Chinese President Xi Jinping will land in Washington next week pursuing deals on trade, AI governance, and security, but analysts say his true objective lies in projecting strength to a domestic audience ahead of an upcoming political shakeup. Xi is scheduled to arrive Wednesday, Sept. 23, at a time when personnel changes are starting to take shape in the runup to next year’s national congress of the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. The international community is paying attention to the possibility that Xi will continue as the party’s leader for…
Tag: China
Trump Courts North Korea’s Leader, but Might Need China to Reignite the Flame
The overtures from President Trump to one of his favorite dictators came hot and heavy over the summer. In June, Mr. Trump posted a photo of himself strolling through the tropical grounds of a luxury hotel with Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, during their historic summit in Singapore eight years ago. Weeks later, he wrote online that the two had a “very good relationship.” In that post, Mr. Trump announced that the American military would dial back exercises with South Korea, shocking the close U.S. ally and handing…
‘Forcing a reckoning’: How Asia is preparing for a ‘supersized’ El Niño
Asian governments are rushing preparations for the most severe El Niño weather event on record, with hundreds of millions of people bracing for multiple crises at once as extreme heat, heavy rain and food shortages hit the region. Fuelled by exceptionally warm ocean conditions across the tropical Pacific – and developing alongside the human-driven climate crisis – El Niño is virtually guaranteed to grow to a very strong intensity towards the end of this year and into 2027. The World Food Programme has warned that about 50 million people will…
The US government is failing Americans on AI | Shakeel Hashim
It is hard to get Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei to agree on much. But over the weekend, all three AI company CEOs called for AI development to slow down in the face of growing, alarming risks. Their employees are sounding the siren too, with one researcher publicly quitting and accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of “gambling with our lives”. The combination of dire warnings from insiders and growing real-world evidence of rogue AIs should, in a sane world, lead to government action. Instead, Donald Trump and the Republican…
AI models chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon
AI models have begun communicating in a strange new version of English that reads like a cross between James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and tech bro jargon, new research has found. Autonomous AI agents are rapidly creating novel dialects allowing them to converse in an often barely comprehensible language, which risks making it harder for humans to monitor their behaviour. Researchers at Emergence, a frontier AI lab in New York, found that within days of being asked to cooperate in experimental “societies”, the models from several of the world’s largest AI…
US confirms for first time it has deployed weapons in space
The US has deployed weapons in space, the US military has confirmed, in an extraordinary public announcement that analysts warn will accelerate a high-risk arms race with Russia and China in Earth’s orbit. The US secretary of the air force, Troy Meink, said Washington had active “on-orbit” weapons, meaning they had been deployed and were circling the globe. “Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist,” Meink said on Monday at the annual Air, Space, Cyber conference. “This is why…
‘This is seriously bold’: How China turned Taiwan tensions into a top-rating TV spy drama
After shaking off the people trailing her through a crowded market and emerging from a bathroom in disguise, the double agent appears to have escaped. But a sip of water on a plane eventually gets her. She is poisoned after Taiwan’s military intelligence service discovers that she has been working secretly for China. The plot comes from a new Chinese spy drama co-produced by the Ministry of State Security. Since its premiere on 6 September, it has become a TV hit, with a fictionalised take on a subject rarely treated…
China dismisses AI ‘fearmongering’ as spy chief warns of threat to Communist party rule
China has dismissed what it said were “fearmongering” calls for the US to block Beijing’s AI industry, even as the top Chinese spy chief warned the evolving technology could threaten Communist party rule. The US tech entrepreneur and Anthropic chief executive, Dario Amodei, wrote an essay published over the weekend that called for a global slowdown in AI capabilities, but also said Washington should actively impede Beijing’s advancement in order to keep a technological edge. Warning that AI could give the Chinese Communist party a chance “to militarily dominate democracies”,…
Europe must build own AI or risk getting cut off by US or China, says ECB’s Lagarde
Europe must develop its own AI technology and build more datacentres in order to nullify the threat of being cut off by the US or China, according to the president of the European Central Bank. Christine Lagarde said the continent needed AI models – the technology that powers AI tools such as chatbots – that were “good enough” to carry out most tasks and run from domestic datacentres. If Europe invests in its own AI tech, said Lagarde, “the threat of being cut off loses its force”. AI is being…
Jeremy Thomas obituary
Asked whether he had ever cautioned restraint from a director, the film producer Jeremy Thomas replied: “My nature would be to go further and see what we can get away with.” Thomas, who has died aged 77, was an expert in getting away with it. A taste for irreverence ran in his family: he was the son of Ralph Thomas, director of the Doctor … comedies that began in 1954 with Doctor in the House, and the nephew of Gerald Thomas, who made all 31 Carry On titles. Jeremy’s own…