requests to AI models, so steering the easy ones to small, cheap models lowers what an agent costs to run. OpenJiuwen is an open-source agent platform built by Huawei's research labs and Huawei Cloud with outside developers, and the team bills x-router as suited to Huawei's Ascend AI chips. A classifier built on the small open model Qwen3-0.6B sorts each request into one of five complexity tiers.

Read at QbitAI ↗

AI & FOUNDATION MODELS

U.S. network company Cloudflare releases content classification AI models built on Alibaba's Qwen

Cloudflare released two open-source content classification models, Clef and the smaller Clef-flash, built on Alibaba's Qwen3.8-27B and Qwen3.5-9B respectively, members of the family whose next generation CTD reported September 23rd was in training. Qwen's weights are published, so any developer can build on them. Here a U.S. company has made a Chinese model family the base of models it offers its own customers. Clef can also read images and takes in twice as much input at once as Jev, a rival text-only classifier from Typesafe AI. Cloudflare says Clef leads the Jev Decision Index benchmark. It released the weights on Hugging Face and is offering a reinforcement learning fine-tuning service to adapt Clef to customers' businesses.

Read at ITHome ↗·Read at Cloudflare ↗

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DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE

China Huadian connects China's first 100-megawatt-class compressed CO2 energy storage plant to grid

State-owned power generator China Huadian connected a compressed carbon dioxide storage plant in Mulei, Xinjiang, to the grid, a project state broadcaster CCTV calls China's first at the 100-megawatt class. Storage plants bank surplus power when demand is low and release it at peak. The developers say this design needs none of the underground caverns some other large storage systems require. Excess power drives compressors that turn the CO2 into a liquid while the released heat is stored. At peak, the reheated gas spins a turbine for more than six hours of continuous output. The developers say the core design and manufacturing technology was developed in China, and the plant can respond to load changes within minutes. Yicai [iXBT]

Alibaba's navigation app Amap reports nearly 370 million daily users on holiday's first day

Amap, Alibaba's navigation and mapping app, says nearly 370 million people used it on the first day of China's National Day holiday, one of several figures it says set records. With the high user count, Amap is able to push hazard warnings to drivers within seconds. The warnings come from Eagle Eye Guardian, which Amap says can spot 28 types of traffic risk. The system was built with the China Academy of Safety Science and Technology, a national safety research institute. In the first day, the system sent more than 600 million alerts, most often "slow vehicle ahead," followed by "vehicle braking hard ahead."

Read at ITHome ↗

ROBOTICS & AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS

Hangzhou police and Chinese Academy of Sciences build robot fish to patrol West Lake

Police at Hangzhou's West Lake and the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Automation, a state robotics and AI lab, built a 1.44-meter robot fish that now patrols the lake, giving officers a live view below the surface of a crowded tourist lake and alerting them to illegal swimming and fishing. It carries a high-definition camera, an infrared thermal imager and a positioning module for Beidou, China's satellite navigation system, among other equipment. It dives to 10 meters and runs five to six hours on a charge. The fish also locates lost phones on video and relays their coordinates to a retrieval crew.

Read at Mydrivers ↗