03a China
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Chinese cars are a security risk.
That’s the message Washington has been sending the American consumer: Cheaper vehicles aren’t worth exposing sensitive data to theft. Hence the massive tariffs aimed at China.
The difference is that Stellantis is now openly telling investors that these partnerships are central to its long-term strategy.
But while America was focused on keeping brands like BYD and NIO out of local dealerships, the global auto industry quietly found another way in.
And Stellantis just made that strategy official.
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The U.S. government’s decision to stop Anthropic from offering its Mythos and Fable 5 models to non-U.S. nationals may end up providing a big boost to the adoption of open-source models, including those from Chinese AI labs like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI.
Users can download open-source models and run them on their own computers or cloud networks, effectively sidestepping the ability of both AI developers and governments to control access. These models can also be more easily fine-tuned by developers to tailor them for specific needs.
Chinese labs are already claiming a public relations win from the Anthropic controversy.
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BEIJING — The Philippines defense secretary and his family have been banned from entering China over comments he has made about Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday.
Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro and his wife and kids are banned from entering China, including Hong Kong, while individuals and groups in China are also banned from having any sort of transaction with Teodoro, the ministry said in a statement
Teodoro is known for using strong language to counter China’s claims over the strategic waters, calling them a “fiction and lie” that no Southeast Asian country would accept.
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Federal authorities on Wednesday shut down 13 internet domains said to be used by China for operations to obtain classified and sensitive U.S. government information, the Justice Department said.
The internet sites were used by Chinese actors to recruit Americans and others with access to secret information while posing as fraudulent professional consulting services, according to a department statement.
“The fake consulting company domains seized by the FBI illustrate the lengths the Chinese government’s intelligence services will go to as they try to use AI-generated content to trick, recruit, or coerce current and former U.S. security clearance holders into sharing sensitive information,” said Roman Rozhavsky, assistant FBI director for counterintelligence and espionage.
“The FBI and our partners have observed China’s intelligence services resort to using AI, professional networking sites, and online payment platforms to target Americans, and we have taken actions to defend the homeland and our national security.”
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China has become the first country in the world to operate an underwater data center, or UDC, powered by wind. Located off the coast of Shanghai, the complex represents a significant advance in the country’s strategy to secure energy supplies in the face of the accelerated growth of artificial intelligence, reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and reduce the environmental impact of its technology infrastructure.
The initiative is the result of a collaboration between private company HiCloud Technology and state-owned China Communications Construction, which involved an investment of 1.6 billion yuan, equivalent to about $236 million.
With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the facility is submerged at a depth of 10 meters in the Lin-gang Special Zone, within the China Pilot Free Trade Zone in Shanghai. This location allows seawater to be used as a natural cooling system, reducing the proportion of energy used to cool the infrastructure to less than 10 percent.
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US Central Command, the US military combat command responsible for Middle East operations, followed up by launching what its press release described as “self-defense strikes against Iran, June 9, at the Commander in Chief’s direction in response to yesterday’s downing of a US Army Apache helicopter.”
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Taiwan may feel distant to most Europeans, but a Chinese takeover of the island would send shockwaves from Washington to Tokyo, Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister François Chih-chung Wu told Euronews Next.
“If China attacks Taiwan, France, Europe, the United States, and Japan will all be affected. Taiwan will be in a terrible situation — but so will you,” he warned.
The deputy minister pushed back on China’s claim over Taiwan as part of its territory since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. Beijing has never ruled out using force to bring the self-governing island under its control and refuses to recognise it as a sovereign state, insisting it be referred to internationally as “Chinese Taipei,” a designation that reflects China’s position that there is only “one China” and that Taiwan is part of it.
Taiwan itself officially goes by the Republic of China, a name dating back to the government that fled to the island after losing the civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communist forces.
Taiwan’s history is far more complex than the narrative that it has always been part of China, Wu said, with the island ruled by the Dutch, the Spanish, the Qing Empire and Japan at different times.
The Qing Dynasty administered part of Taiwan for more than a hundred years, but it was only between 1885 and 1894 that it attached any real importance to the island and established it as a province — a mere ten years of genuine strategic interest that challenges the current Chinese claims of continued sovereignty.
“China was not the only country there,” he said, arguing this history does not justify Beijing’s ambitions.
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China’s President travelled to North Korea for the first time in seven years, underscoring the strategic importance of ties between the two neighbours.
President Trump told the press at a White House event he does not think China is engaging in agit prop campaigning to drive Americans to not support AI Data Centers. His response suggested even if China could do such a thing, it wouldn’t be effective.
The world’s top reserve asset is no longer US Treasuries, it’s gold, and that rally is being led by China, with Poland, Kazakhstan, and Brazil joining in the gold buying frenzy.
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China’s plan to become a world leader in AI by 2030 is a fixture of practically every Congressional briefing and expert commentary on Beijing’s AI ambitions. The plan’s logic — introduced in 2017 — was simple and alarming: Beijing would direct capital, mobilize its firms, recruit talent, and execute with the strategic patience of a state-led innovation ecosystem. Nearly a decade later, that frame has only hardened. Beijing’s recently issued 15th Five-Year Plan directs Party organs to take “extraordinary measures” to strengthen technological self-reliance and launch a new “AI+” initiative to integrate AI across the nation’s strategic sectors. Beijing has the legal architecture to compel its firms to do its bidding, so Washington has largely concluded that Beijing’s AI sprint reflects deliberate industrial policy, and built America’s response around that assumption.
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Beijing’s censorship cannot erase memories of its 1989 military assault on peaceful demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday, ahead of the anniversary of China’s violent suppression there.
Rubio’s statement largely mirrored his past remarks on the crackdown but is likely to be reassuring to Chinese dissidents and pro-democracy supporters at a time when President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted his relationship with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, whom he met in Beijing last month.
According to human rights groups, Chinese troops opened fire on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square and killed hundreds if not thousands of people.
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On May 8, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan broke a grueling six-month stalemate by passing a landmark $25 billion defense budget, catching many observers off guard. The vote brought sudden end to an agonizing legislative deadlock that had pushed U.S.-Taiwanese relations to the edge. For months, long-simmering frustration in Washington over Taiwan’s defense trajectory has threatened to boil over, catalyzed by an unprecedented bipartisan open letter from U.S. senators, demanding that Taiwan authorize the pending defense packages.