China’s Push Into A.I. Has Led to a Problem: Too Much Usage; The New York Times, October 2, 2026

 Yan Zhuang , The New York Times; China’s Push Into A.I. Has Led to a Problem: Too Much Usage

"As China’s government pushes its citizens to embrace artificial intelligence, it is confronting a problem partly of its own making: overreliance on the technology.

State media reports have featured stories that serve as cautionary tales: a farmer who lost 25 acres of seedlings after asking an A.I. for advice, children who have become so attached to chatbots that they want their parents to speak like them and A.I.-generated micro dramas with characters that look like carbon copies of one another.

These cases and others have raised concerns in China that as it rushes to catch up with the United States in A.I., it is running into adverse side effects created by the new technology, which is accused of undermining human relationships and depriving people of their better judgment. The government, seeking to direct how people use the technology, has responded by imposing new regulations and judicial guidelines on its use — and misuse.

The response reflects how the ruling Communist Party is trying to balance its ambitions to promote the widespread use of A.I. with a desire to avoid anything that might undermine social order, say analysts."

Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month; The Guardian, October 1, 2026

 Timnit Gebru and Emily M Bender, The Guardian; Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month

"A series of events almost got us to armageddon, not caused by “rogue, superintelligent AI”, but by government reliance on error-prone systems that are marketed by their manufacturers as being close to superintelligent.

A CNN report published on 18 September, which hasn’t been verified by other major outlets, describes how the US “almost started a war” with China, based on an intelligence report that claimed a Chinese ship was transporting components of nuclear weapons. Military personnel made plans to intercept the Chinese vessel, complete with aircraft and soldiers ready to board the ship. A military skirmish of this kind between China and the US could quickly escalate and spiral into world war three.

It was only moments before executing on the plan that American officials further investigated the intelligence report and found that it had been generated with the use of a chatbot and contained erroneous information about the vessel’s contents.

Unlike the terminator, “rogue AI”, scenario, this incident didn’t galvanize lawmakers into announcing calls for regulation so as to avoid potential human extinction. Media outlet after media outlet didn’t warn the public that we almost triggered a war against a nuclear superpower because of our military’s reliance on error-prone chatbots."

It’s Time to Cry Wolf Over A.I.; The New York Times, September 22, 2026

 THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, The New York Times; It’s Time to Cry Wolf Over A.I.

"Here is what my imagination is telling me. It is telling me that the big A.I. companies in America and China are not being candid with us about how little even they understand the power and reach of the models they have developed, like sorcerers, in their labs. It is telling me that the Trump administration, headed by a man who so often governs by social media post, is uniquely unsuited to the kind of comprehensive, sustained, coordinated governance that keeping A.I. safe demands. And it is telling me that there is so much at stake — economically, militarily and technologically — and so little trust between Washington and Beijing that it would take a miracle for the United States and China to agree on the kind of deep collaboration needed to defuse the most nightmarish threats posed by A.I...

The last time we trusted the good intentions of the tech bros of Silicon Valley, when they told us to “move fast and break things” — regulations be damned — we unleashed social networks that helped fracture our society. I do not trust for one second that these people will put the national interest ahead of their own on A.I...

Trump should be thinking about another president. Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” What he meant was that no fixed plan can survive all the unanticipated stuff that happens once a war or crisis starts to unfold. But if you’ve gone through a rigorous planning process — familiarized yourself with the depth of the problem and the kinds of things that could go haywire and built trust within your team — you greatly improve your ability to adapt on the fly.

That is precisely what was missing in the run-up to Trump’s war with Iran, and we are paying a huge price for that today. Imagine what could happen if A.I. agents — a thousand times cleverer and more dangerous than Tehran or Trump — go off the rails."

Authors have mixed feelings about the $1.5B Anthropic copyright infringement ruling; NPR, July 27, 2026

Chloe Veltman , NPR; Authors have mixed feelings about the $1.5B Anthropic copyright infringement ruling

"Graeber is among the more than 300,000 writers involved in the suit who may soon be getting a modest windfall. A federal judge in San Francisco rubber stamped a $1.5 billion settlement in July resulting from a landmark class action lawsuit the authors brought against the AI company Anthropic two years ago...

AI companies often invoke the fair use doctrine – which enables the use of copyrighted works without the copyright holder's consent in some situations – as they try to make the case in court for training their models on these materials...

Chinese AI companies often use a technique to build their models called "AI distillation." This involves feeding their models the outputs generated by other AI models, often high-quality U.S.-based ones like OpenAI's GPT-4 or Anthropic's Claude, instead of directly training them on pirated copies of books by American authors...

One possible way for authors to get a fairer shake in the age of AI could be through the licensing of their work to AI companies...

