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Bottom Line Up Front U.S. regulator blocks two devices with Huawei chips in its first use of a rule that bars devices containing chips and other logic-bearing parts from firms on its Covered List. Unitree says it has built 10,000 to 20,000 G1 humanoids, which founder Wang Xingxing called the most shipped single humanoid model worldwide, even as he called the company's current output "far from enough." China's Foreign Ministry rejects U.S. biotech curbs after Treasury proposed Thursday to restrict U.S. investment in Chinese biotechnology, a week after Beijing proposed export controls on five biomedical technologies of its own. YMTC reportedly plans to mass-produce high-speed phone memory, moving the flash storage maker into direct competition with Samsung and Micron. |
| U.S. regulator blocks two devices with Huawei chips in first use of component rule The Federal Communications Commission (FCC, blocked a dashcam and a wireless video transmitter containing chips from Huawei's HiSilicon unit. It is the first action under a rule in force since Oct. 13 that bars devices containing chips and other logic-bearing parts from firms on the FCC's Covered List of security risks, extending U.S. restrictions on Chinese tech from whole devices to the components inside them. The FCC cited HiSilicon's own marketing, which describes the chip as "designed for the surveillance market" with built-in face detection algorithms. Beijing has repeatedly accused Washington of stretching the concept of national security to suppress Chinese companies and argues that protectionism will not make the U.S. more competitive. |
| Robot maker Unitree says it has built 10,000 to 20,000 of its G1 humanoids Unitree founder Wang Xingxing said the company has built roughly 10,000 to 20,000 G1 humanoid robots since their May 2024 launch, which he called the most shipped of any single humanoid model worldwide. Most humanoid robots are still built in small batches, with tens of thousands marking Unitree's steps toward mass manufacturing. Wang ranked scaling up hardware manufacturing ahead of AI models as the company's top task, calling its current output of tens of thousands of robots a year "far from enough." Wide adoption would take at least 10 million units a year, he said at a Hangzhou conference marking Unitree's 10th anniversary. Unitree will also partner with Chinese and foreign AI model developers. |
| China's Foreign Ministry rejects U.S. Treasury proposal to curb investment in Chinese biotech Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told Washington to stop interfering with normal business cooperation, responding to a Treasury proposal yesterday to restrict U.S. investment in Chinese biotechnology. U.S. drugmakers are increasingly turning to Chinese biotech firms, licensing promising therapies to fill their development pipelines, per Bloomberg. Treasury would add biotechnology to the technologies restricted under its outbound investment security program, which limits American investment in adverserial countries. China proposed last week to restrict exports of five biomedical technologies, including cell and gene therapy and small nucleic acid drugs, while easing approval for licensing deals that do not transfer ownership abroad. |
| Flash memory maker YMTC reportedly plans to mass-produce high-speed phone memory Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), a Chinese maker of flash storage chips, is reportedly preparing to mass-produce the fast working memory used in high-end smartphones. That would take YMTC beyond storage into high-speed phone memory, where it would compete directly with Samsung and Micron, according to Mydrivers. The reported part runs at up to 9,600 MT/s (megatransfers per second, a speed measure), against 7,500 MT/s for the slower phone memory YMTC has been testing since October 2025. It would also be YMTC's first to use 4F² cells, a denser layout that fits more memory into the same chip area and whose density advantage Micron has publicly called a myth. Mass production is planned at YMTC's Fab 3 plant in Wuhan. |
China's Commerce Ministry pledges 'necessary measures' over Pentagon university research reviewChina's Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM), in response to U.S. trade and technology restrictions, said China will take necessary measures to protect its research institutions after a Pentagon research security review released Monday. That is the same pledge it made over U.S. trade secret sanctions in the October 21st edition. The review reported that the U.S. universities it examined had fully ended cooperation with entities on the 1286 list, a Pentagon roster that includes many Chinese research institutions, that it says put U.S.-funded research at risk of misuse by foreign governments. That cuts those institutions off from the reviewed universities. A ministry spokesperson said the U.S. action in effect coerces American research institutions to "pick sides" and will only weaken America's own scientific progress. |
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| ByteDance releases 4K version of its video generation AI model to enterprise testers Volcano Engine, the cloud-computing arm of TikTok owner ByteDance, released Seedance 2.5 4K, a video generation model that outputs 4K video with 10-bit color depth. Those are the formats professional film and streaming work is delivered in, and 10-bit color renders smoother gradients than the 8-bit color of ordinary video. A draft mode lets users test shots at 480p, which costs less to generate, before rendering the 4K final version. Some film and post-production companies in China and abroad have already tried it, according to ITHome, and access is limited to some enterprise customers for now. |
AI developer MiniMax publishes its 428-billion-parameter model for downloadMiniMax, a Chinese AI developer, published the weights of M3.1 Flash, the coding and agent model whose paid launch CTD reported October 20th. Weights are the trained numerical values that make up a model, and publishing them lets any developer or company, in China or abroad, run it on their own hardware. Only 23 billion of its 428 billion parameters are active at each step of generating a response, because a mixture-of-experts design routes each task to a fraction of the network to cut computing cost. |
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| III | QUANTUM & FRONTIER SCIENCE | |
| Chinese Academy of Sciences lab completes first compact heavy-ion cancer therapy unit The Institute of Modern Physics, a lab under the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences, has completed the first demonstration unit of its ultra-compact heavy-ion therapy system. Heavy-ion therapy, a form of cancer radiation treatment, normally needs a large accelerator complex, cutting the floor space of a hospital. The institute expects it to treat 2,000 to 5,000 cases a year, while China's existing domestic heavy-ion machines had together treated nearly 5,000 patients through September. It also calls the system's rotating beam delivery unit an international first. The unit, at the Huizhou Heavy Ion Medical Center in Guangdong, is in equipment testing, with clinical trials expected by the end of 2026. |
| State shipbuilder CSSC signs contract to build a deep-sea floating research platform China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) said its Waigaoqiao yard has signed a contract to build a floating ocean research platform for Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Designed to keep working in rough seas and survive a force-17 typhoon, the top of China's extended wind scale, the platform would let ocean researchers stay on station through storms. The signing moves into construction a national major science and technology infrastructure project, the category Beijing uses for state-funded big-science facilities. Six laboratories will sit aboard the twin-hull platform, with delivery due by June 2030. |
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| Chinese navy escort group returns from 378-day Gulf of Aden deployment The Chinese navy's 48th escort task force returned to a naval port in Qingdao after a 378-day mission escorting ships in the Gulf of Aden and off Somalia. The rotation shows the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy keeping a destroyer, a frigate and a supply ship on station far from China for more than a year. The guided-missile destroyer Tangshan, the frigate Daqing and the replenishment ship Taihu escorted 423 Chinese and foreign ships during the deployment. Along the way the group joined exercises with South Africa and Pakistan and the parade for Seychelles' 50th independence anniversary. |
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