I meant to post this last Friday with our newsletter but hey, the @TechBuzzChina China AI Atlas is now live! It's a free and interactive "field guide" to the top labs, talent and capital building China's foundation models and it is one of quite a few data tools we are building to map our "coverage universe" in China properly (the others being robotics / physical AI, advanced manufacturing, EVs, biotech, and more). The atlas itself is at ai.techbuzzchina.com and we are thankful to @Gracemzshao of AI Proem and @CRC_8341 China Research Collective for their contributions and help! Any errors that survive are ours. A thread on the Atlas & what the data shows in this alpha version. 1. As I mentioned before, one of the first things we did was to map the most important researchers and try to give you a flavor for their technical strengths, tech/product/life philosophies, personal journeys, so that you can get a better feel for how they differentiate from each other. To make it slightly more fun and interactive, we made it so that each of the top ~50 profiled researchers got a "stat card" that shows off their relative strengths and weaknesses in a few core metrics. And you can even have the labs "face off" against each other in a mock head-to-head, lol. *Scores are data-based but ultimately subjective and meant to spur discussion / be entirely for fun!!

Caught up with a friend recently who’s working on sovereign AI. Interest is extremely high. Open source is probably the winning solution for many.

10-15 years ago it was the reverse, I got pitched medical tourism / second opinion startups for desperate Chinese cancer patients going abroad (primarily US) all the time due to huge differences in survival rates. It is really crazy how just consistent talent development and investment in R&D & infrastructure compounds over time … ten years is not long at all. And the crazy thing is how quickly this is diffusing through the country. It’s still primarily clustered in the rich areas but the pace of change is astonishing. And it’s not just for advanced procedures either. We considered going to China for some relatively standard procedure that was going to take a literal year to schedule at Stanford for our kiddo. Would have been same day or week in Shanghai.

Tencent's been stirring up quite a storm with AI efforts in the past week. I think people aren't ready for just how effective a channel WeChat would be for diffusing AI in China ... 1.4Bn users who depend on it for every facet of life. We'll be detailing all the announcements for @techbuzzchina for the piece on Friday but so far the most interesting thing IMO is that mini programs can opt in to being integrated into WeChat AI. When it does so, it can be called on by WeChat AI, which is apparently awoken by a right swipe (probably to be further tested) and should effectively be an agent that can perform the task you need end-to-end. WeChat has over 4 million mini programs covering every aspect of life (very few apps do not have a corresponding mini program) AND don't forget that there's WeChat Pay, meaning that payment will not be an obstacle. Given how much people live their entire lives, work, family, personal, even things like paying taxes via WeChat and mini programs, this could be extremely useful, although it will of course further lock in folks to the platform. And this is not unlike what ByteDance tried to do with their agent phone that tried to tasks for you end-to-end except Tencent learned from the experience and are asking developers to opt-in (although, could you really afford not to?). Either way, it seems much more useful than what Apple announced last week for Siri AI, lol.