There are already some such deals between publishers and AI companies in place, such as Perplexity AI's agreement with media entities like the Los Angeles Times and Le Monde to license content for the training of its models. There are also online licensing marketplaces, such as Created by Humans."

The U.S. Is Still Winning the A.I. Race. Trump Could Blow It.; The New York Times, July 27, 2026

The Editorial Board, The New York Times ; The U.S. Is Still Winning the A.I. Race. Trump Could Blow It.

"Americans often hear about China’s having surpassed the United States in the manufacturing of emerging technologies, including clean energy, electric vehicles and drones. Semiconductors are an important exception. In partnership with its allies in Europe and Asia, America designs and makes by far the best computer chips in the world.

Those chips are crucial to America’s economy and national security. They have enabled the development of the world’s leading technology companies and allowed the military to create advanced weapons. With artificial intelligence, these chips have become even more important. They are the engines that power frontier A.I. models.

China is working hard to catch up, and the United States should take steps to keep its advantage. Most important, it should continue to prohibit American companies from selling the most advanced chips and equipment to China. Over the past decade, presidents of both parties have worked with Congress to enact export controls. Those controls have been “existentially important,” Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, the A.I. company, has said.

In his second term, however, President Trump has gone the opposite direction. He has relaxed controls on some advanced semiconductors and suggested he may go further. Nvidia, an American company that makes the most advanced chips, has lobbied for the ability to sell more to China and is likely to continue pushing. Yet this is a classic case in which a company’s interest runs counter to the national interest."

Data centers have united Americans of both parties in a shared hatred; The Washington Post, July 18, 2026

 Shira Ovide , The Washington Post; Data centers have united Americans of both parties in a shared hatred

"Kyle Schmidt ticked through what makes him irate about the massive Google data center slated for construction about a mile away from his home near Sand Springs, Oklahoma.

He didn’t like that residents were kept in the dark about what would be built on a pristine tract of mostly forested land. He’s worried about the data center’s potential impact on the community’s water supply and on the dream home that his family moved into last year.

But Schmidt said what really bothers him is the powerlessness he felt as the project advanced and elected officials, Google representatives and bigwig data center backers belittled or misled people who raised concerns...

Opposition in both red and blue regions continued to build to the point where he has tracked about 65 state data center restrictions enacted since the start of 2025, and dozens of cities that have imposed temporary halts to data center development. This week, New York became the first state in the nation to impose a temporary pause on large new data center projects...

Tech giants and other data center backers have been caught off guard by the rapid rise of public opposition, arguing that the hubs are essential for modern digital services and to keep the United States ahead of China on AI."

‘It’s a hurricane warning’: Guardrails around powerful AI models may be too late; Politico, June 7, 2026

 DANA NICKEL and  MAGGIE MILLER, Politico; ‘It’s a hurricane warning’: Guardrails around powerful AI models may be too late

The U.S. has at most six to 12 months before Beijing can compete with this new wave of hyper-advanced AI models.

"The U.S. is scrambling to strengthen guardrails around increasingly powerful artificial intelligence models before China can catch up.

It may already be running out of time.

New AI models, such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5-Cyber, have advanced faster than legislation regulating the technology can keep pace. They have both shown a remarkable ability to identify software vulnerabilities and launch cyberattacks — skills that hackers and cyber adversaries are hungry to exploit.

Recent estimates suggest that the U.S. has at most six to 12 months before Beijing gains access to a frontier model with prowess comparable to Mythos or GPT 5.5-Cyber or develops an AI competitor that could eventually be wielded as a cyber weapon...

This race to develop defensive tools against a potential barrage of AI-powered cyberattacks has been accelerated by accusations that China is stealing U.S. technologies to create copycat versions of advanced AI models via distillation attacks, by which attackers use a “teacher” model’s outputs to train their own “student” models...

As this watershed moment for AI fast approaches, the U.S. government is weighing how to support the continued development of American-made technology while balancing the need for greater guardrails.

The Trump administration has largely taken a hands-off approach to regulating the release of frontier models to avoid stifling innovation and to stay competitive with China. It was finally motivated to act after Anthropic warned that the rate of AI progress threatened to upend global economies, public safety and national security if not deployed safely.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this week that encourages AI companies to submit their powerful new models for voluntary government review at least 30 days before releasing them to the public."

Disney’s Copyright Suit Against Chinese AI Developer Advances; Bloomberg Law, May 23, 2026

Laura D. Francis, Bloomberg Law; Disney’s Copyright Suit Against Chinese AI Developer Advances

"The Walt Disney Co. and other major movie studios will move forward with their copyright claims against the makers of the Hailuo AI program after a federal judge in California refused to toss the case.

Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros.—as well as their subsidiaries—convinced the US District Court for the Central District of California Friday that they made plausible claims that Hailuo AI’s ability to generate near-perfect likenesses of their well-known characters constituted both direct and secondary infringement."

