Kinaforum

tirsdag 15. september 2026

Big AI slowdown a safety pause or strategic retreat?

Over the weekend, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called for artificial intelligence (AI) companies, including his own, to slow down their work. Sam Altman and Elon Musk, heads of rivals OpenAI and xAI respectively, agreed.

The move reflects concern across the AI industry and, more broadly, about the dangers of new, rapidly improving systems. Recent high-profile incidents such as OpenAI’s AI agents hacking another company and hijacking a public website have shown current systems can break out of safety confines – and even more capable systems are in development.Further complicating AI safety is the tension between safety and performance. Companies will be reluctant to limit the performance of their models in the name of safety for fear of losing ground to competitors. US President Donald Trump has also rejected calls for a slowdown, for fear of losing ground to China.

This means any successful effort at “pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up”, as Amodei puts it, will require significant cooperation between rival companies – and nations.

China launching multidomain drone swarms for next-gen warfare

China’s pursuit of multidomain drone swarms reflects a broader effort to turn autonomous systems from standalone weapons into the connective tissue of a networked form of warfare built around speed, redundancy and system-level disruption.

China is expanding its uncrewed combat capabilities from homogeneous aerial drone swarms to the multidomain integration of autonomous land, sea, and air platforms, according to an assessment published by the Intelligent Technology Research Institute of state-owned defense contractor China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC).

CNBC’s The China Connection newsletter: Tech controls expand to employees

Forget chips and rare earths. Starting Tuesday, China is formally restricting its citizens from leaving the country if they violate tech export controls. It reflects how Chinese businesses today have more advanced technological know-how than the past — and have been ramping up overseas expansion. The new rules build on measures strengthening oversight of overseas investment that took effect July 1.

All companies going global need to think about whether they are compliant, especially if executives are handling negotiations abroad, said Shuai Peng, CEO of Lex Magister, a platform connecting Chinese businesses and lawyers internationally.

While semiconductor and artificial intelligence companies are most impacted, the new rules cover all industries, as reflected in lists such as the Commerce Ministry’s export controls, Peng said. He doesn’t expect much restriction on the ability of businesses to participate in international conferences such as the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Wealthy Chinese, tech talent confront tighter borders as Beijing widens exit controls

China’s new border-control regulations are designed to keep two of its most valuable assets from leaving the country: money and talent.

The rules, issued by the State Council and taking effect Tuesday, give authorities explicit legal power to block people from leaving the country – turning a patchwork of ad hoc travel bans into a permanent tool for stemming capital and talent flight.

Authorities can bar Chinese nationals from departing over export-control or technology-transfer violations deemed to threaten national security. The new rules also add pressure on wealthy households already facing a widening tax dragnet, along with private bankers, trust companies, and immigration agencies that help move their money and families abroad.

Trump won’t put the brakes on AI because he wants to beat China. How big a threat is Beijing?

Last weekend, as the world worried about the possibility of unconstrained artificial intelligence wiping out humanity, the leaders of the United States and China articulated their visions for the era-defining technology. They came from almost opposite sides of the spectrum.

Brushing aside the calls from AI scientists and executives from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google to slow the development, US President Donald Trump said what was most important was keeping the US in the lead against China in the intensifying AI superpower race. “We’re leading China in AI…and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins,” he said on Saturday.

Trump dismisses AI alarms as a ‘HOAX’ — worrying White House officials

President Donald Trump spent Monday angrily rejecting calls from AI industry leaders for more government regulation on their cutting-edge models, making clear in a daylong string of social media posts he considers outpacing China and preserving AI-driven economic gains a higher priority than addressing growing public concerns.

Trump asserted a “SICK conspiracy” was afoot to undermine AI and claimed his oversight alone was enough to prevent models from going rogue. He called concerns a “HOAX,” comparing the technology to the “Global Warming Scam” and the investigation of possible ties between his campaign and the Russian government. He also renewed his support for the data centers that power AI, despite their political unpopularity.

For the first time, Japan has more than 100,000 centenarians

Japan has been gripped by a declining population for decades, but one age group is adding new members and there are more of them than ever. For the first time in Japan, the number of people aged 100 or older has surpassed more than 100,000 – a new record in the country known for longevity.