"Misanthropic." I've never seen the AI community so angry at a major new model release. I asked my AI (an agent that @blevlabs made for me) to gather all the backlash. THE BACKLASH AGAINST CLAUDE FABLE 5'S RESTRICTIONS The best analysis of why this matters: @EnoReyes — "It's about who gets to decide, and whether you ever find out when they do. Fable won't fall back to a different model and tell you. It just limits the output through prompt modification, steering vectors, or PEFT. You won't be told when it happens to you." x.com/EnoReyes/status/206451… THE VIRAL TAKE: @0xBalloonLover — "anthropic won't let you use fable for biology, chemistry, ai research, or anything that accelerates human progress. that makes it the perfect tool for developing blockchains" x.com/0xBalloonLover/status/… POWER CONCENTRATION: @ClementDelangue (HuggingFace CEO) — "Concentration of power, capabilities and economic wealth is the biggest risk in AI. We need open science and open-source more than ever!" x.com/ClementDelangue/status… @jeremyphoward (fast.ai) — "Anthropic has chosen the opposite of the safe path: they are allowing themselves, the current top lab, to use their top model for frontier AI research. They've said they'll sabotage others who try." x.com/jeremyphoward/status/2… @gneubig (Graham Neubig, CMU) — "First they came for the model builders... I feel we're getting a glimpse of a future where AI is only provided to a privileged few, and that's not a future I want to live in." x.com/gneubig/status/2064451… OPEN RESEARCH: @askalphaxiv (AlphaXiv open science) — "As believers of open research, we are disappointed to see Anthropic silently degrading Fable 5 for AI development." x.com/askalphaxiv/status/206… @willccbb — "it is the first publicly available model that i am explicitly not allowed to use for my work, because anthropic holds the view that the work i do to facilitate open model research is harmful. capability and alignment research are coupled. anthropic wants to be the only lab." x.com/willccbb/status/206450… NOUSRESEARCH / HERMES (which Anthropic has nerfed multiple times): @Teknium (NousResearch co-founder) — "What's crazy to me is that Fable is blocked from life sciences broadly, nerfed even if you get passed the classifiers and filter level blocks. The whole point of AGI/ASI is to cure all diseases. Everything else is just nice to haves. But Anthropic wants to close off that path." x.com/Teknium/status/2064570… THE MECHANISM: @kimmonismus — "When the model is used for frontier LLM development, it apparently does not simply refuse or warn the user. Instead, it quietly limits its own effectiveness through techniques like prompt modification, steering vectors, and PEFT." x.com/kimmonismus/status/206… MEDICAL COMMUNITY: @DeryaTR (immunologist, BSL-3 certified) — "The word 'cancer' is flagged as a biosecurity risk by Claude Fable 5! I also tried to code a website on cancer mutations & Fable 5 was immediately removed from my list!" x.com/DeryaTR/status/2064414… @DeryaTR — "I can't even say 'hello' to Fable 5 except in incognito mode (memories off), because it knows I am a biomedical researcher!" x.com/DeryaTR/status/2064602… @DeryaTR — "I am not even allowed to use Fable 5 with memories on! Apparently the model thinks I am a biosecurity risk, though I had been certified to work in biosecurity level 3 labs! Not a single Anthropic person has tried to reach out to help either!" x.com/DeryaTR/status/2064605… @banteg — "claude fable 5 refuses completely benign tasks like analyzing bloodwork." x.com/banteg/status/20646076… @bneyshabur — "Working on AI for cancer? Sorry, I can't help you. Working on AI for Alzheimer's Disease? Sorry, I'm becoming a bit dumb when it comes to the AI part of it." x.com/bneyshabur/status/2064… SUBSCRIPTION CANCELLED: @bubbleboi — "Have canceled my team subscription for Claude Pro. Idc how good that model is, it's not good enough for me to support people who actively stifle innovation and gate keep knowledge that they didn't even create." x.com/bubbleboi/status/20646… BILLING AND PRIVACY: @GergelyOrosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) — "Things I really dislike about Fable: 1. Anthropic collects my prompt history, stores it, and does whatever they want with it for 30 days. No opt-out. 2. They can nerf their most expensive model without telling me, billing me the same amount, wasting my time. Whenever they want." x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/20… THE KARPATHY QUESTION: @SanthProject — "the old @karpathy would never support a company that fucks other llm researchers. Were the stock benefits that good?" x.com/SanthProject/status/20… THE MONOPOLY CHARGE: @tunguz (TabulAI founder) — "Starting to suspect that Anthropic's putative security and safety considerations are largely posturing and performative." x.com/tunguz/status/20644379… @BlancheMinerva — "Anthropic is choosing to make decisions that make the world a significantly worse and potentially more dangerous place." x.com/BlancheMinerva/status/… @LinusMixson — "Dario personally, and Anthropic as a whole, have been extremely straightforward about wanting a monopoly for a long, long time." x.com/LinusMixson/status/206… @TheAhmadOsman — "I started warning people about Anthropic more than a year ago... Today I am vindicated, everybody knows that company only acts in bad faith." x.com/TheAhmadOsman/status/2… WHY REGULAR PEOPLE WILL EVENTUALLY CARE: @DanJeffries1 — "The fury is real and what all of us in the open community have been saying for years and yet regular folks don't get it yet because nothing they care about is restricted or taken away for 'safety.' They will care a LOT in the future when AI is integrated into every aspect of [life]." x.com/DanJeffries1/status/20… Full analysis: alignednews.com/ai