Shein accuses Temu of copyright infringement on 'industrial scale'; Quartz, May 11, 2026

Colleen Cabili , Quarz; Shein accuses Temu of copyright infringement on 'industrial scale'

"Shein accused rival Temu of copyright infringement "on an industrial scale" as a two-week trial opened Monday at London's High Court, with Temu firing back that the lawsuit was designed to stifle competition rather than protect intellectual property."

Americans are down on AI. These two caricatures are to blame.; The Washington Post, April 28, 2026

 

Russell Wald

 and 

Sha Sajadieh

, The Washington Post; Americans are down on AI. These two caricatures are to blame.

"America is all-in on artificial intelligence. Americans are not. 

That is clear enough from domestic polling alone. But the 2026 AI Index, released this month by Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, puts this skepticism into a global context. 

While the United States and China are nearly matched in their aggressive investment and economic stakes, they are worlds apart in public sentiment. About 84 percent of respondents in China say they are excited about AI, versus just 38 percent in the U.S., a gap with profound implications for how each country builds, adopts and governs the technology.

Public opinion does not merely reflect the AI debate. It decides whether democratic societies can govern the technology wisely, adopt it productively and distinguish between real risk and manufactured panic.

The U.S. now stands out with its distrust. Americans reported the lowest trust in their government to regulate AI responsibly of any country surveyed: just 31 percent. The global average was 54 percent. In Singapore, that number was 81 percent."

DeepSeek’s Sequel Set to Extend China’s Reach in Open-Source A.I.; The New York Times, April 24, 2026

Meaghan Tobin and Cade Metz, The New York Times; DeepSeek’s Sequel Set to Extend China’s Reach in Open-Source A.I.

"DeepSeek released its models as open source, which means others can freely use and modify them. By contrast, OpenAI and Anthropic kept their leading models proprietary. The episode demonstrated that an open-source system could perform almost as well as closed versions. In the months that followed, Chinese firms released dozens of other open-source models. By the end of 2025, these models made up a significant share of global A.I. usage.

On Friday, DeepSeek released a preview of V4, its long-awaited follow-up model, which it intends to open source. The new model excels at writing computer code, an increasingly important skill for leading A.I. systems. It significantly outperformed every other open-source system at generating code, according to tests from Vals AI, a company that tracks the performance of A.I. technologies.

DeepSeek released its new model just days after Moonshot AI, another Chinese start-up, introduced its latest open-source model, Kimi 2.6. While these systems trail the coding capabilities of the leading U.S. models from Anthropic and OpenAI, the gap is narrowing.

The implications are meaningful. Using A.I. to write code is faster and frees up human programmers to focus on bigger issues. It also means people can use DeepSeek’s latest release to power A.I. agents, which are personal digital assistants that can use other software applications on behalf of office workers, including spreadsheets, online calendars and email services."

U.S. accuses China of "industrial-scale" campaigns to steal AI secrets; Axios, April 23, 2026

Sam Sabin, Axios ; U.S. accuses China of "industrial-scale" campaigns to steal AI secrets

"The Trump administration on Thursday accused China-backed actors of running "deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns" to distill and copy American frontier AI models...

Driving the news: Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, sent a memo Thursday to federal agency heads accusing mostly China-based actors of using proxy accounts to evade detection and jailbreak models to "expose proprietary information" and "extract capabilities from American AI models."

Distillation attacks involve querying proprietary models, like Claude or Gemini, millions of times via APIs to build datasets that replicate how the systems behave.

Kratsios said these campaigns enable foreign actors to release models that appear to match U.S. AI capabilities at a fraction of the cost.

He added that such tactics can also strip away guardrails meant to keep outputs "ideologically neutral and truth-seeking.""

Senators tell ByteDance to ‘immediately shut down’ Seedance AI video app; CNBC, March 17, 2026

Emily Wilkins, CNBC ;  Senators tell ByteDance to ‘immediately shut down’ Seedance AI video app

"Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Peter Welch are calling for a halt to the new version of ByteDance’s artificial intelligence app, Seedance, which generates videos of real people and licensed characters, raising copyright and intellectual property concerns. 

Seedance 2.0 “is the most glaring example of copyright infringement from a ByteDance product to date, and you must immediately shut down Seedance and implement meaningful safeguards to prevent further infringing outputs,” Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Welch, D-Vt., wrote in a letter to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo that was first obtained by CNBC.

Their letter is a sign of growing concerns on Capitol Hill about how AI companies are developing and using their models and whether proper protections are in place for those who generate the materials the models train from."

ByteDance’s Controversial AI Video Model Reportedly on Hold Globally Due to Copyright Disputes; Gizmodo, March 14, 2026

MIKE PEARL  , Gizmodo; ByteDance’s Controversial AI Video Model Reportedly on Hold Globally Due to Copyright Disputes

"According to two anonymous leakers who spoke to the Information, the global release of Seedance 2.0 is on hold amid legal action from movie studios and streaming services.

