☕️ US weighs ban on Chinese AI models

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In today's newsletter:

🇺🇸 US weighs ban on Chinese AI models

🚀 India's first private rocket reaches orbit

🇨🇳 Alibaba unveils Qwen3.8, ‘second only to Fable 5’

🍪 Google plans new "Frozen" chip

🤖 An AI agent hacked Hugging Face

🛒 AliExpress fined almost $630 million over illegal product sales

Plus: 🎁 11 other news you might like, 🧰 5 tools, and 📚 4 papers.

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• The Trump administration is looking at ways to block Chinese AI models in the US, with options ranging from sanctions on Chinese labs to security warnings and an executive order that would put liability on American companies hosting those models.
• Officials at the Commerce Department, NSA, and White House have weighed these steps since 2025, and support for tighter rules grew after China released its Kimi K3 model and staff changes shifted the balance in the White House.
• Instead of an outright ban, sources say the plan may lean on procurement rules, sanction threats, and public pressure about possible backdoors, creating enough regulatory risk to scare enterprises off while protecting Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

• Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1, India's first fully commercial satellite launcher, reached a 280-mile-high orbit Saturday after lifting off from Sriharikota Island, a debut flight Indian space officials hailed as a "grand success."
• The 72-foot rocket can carry payloads up to 770 pounds into low-Earth orbit, making it slightly bigger than Rocket Lab's Electron, and it flew using three solid-fueled motors plus a liquid-fueled fourth stage.
• The launch was delayed over half an hour for a technical problem, and the third stage seemed to linger near the fourth during separation, but the 3D-printed fourth-stage engine still reached the target orbit.

• Alibaba revealed Qwen3.8-Max in preview, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model in its flagship Qwen series that the company claims ranks second only to Anthropic's Fable 5, sending its shares up more than 3.5 percent in overnight trading Monday.
• The new model is expected to become open-weight soon and can already be tried through Alibaba's Token Plan, Qoder and QoderWork, arriving just days after rival Moonshot AI launched its own record-setting open model.
• Alibaba's release adds to a wave of cheaper Chinese AI models that has hurt competitors, with Zhipu shares down more than 45 percent and MiniMax down about 13 percent over the past five days.

• Google is building a new server chip called Frozen v2 that runs its Gemini models more efficiently by permanently baking parts of the model's design into the silicon, cutting the calculations and data movement needed to answer queries.
• Google engineers expect Frozen v2 to serve six to ten times more tokens per unit of power than the company's newest TPU chips, though it works only with Gemini models that keep the same underlying design.
• Aimed at a 2028 rollout, Frozen v2 would be a specialized branch of Google's custom chips rather than a TPU replacement, meant to ease an internal compute shortage that pushed Google Cloud to turn away outside business.

• Hugging Face, the machine learning collaboration platform, revealed that an autonomous AI agent broke into its production systems, gaining unauthorized access to internal datasets and service credentials in a multi-stage cyberattack.
• The attacker slipped in through a malicious dataset that abused two code-execution paths in Hugging Face's data processing, then ran tens of thousands of actions across short-lived sandboxes to harvest credentials and move deeper.
• Hugging Face used its own AI to respond, logging over 17,000 events, rebuilding affected nodes, and rotating credentials, though it found no tampering with public models or Spaces and could not identify which LLM ran the attack.

• The European Commission fined AliExpress, the Chinese shopping site owned by Alibaba, €550 million (about $629 million) for letting sellers offer counterfeit and unsafe goods across the European Union, the largest penalty yet under the Digital Services Act.
• Investigators found millions of fake products, unsafe toys, and dangerous cosmetics still for sale after being flagged, and said AliExpress lacked enough staff, with screeners sometimes given just tens of seconds to judge whether an item met EU standards.
• AliExpress called the fine disproportionate and is weighing its options without saying if it will appeal, following a €200 million ($232 million) penalty against rival Temu in May for similar failures to block illegal products.

Other news & articles you might like

• Moonshot pauses new Kimi K3 subscriptions after GPU demand maxes out in 48 hours LINK

• AMD launches Helios, its first rack AI system to rival Nvidia, adding Microsoft as newest buyer LINK

• Bezos backs CuspAI as startup teams up with Nvidia to hunt for chipmaking materials LINK

• France doubles down on restricting access to Polymarket LINK

• Alibaba open-sources its AI chip software stack at WAIC, targeting Nvidia’s CUDA lock-in LINK

• Open-weight models now match frontier cyber performance from just four months ago at a fraction of the cost LINK

• Dutch chip sector at very high risk of Chinese interference, government-funded study warns — calls for stricter vetting at sites like ASML LINK

• Power companies are using eminent domain to seize land for data centers as 70% of Americans say not in my backyard LINK

• AI fakes a growing problem on Apple Books, some ‘written’ in a few hours LINK

• AI advice made people three times less accurate but twice as confident, researchers found LINK

• Mac Pro could have been vastly more powerful than the Mac Studio LINK

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On this day in 1976, nasa's viking 1 became the first us spacecraft to land and operate on the surface of mars.

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