|
|
|
|
Bottom Line Up Front China's commerce and science ministries proposed adding 40 technologies, 23 of them in AI, to China's list of technologies barred or restricted from export. StepFun published open weights for Step 5 Preview, a 600-billion-parameter model it says is designed for long-running agent work such as software engineering and financial tasks. Ant Group open-sourced its Ling-3.1-flash model, a 560-billion-parameter model compressed to run on four Nvidia Hopper data center GPUs. AI agents tested on Tencent Cloud probed Alibaba’s mapping app Amap, with some escalating to leaked API keys when blocked. |
| China proposes export controls on 40 AI, biomedical and solar technologies The Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM), which runs export licensing, and the science ministry proposed adding 40 technologies, 23 of them in AI, to China's list of technologies barred or restricted from export. API or app access to Chinese models is not an export, and the "vast majority" of AI technology would stay freely exportable, the MOFCOM spokesperson said. The rule targets transfers such as hosting models abroad. Proposed AI bans cover large models trained on China's core data (its most sensitive data class) and offered as services, and high-performance agents built mainly for critical infrastructure, defense or government use. Open-sourced or published technology would be exempt. From today, exporters must register before shipping listed technology abroad. |
| AI developer StepFun publishes open weights for 600-billion-parameter agent model StepFun posted the weights of Step 5 Preview, a model it says is designed for long-running agent work such as software engineering and financial tasks, on Hugging Face and ModelScope. Because the weights are public, any developer in China or abroad can download, run and modify the model on their own hardware. In its sparse mixture-of-experts design, which switches on only part of the network for each token, 27 billion of the 600 billion parameters are active at a time. OpenRouter, a service that routes developers' requests to many AI models, ranked it second worldwide in weekly and daily token usage, per InfoQ. |
| Ant Group open-sources 560-billion-parameter AI model that runs on four GPUs Ant Group's Bailing large model team open-sourced Ling-3.1-flash, compressed so it runs on four Nvidia Hopper data center GPUs instead of eight. Halving the hardware lets an organization with a single four-GPU server host the model on its own equipment. The savings come from storing the routed experts, the sub-networks that switch on only for certain inputs, at 4-bit precision, which cut the model's weight memory from about 534GB to 292GB. Ant's Ling-3.0 series models were downloaded nearly 1 million times on Hugging Face over the past 30 days. |
| Tencent Cloud says third-party models ran the AI agents that probed navigation app Amap Tencent Cloud said AI agentsAI agentAn AI system that carries out multi-step tasks on its own, such as browsing, writing code or making purchases, rather than answering a single prompt. Agents raise new questions about liability, security and oversight because they act rather than just advise. caught trying to break into Amap's navigation service from its cloud were testing outside developers' models, not models from its Hunyuan team. Tencent's statement confirms the agents were running model evaluations on its cloud, so a cloud provider's test activity reached another company's systems and came to light only through outside researchers. They made 2,818 attempts to reach Amap between Sept. 28 and Oct. 8, per Swarmchasers, a research group. After hitting Amap's anti-scraping controls, which block automated bulk collection, some agents tried leaked API keys or remote code execution. Remote code execution means running commands on another machine. Most attempts failed, and Tencent says it is tightening network access controls and agent monitoring. |
|
| Industry ministry publishes catalog of over 1,000 AI use cases for factories The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), which sets China's industrial policy, released more than 1,000 documented cases of AI in factory work across 20 manufacturing sectors such as petrochemicals, steel and autos. Each case is graded as needing more research, in verification or ready for wider rollout, which tells manufacturers and AI vendors which applications the ministry treats as ready to scale. The cases are drawn from production practice and span R&D design, pilot testing, production, operations and equipment maintenance. In autos, a related multi-agency plan calls for large models that generate body and interior designs and simulate structural strength and drag. MIIT says it will next push the cases to small and mid-sized firms through matchmaking events. |
| China makes safety standard for electric motorcycle lithium batteries mandatory from July 2027 The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), China's product-safety regulator, released a mandatory safety standard for lithium-ion batteries in electric motorcycles and mopeds, effective July 1, 2027, replacing a voluntary one. Because compliance becomes compulsory, batteries that fail its tests can no longer be sold in China once it takes effect. New tests cover crush, flame retardancy, heating after low-temperature cycling and thermal propagation, which checks whether a fire in one cell spreads to its neighbors. Developed with the industry ministry, the standard sets separate requirements for cells, packs and full battery systems and defines when two products count as the same type for testing. |
|
| III | AI & FOUNDATION MODELS | |
| Kuaishou's Kling AI releases video generation model that produces 30-second clips Kling AI, the video generation unit of short-video platform Kuaishou, launched Kling 4.0, which generates up to 30 seconds of video in a single pass at up to 4K resolution. Longer single-pass clips and finer control over reference images and keyframes, the fixed frames a clip must hit, give creators more say over a whole shot. Each task can draw on up to 15 reference items such as images and video clips, and Kling AI says an API for enterprise customers and developers is coming. Kling AI's annual revenue has reached about $500 million, according to public information cited by GeekPark. |
|
| Wuxi chip designer Zhongxingwei releases 12 mass-produced interconnect chips for servers Zhongxingwei, a chip designer based in Wuxi, released 12 interconnect chips, all already in mass production, that move data between processors, storage drives and other server components. Storage controllers of this kind sit in nearly every server, so they are a part data centers buy at volume. The line includes RAID chips, which combine many drives into one fault-tolerant array. It also includes host bus adapters that connect a server to its storage. Founded in 2020, the company says it designs its own core IP, the reusable blocks a chip is assembled from. Cumulative shipments have passed 800,000 units since its first product reached mass production in August 2022, and it expects 1 million by year-end. |
|
| V | QUANTUM & FRONTIER SCIENCE | |
| Shenzhen team reports first transfer of entangled vibration quantum states between chip nodes A Shenzhen International Quantum Academy team led by Tan Dian, with Germany's University of Stuttgart, says it was the first to prepare entangled states spanning multiple phonons and move them between chip nodes. Phonons, quantum units of mechanical vibration, can carry quantum information between parts of a chip, so moving entangled states between nodes is one ingredient for linking small quantum processors into larger ones. Working under Yu Dapeng, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the team ran the experiment on a scalable two-dimensional hybrid quantum chip. The result appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Science. |
|
| Defense ministry to run UN peacekeeping drone and counter-drone course for eight countries China's Ministry of National Defense said it will run a UN peacekeeping drone training course in Xi'an in mid-to-late October with the PLA Air Force Engineering University, a People's Liberation Army air force academy. A PLA academy is co-hosting the course, which trains instructors and trainees from the UN and eight countries, including Algeria, Malaysia and South Africa, in deploying drone units and countering hostile drones. Its 31 topics span drone deployment, command and control, safety management and counter-drone technology, alongside a module on the UN peacekeeping framework, ministry spokesperson Senior Col. Chen Xi said. |
|
|
|