Chinese A.I. Models Gain Ground on Anthropic and OpenAI

Two weeks ago, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic shut down its two most powerful A.I. systems after an unexpected demand from the U.S. government to cut access to it. Days later, a Chinese start-up, Z.ai, released an A.I. model that is nearly as powerful as Anthropic’s models, Fable and Mythos. But Z.ai’s new technology costs much less to use, and no one in the United States was putting restrictions on it. It quickly landed on a closely watched leaderboard of the world’s 10 most popular models. Z.ai is on the…

China Takes Supercomputer Crown From U.S. For First Time Since 2017

China took back a coveted computing crown from the United States on Tuesday, ratcheting up a fierce technological competition that has implications for science, national security and geopolitics. LineShine, a massive computing system in Shenzhen, China, was declared the world’s fastest by a group of researchers using a set of standard tests for supercomputers. Besides raw speed, the system stood out because it uses only standard microprocessors and not the special-purpose chips called graphics processing units, which most high-end supercomputers rely on for heavy number crunching. That underlying design could…

Hacking of Government Email Was Traditional Espionage, Official Says

The hack of Microsoft’s cloud that resulted in the compromise of government emails was an example of a traditional espionage threat, a senior National Security Agency official said. Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, Rob Joyce, the director of cybersecurity at the N.S.A., said the United States needed to protect its networks from such espionage, but that adversaries would continue to try to secretly extract information from each other. “It is China doing espionage,” Mr. Joyce said. “It is what nation-states do. We have to defend against it, we need…

China’s Cloud Computing Firms Raise Concern for U.S.

Samm Sacks, a cyber policy fellow at the New America think tank, said the interest in cloud computing reflected the Biden administration’s approach of looking at Chinese influence in the infrastructure of the internet and the digital services that use the web. “There’s an intent to focus on the whole ecosystem across those layers,” she said. U.S. efforts to hinder Chinese tech firms have had mixed success. American restrictions on suppliers to Huawei hurt the company’s smartphone business, but efforts to remove Huawei equipment from wireless networks inside the United…