China bans Nvidia AI chips | House panel subpoenas forum CEOs after Kirk assassination | Anthropic clashes with White House
Plus, Russian state TV launches AI-generated news satire show
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China’s internet regulator has banned major tech firms like Alibaba and ByteDance from buying Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D AI chips, aiming to reduce reliance on US tech. Beijing believes domestic chips now match Nvidia’s performance, accelerating efforts to build a self-sufficient AI ecosystem. Financial Times
The U.S. House Oversight Committee has asked the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch, and Reddit to testify on October 8 regarding the radicalization of users on online forums, following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Reuters
Anthropic has declined to allow its AI models to be used in certain law‑enforcement contexts—including surveillance of US citizens—citing policy restrictions. That’s upset the White House, which expects AI firms benefiting from government favor to be more cooperative. Its vague definitions of “surveillance” deepen the tensions. Semafor
ASPI
Shanghai University’s uncrewed vessels support China’s maritime push
The Strategist
Astrid Young
ASPI’s newly expanded China Defence Universities Tracker reveals how leading Chinese research institutions, including Shanghai University, are developing advanced uncrewed surface vehicles to boost China’s military and territorial ambitions. SHU’s Jinghai series are reportedly the first Chinese uncrewed vessels to operate in the South and East China seas and the Antarctic. Equipped with advanced technologies such as radar sensors and control systems, SHU’s USVs conduct scientific missions that enhance China’s maritime domain awareness and its ability to project power in contested waters.
Australia’s trusted tech moment in the Pacific: Don’t let the 5G lesson go to waste
The Strategist
Jason Van der Schyff
Australia should position itself as the trusted technology partner for core infrastructure across the Pacific. More than branding, this means being the default choice for governments weighing offers from multiple suitors with competing strategic and commercial aims. When Australia moved to exclude Huawei from its 5G rollout in 2018, it signalled something larger than a vendor decision. Core digital infrastructure is a strategic, not just commercial, choice. That call was heard across the Pacific, where similar questions about trusted next-generation networks were already emerging.
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Australia
Australia is seeking its place in the AI world order
Australian Financial Review
Paul Smith
Australian politicians and chief executives love to talk about the nation’s chance to be a “global AI leader”. It’s a bland, ambitious phrase that suffers from one major flaw: it’s meaningless. In a world where the AI agenda is being set by the US and China, no other country can credibly claim leadership. Outside of a few outliers like France’s Mistral, the industry-shaping giants all belong to the two superpowers, leaving middle powers like Australia to find different, more realistic roles. The question is, what are they?
Shadow industry and innovation minister Alex Hawke takes aim at Labor's AI policy
Capital Brief
AI Angst
Shadow minister for industry and innovation Alex Hawke, has outlined the Coalition's position on AI regulation and fintech innovation, during a keynote speech at FinTech Australia's Intersekt 2025 conference, responding directly to Industry and Innovation Minister Tim Ayres' speech on Tuesday at the National Tech Summit.
NSW govt’s plan to build up Tech Central and share its control
InnovationAus
Joseph Brookes
The NSW government’s keenly awaited plan for Tech Central sets a long-term vision and outcomes for Australia’s biggest innovation district, but offers no hard targets and few details on where $38.5 million in state support is heading. New commitments revealed on Wednesday include new coordinated leadership, economic growth, talent building and better public spaces, with $5 million earmarked for investment attraction and a new governance structure.
China
China bans tech companies from buying Nvidia’s AI chips
Financial Times
Zijing Wu, Cheng Leng and Tim Bradshaw
China’s internet regulator has banned the country’s biggest technology companies from buying Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips, as Beijing steps up efforts to boost its domestic industry and compete with the US.
AI firm DeepSeek writes less secure code for groups China disfavors
The Washington Post
Joseph Menn
The Chinese artificial intelligence engine DeepSeek often refuses to help programmers or gives them code with major security flaws when they say they are working for the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong or others considered sensitive by the Chinese government, new research shows. The findings, shared exclusively with The Washington Post, underscore how politics shape artificial intelligence efforts during a geopolitical race for technology prowess and influence.