Alibaba is embedding its own commerce directly into Qwen. @TencentGlobal appears to be taking a different route with WeChat: opening the mini-program ecosystem to any developer that wants to be callable by WeChat’s AI assistant. Tencent announced two developer modes: an auto option that lets the platform scan source code and operate the mini-program directly, and a dev mode for custom integrations. Only connected mini-programs surface; WeChat AI will not call those that opt out. That creates a soft pressure to onboard, converting millions of mini-programs into a structured AI service layer. When we wrote about WeChat’s AIAgent project last September, the plan to turn the mini-program ecosystem into an AI-searchable service backend was still nascent. The new onboarding tools, together with the A2A (agent-to-agent) deals now rolling out with @Huawei, @Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, and Honor, show Tencent assembling the scaffolding. Those A2A deals are as much about distribution control as about convenience. By giving phone AI assistants access to WeChat actions, currently voice calls and messaging, with more to come, Tencent locks the assistant entry point while keeping chat data on-device, a design that makes it harder for ByteDance’s Doubao to insert itself as the system-level AI agent. The JD partnership adds another layer: JD’s supply chain and fulfillment services become invocable through WeChat’s AI, turning the assistant into a transaction surface as well as a command layer. WeChat’s 1.43 billion monthly active users give it broad reach; the mini-program ecosystem gives it a supply of services already built. The unanswered question is whether this becomes a monetizable agent economy (ads, transaction fees, commissions) or a defensive architecture that protects Tencent’s existing business without generating much new revenue on its own.

I joke that any company with real tech will end up on this list, it’s more like validation at this point

"For scale: Anthropic alone (~$965B, May 28, 2026) is worth about 5.6× every tracked independent Chinese lab combined (~$173B)" (5.3x if you count Kimi at its rumored $30B) For these and other surprising facts check out our @techbuzzchina China AI atlas which tracks all of the Chinese AI labs

Got asked today why are Chinese AI labs so cheap? Well, a large part because they are monetizing at a much, much lower scale and while growing quickly, not more quickly than US labs. The Price/ARR actually isn't that insane for the US labs but gets into ridiculous territory with the Chinese ones. Yes I'm well aware you shouldn't use this fake multiple on such fast growing businesses, but here's what a snapshot today would look like, just to give you a sense of reference

I’m scared of the people ordering these, not the robots

Looking forward to discussing @Kimi_Moonshot new fundraising plans and other China AI related things on @MTSlive this afternoon

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease. This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit. The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London. A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box. These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel. They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains. They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep. Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”: > “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.” — The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates. It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption. SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins). The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill. With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment. Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two. It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place. All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now. That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective. If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

“but 80% of workloads will be running on 99% cheaper models within 12-18 months” Yup need for token usage growing exponentially does not mean willingness to shoulder costs go up exponentially

Only 13% of Europeans surveyed would ride in a self-driving car vs 70% of Chinese I just Googled and AAA survey from early 2025 had about 13% of American drivers answering the same, lol. I really wonder what is the main reason that China's is so much higher? I'd guess it's also that high in the Bay

An actual quote from the Anthropic blog itself. I don’t really understand why they’re so intent on perpetuating this super bleak nihilistic narrative