The population of centenarians rose again – for the 56th consecutive year – to 107,677 in September, up almost 8,000 from the previous year, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said Tuesday. Most are women, accounting for 88% or 94,298 of the total, the ministry added.

North Korea says recent drill shows 'huge destructive power'

North Korea said Monday that its recent "live-fire" drill demonstrated "huge destructive power."

During the test on Saturday, different types of weapons were fired simultaneously, with the aim of boosting the morale of North Korean troops and improving their capabilities to "completely collapse the enemy," according to the state news agency KCNA.

KCNA reported that the drill involved five army units and tested attack drones, tactical cruise missiles, tactical ballistic missiles, and other weapons systems. Experts say North Korea is not slowing down its weapons activities, even after US President Donald Trumprecently scaled back a military exercise with South Korea in an apparent effort to revive diplomacy with leader Kim Jong Un.

Pay to ghost your boss: Japan's resignation business

For Y.M., a Japanese man in his early 20s, his first job out of university at a real estate sales firm quickly turned into a daily trial of endurance. Among his colleagues, he was always the one being screamed at.

According to his testimony featured on the website of Leadbrain, a Tokyo-based labor and human resources consulting firm, he sought a quiet way out because he was wary of how colleagues perceived him. He was reluctant to burden his parents and determined to avoid workplace conflict, which is a common attitude among working Japanese.

Rather than submitting his resignation in person, he opened his phone and began searching for a resignation proxy service, a third-party agency that could help him quit without direct interaction with his employer.

Satellite images show China advancing into contested India border territory as Xi travels to New Delhi

Panic has gripped the remote frontier villages of India’s border with China, where tribal communities say they are being pushed back from their ancestral yak-grazing and hunting landsdue to a rapidly growing threat – the advancing Chinese Army. Satellite images accessed by The Independent show a rapid expansion of infrastructure at multiple sites along and near the disputed India-China frontier in Arunachal Pradesh, including new buildings, roads, as well as helipads.

The imagery offers a rare visual record of the changing landscape along one of the most inaccessible sections of the frontier in the Himalayas, where competing territorial claims and the difficulty of maintaining a permanent Indian presence have left communities living close to the border increasingly anxious.

Namrata Goswami: China's Territorial Claim on Arunchal Pradesh

China’s territorial claim on the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh has been a major bone of contention between India and China. China bases it claim on the argument that historical ties existed between the Tawang monastery in Arunachal Pradesh and the Lhasa monastery. Hence, the Chinese logic is that given Tibet is now part of China, Arunachal Pradesh should form a part of it.

Both countries fought a border war in Arunachal Pradesh in 1962 and the situation remains unpleasant due to repeated Chinese foreign office statements reiterating the claim. In the light of this backdrop, this Occasional Paper offers four alternative scenarios in 2032 with regard to China’s territorial claim. The year 2032 has been chosen for a significant reason. A 20 year timeline is useful as it provides a defining guide-line to policy makers on what policy interventions can be undertaken in the interim period in order to ensure that a positive scenario unfolds while a negative scenario is averted.

Trump downplays the need to check AI development and says he doesn’t want to cede edge to China

President Donald Trump on Sunday played down the need for his administration to check the development of artificial intelligence, saying he worried about ceding America’s edge over China in a global competition and that winning would help address the risks from the advancing technology.

While acknowledging the need for some regulation, Trump provided no specifics about potential rules and attributed warnings about the technology moving too quickly and with little oversight to “negative forces” he did not identify, though industry pioneers have raised such concerns.

“We can put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that ... shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” Trump told reporters during a weekend trip to Ireland. “But whoever wins with AI wins.”

Trump Suggests China Is Stirring US Data Center Backlash: What We Know

President Donald Trump has suggested that China may be helping fuel the growing American backlash against data centers. Asked by Fox News host Laura Ingraham why Americans do not want data centers near their homes, Trump replied: “A lot of people say it’s China” and “a lot of people say that it’s a China PR thing.” Trump did not point to any specific evidence during the exchange. He also warned that communities could lose investment and jobs if they reject data centers, calling them “the oil of the next 50 years.”