China trials its first advanced tools for AI chipmaking
Financial Times
Zijing Wu and Eleanor Olcott
China’s leading chip producer is running trials on the country’s first domestically produced advanced chipmaking equipment in an effort to challenge western rivals in producing artificial intelligence processors. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation is testing a deep-ultraviolet lithography machine made by Yuliangsheng, a Shanghai-based start-up, said two people with knowledge of the development.
‘I have to do it’: Why one of the world’s most brilliant AI scientists left the US for China
The Guardian
Chang Che
By the time Song-Chun Zhu was six years old, he had encountered death more times than he could count. Or so it felt. This was the early 1970s, the waning years of the Cultural Revolution, and his father ran a village supply store in rural China. There was little to do beyond till the fields and study Mao Zedong at home, and so the shop became a refuge where people could rest, recharge and share tales.
USA
US House panel asks online forum CEOs to testify after Charlie Kirk assassination
Reuters
David Shepardson
A U.S. House committee on Wednesday asked the CEOs of online platforms Discord, Steam, Amazon-owned Twitch, opens new tab and Reddit, to testify at an October 8 hearing following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, citing the "radicalization of online forum users." Kirk, 31, co-founder of the conservative student movement Turning Point USA and a key ally of President Donald Trump, was speaking at an event attended by about 3,000 people when he was gunned down last week.
US panel probes Huawei affiliate’s presence on Nvidia campus
Bloomberg
Maggie Eastland
US lawmakers are asking Futurewei, a subsidiary of the blacklisted Chinese firm Huawei Technologies Co., to explain why it shared buildings in Silicon Valley with Nvidia Corp., thrusting the US chipmaker into the crossfire of an investigation into possible Chinese espionage.
North Asia
Taiwan chipmakers struggle to curtail tech leaks to China
Nikkei Asia
Fumie Yaku and Hideaki Ryugen
Taiwanese chipmakers are increasingly the targets of industrial espionage that sends cutting-edge technology to China, as Beijing looks to rapidly boost mainland companies' capabilities amid U.S. export restrictions.
Southeast Asia
How Chinese rare-earth mining threatens the Mekong River
Deutsche Welle
David Hutt
Ecologists are warning that mainland Southeast Asia faces a looming ecological disaster unless urgent steps are taken to address the rare-earth mining boom in war-torn Myanmar. According to Global Witness, a London-based watchdog, Myanmar has become the world's largest source of heavy rare-earth elements. These minerals are essential for manufacturing high-tech products like wind turbines, electric vehicles and medical devices.
South & Central Asia
AI is erupting in India
The Economist
Sam Altman is bullish about India. The co-founder of OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, says the country’s adoption of artificial intelligence has been “unmatched anywhere in the world”. India is already OpenAI’s second-largest market by number of users and could soon be its biggest. In August OpenAI launched a cheaper version of its chatbot tailored for Indian users. It plans to open an office in New Delhi later this year.
Ukraine – Russia
Russian State TV Launches AI-Generated News Satire Show
404 Media
Matthew Gault
A television channel run by Russia’s Ministry of Defense is airing a program it claims is AI-generated. According to advertisements for the show, a neural network is picking the topics it wants to discuss, then uses AI to generate that video. It includes putting French President Emmaneul Macron in hair curlers and a pink robe, making Trump talk about golden toilets, and showing EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen singing a Soviet-era pop song while working in a factory.
Europe turns to Ukrainian tech for ‘drone wall’ against Russia
Financial Times
Henry Foy, Laura Pitel, Ben Hall and Richard Milne
The EU is rushing to spend billions on setting up a “drone wall” with technology that has been battle-tested in Ukraine, after Russia’s recent forays into Nato’s airspace. Last week’s response to the Russian aerial incursions into Poland and Romania showed Nato relies on expensive technology to intercept relatively cheap drones — a glaring vulnerability Moscow can exploit further.