When it was initially released, Seedance 2.0 appeared to have few if any protections in place to prevent users from generating videos appearing to star celebrities, copyrighted characters, and celebrities as copyrighted characters."

Hollywood studios escalate dispute over ByteDance’s ‘pervasive copyright infringement’ with its AI tools; Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2026

Cerys Davies, Los Angeles Times; Hollywood studios escalate dispute over ByteDance’s ‘pervasive copyright infringement’ with its AI tools

"Following the lead of several major Hollywood studios, the Motion Picture Assn. has sent its own cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, the company behind the controversial artificial-intelligence video generator Seedance 2.0.

The trade association, which represents the interests of major film and TV studios, sent a notice to the Chinese company, reflecting its members’ collective response to “ByteDance’s pervasive copyright infringement.” MPA argues that Seedance’s unauthorized use of copyrighted materials is a “feature, not a bug.” 

The letter, sent Friday, marks the first time the MPA has forwarded a cease-and-desist to a major AI firm and represents a further escalation of tensions between the entertainment industry and an AI company."

Hollywood's copyright fight meets China's AI boom; Axios, February 19, 2026

Madison Mills, Sara Fischer, Axios; Hollywood's copyright fight meets China's AI boom

"The big picture: Hollywood is leaning on copyright law to rein in Seedance, but legal pressure hasn't slowed the rise of Chinese AI models more broadly."

ByteDance says it will add safeguards to Seedance 2.0 following Hollywood backlash; CNBC, February 16, 2026

Dylan Butts, CNBC; ByteDance says it will add safeguards to Seedance 2.0 following Hollywood backlash

"Chinese tech giant ByteDance has said it will strengthen safeguards on a new artificial intelligence video-making tool, following complaints of copyright theft from entertainment giants. 

The tool, Seedance 2.0, enables users to create realistic videos based on text prompts. However, viral videos shared online appear to show copyrighted characters and celebrity likenesses, raising intellectual property concerns in the U.S. 

“ByteDance respects intellectual property rights and we have heard the concerns regarding Seedance 2.0,” a company spokesperson said in a statement shared with CNBC."

Scoop: Disney sends cease and desist letter to ByteDance over Seedance 2.0; Axios, February 13, 2026

Sara Fischer, Axios ; Scoop: Disney sends cease and desist letter to ByteDance over Seedance 2.0

"The Walt Disney Company on Friday sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, alleging the Chinese tech giant has been infringing on its works to train and develop an AI video generation model without compensation, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Axios.

Why it matters: It's the most serious action a Hollywood studio has taken so far against ByteDance since it launched Seedance 2.0 on Thursday. 

Zoom in: The letter, addressed to ByteDance global general counsel John Rogovin, accuses ByteDance of pre-packaging its Seedance service "with a pirated library of Disney's copyrighted characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and other Disney franchises, as if Disney's coveted intellectual property were free public domain clip art." 

"Over Disney's well-publicized objections, ByteDance is hijacking Disney's characters by reproducing, distributing, and creating derivative works featuring those characters. ByteDance's virtual smash-and-grab of Disney's IP is willful, pervasive, and totally unacceptable," Disney's outside attorney David Singer wrote. 

"We believe this is just the tip of the iceberg – which is shocking considering Seedance has only been available for a few days," he added.

Between the lines: The letter includes a slew of examples of infringing Seedance videos that feature Disney's copyrighted characters, including Spider-Man, Darth Vader, Star Wars' Grogu (Baby Yoda), Peter Griffin from Family Guy and others."

Ex-Google engineer found guilty of stealing AI secrets for China; Axios, February 2, 2026

Rebecca Falconer, Axios; Ex-Google engineer found guilty of stealing AI secrets for China

"A former Google engineer was found guilty of economic espionage and theft of confidential AI technology for the benefit of China's government, the FBI said Monday.

Why it matters: Intelligence and defense officials have long warned of increased efforts by Beijing and others to obtain U.S. intellectual property and use AI against American interests.

State of play: A federal jury in San Francisco convicted Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, 38, of seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets, per an FBI post on X Monday."

Young people in China have a new alternative to marriage and babies: AI pets; The Washington Post, February 6, 2026

 

Huiyee Chiew

 and 

Rudy Lu

, The Washington Post; Young people in China have a new alternative to marriage and babies: AI pets

"While China and the United States vie for supremacy in the artificial intelligence race, China is pulling ahead when it comes to finding ways to apply AI tools to everyday uses — from administering local government and streamlining police work to warding off loneliness. People falling in love with chatbots has captured headlines in the U.S., and the AI pet craze in China adds a new, furry dimension to the evolving human relationship with AI."