The claim comes after both X, formerly Twitter, and OpenAI disclosed China-linked online influence activity targeting the U.S. debate over data centers. But the available evidence draws an important distinction: researchers have found attempts to amplify existing American concerns, while there is considerably less evidence that China created, controls or is principally responsible for the nationwide backlash.

Tibet activists, journalist held for hanging protest banners near BRICS summit venue in Delhi

A day ahead of the much-ballyhooed arrival in New Delhi of Chinese President Xi Jinping for the BRICS summit, scheduled to be held over Sep 12-13, police took into custody five activists of Students for a Free Tibet (SFT) and a journalist on Sep 11 morning after the activists unfurled protest banners near the summit’s venue, the Bharat Mandapam in the Pragati Maidan complex.

Four of them are currently being held in Tihar Jail through Sep 14, and the other two at the Connaught Place Police Station, SFT said in a statement Sep 11. The Delhi Police are yet to comment on the matter, noted amp.scroll.in Sep 11.

Defying tight security, the four SFT activists, including three who climbed poles on a tunnel road, unfurled two banners reading “Xi Jinping = Genocide” and “Tibet is Facing Ecocide: Free Tibet” alongside a Tibetan National Flag.

Hormuz crisis forcing Japan to domesticate its energy security

Japan’s Foreign Minister Motegi Toshimitsu phoned his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, on September 8, 2026, to express concern over the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It was reportedly the ninth such phone call between the pair since March.

Tokyo’s urgency over the crucial waterway is understandable. While the economic ripples over the Strait of Hormuz crisis has been felt across the world, Japan is one of the countries feeling the pain most acutely. Prior to the US and Israeli strikes on Iran – and Tehran’s retaliation and closure of the strait – Hormuz carried 93% of Japan’s crude imports; the Middle East as a whole supplied 94% of the nation’s oil.

Stockpiles and domestic refining capacity have cushioned the shock, but the crisis has exposed a deeper vulnerability: Japan has long depended on a maritime security environment it does not control.

Asia’s lonely economy of one

For most of modern history, the household was a bundle. Under one roof, families pooled rent and meals, raised children, cared for parents, kept each other company and insured one another against bad luck. Nobody itemized it, and national accounts barely noticed.

Across East Asia, that arrangement is coming apart, and one line item after another has turned into something you pay for. The loneliness economy is the usual name for the result; the unbundling of the family household is the more accurate one.In South Korea, single-person households are now 36% of the total, the largest category. Japan was at 38% in 2020 and is expected to reach 44% by 2050; Tokyo is already past half.

China’s 2020 census found 125 million people living alone, equal to one in four households. Fertility has fallen in step. South Korea’s rate is 0.80, Hong Kong’s is 0.84and Taiwan’s births fell 20% in 2025 alone.

BRICS summit 2026: What are the key takeaways?

Leaders of the BRICS group of nations unanimously adopted a joint declaration on the first day of the two-day summit in the Indian capital, New Delhi, despite divisions among members over the wars in Iran and Ukraine.

The New Delhi Declaration, adopted on Saturday, called for restraint in the Middle East but avoided condemning the US-Israeli strikes or Iran’s targeting of Gulf countries in the region. It also criticised the global trade war without naming the United States.Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, were among the leaders attending the gathering of the 11-member bloc in New Delhi at a time of global upheaval caused by the US-Israel war on Iran, Trump’s tariff war and the US’s unilateral decisions to promote its foreign policy.

Red Sea nations watch as Houthis seize Bab al-Mandeb strait

The Houthis have completed their takeover of Yemen’s entire Red Sea coastline, capturing the port city of Mocha and overrunning the strategic island of Mayyun (Perim) over the weekend.

Houthi forces are now positioned just 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the African coast and essentially control the strategically significant Bab al-Mandeb strait, a chokepoint for Red Sea maritime traffic.While there are no indication that the Houthis would intervene outside Yemen’s borders, the war is already being felt on the African continent.

More than 2,000 people have fled Yemen to Djibouti over the past 24 hours, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said on Sunday. Yemenis arriving in Obock, a Djibouti city only about 20km (12 miles) from Yemen’s coast, are being provided with food and water, but the IOM warned that “more support is needed”.