US artificial intelligence company Anthropic has introduced Chinese-language options to its Claude chatbot in supported markets, even as it continues to block users from mainland China. Checks by the South China Morning Post on Thursday confirmed that Claude’s web interface now lets users select simplified and traditional Chinese as their preferred on-screen language. China also briefly appeared as a billing country option before disappearing from the settings. Users on X have shared screenshots...

When I took out the US$3,500 Huawei Mate XT 2 over a family dinner during China’s “golden week” – the long National Day holiday in early October – the trifold phone quickly became the centre of discussion: my father and his peers took turns playing with the device, marvelling at the sleek design while debating whether it was true innovation or pure luxury. It wasn’t the first time unfolding its massive 10.2 inch display raised a few eyebrows at dining tables during the week I spent trying out...

China’s open-weight artificial intelligence models are taking off globally, but much of the money they generate is flowing to third-party providers rather than the companies that create them, according to a new study. Developers including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI make their model weights – essentially the “brains” of their AI systems – freely available for download. This strategy, which has accelerated global adoption over the past two years, allows other companies to run the models on their own...

On September 22, the global artificial intelligence landscape spun on its axis within a matter of hours. In Beijing, Xiaomi engineers went live with an unusual broadcast, streaming the training run of their new MiMo-V2.6 model. In San Francisco, Anthropic unveiled its frontier Opus 5.5 model. About an hour later, OpenAI crashed the party with the surprise release of its GPT-6 Sol and Luna models. For tech executives and developers trying to keep pace, it was just another overwhelming day in the...