Drone Wars: How Ukraine’s creative destruction rewrote the playbook on warfare
Center for the National Interest
John Garnett, and Craig Roach
In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stated that “Drones are the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation, accounting for most of this year’s casualties in Ukraine.” A week later, the United States and Ukraine announced a potential arms “mega-deal” where Ukraine would sell its proven drone technology to bolster US defenses in exchange for Ukraine purchasing more conventional weapons from the United States. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, “The people of America need this technology, and you need to have it in your arsenal.”
Europe
EU tech chief sounds alarm over Spain’s Huawei contract
POLITICO
Sam Clark
Spain’s multimillion euro contract with Huawei to store judicial wiretaps could lead to foreign interference, European Commission tech chief Henna Virkkunen said Wednesday. Spanish outlet The Objective reported in July that Huawei won a €12.3 million contract from the Ministry of the Interior to store the country's judicially authorized wiretaps used by both law enforcement agencies and intelligence services — a decision that drew sharp criticism from some officials and analysts.
How the Swiss central bank built a $167bn tech-led US stocks portfolio
Financial Times
Mercedes Ruehl
Switzerland’s conservative central bank has quietly become one of the world’s biggest tech investors, amassing a stock portfolio that is equivalent in value to nearly a fifth of the national economy’s annual output. The Swiss National Bank has US equity holdings amounting to $167bn, spread across more than 2,300 positions, according to SEC filings from June.
UK
What is new in UK-US tech deal and what will it mean for the British economy?
The Guardian
Dan Milmo, Robert Booth and Jillian Ambrose
Donald Trump’s arrival in the UK on Tuesday night was accompanied by a multibillion-dollar transatlantic tech agreement. The announcement features some of the biggest names from Silicon Valley: the chipmaker Nvidia; the ChatGPT developer, OpenAI; and Microsoft. Big numbers were involved, with Microsoft hailing its $30bn (£22bn) investment as a major commitment to the UK – and adding, in an apparent swipe at its rivals, that it was not making “empty tech promises”.
Has Britain gone too far with its digital controls?
The New York Times
Adam Satariano and Lizzie Dearden
As a couple with a stroller walked by a police van adorned with cameras on one of London’s busiest shopping streets this month, officers stopped the man for questioning. After several minutes, they put him in handcuffs and took him away. Such scenes have become increasingly common as British authorities have ramped up the use of live facial recognition.
Russian state hack attacks on council 'increasing'
BBC
Marc Waddington
A city council has suffered repeated attacks by Russian state-funded cyber hackers in the last two years, it has revealed. Liverpool City Council said it had, "like many UK councils", had "significant attention" from the Noname057(16) group, with the so-called hacktivists using bots to try to infiltrate or disable the authority's systems.
Middle East
Can the Middle East fight unauthorized AI-generated content with trustworthy tech?
Fast Company Middle East
Myriam Mikhael
Since its emergence a few years back, generative AI has been the center of controversy, from environmental concerns to deepfakes to the non-consensual use of data to train models. One of the most troubling issues has been deepfakes and voice cloning, which have affected everyone from celebrities to government officials.
Big Tech
Anthropic irks White House with limits on models’ use
SEMAFOR
Reed Albergotti
Anthropic is in the midst of a splashy media tour in Washington, but its refusal to allow its models to be used for some law enforcement purposes has deepened hostility to the company inside the Trump administration, two senior officials told Semafor.
Microsoft seizes 340 websites linked to growing phishing subscription service
Reuters
A.J. Vicens
Microsoft Inc said on Tuesday that it seized nearly 340 websites tied to a rapidly growing Nigerian-based service that allowed users to carry out phishing operations that stole at least 5,000 Microsoft user credentials. Microsoft obtained an order from the U.S. District Court in Manhattan earlier this month to seize domains associated with Raccoon0365, the subscription service that allowed users to carry out massive phishing campaigns, which sometimes involved thousands of emails at a time, according to Steven Masada, assistant general counsel for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit.
Top sensor maker Hesai warns world not ready for fully driverless cars
Financial Times
Edward White
The world’s biggest maker of sensors for self-driving cars has poured cold water on the chance of rapid growth for fully autonomous vehicles, saying society and regulators are not ready to accept deaths caused by machines that drive themselves.
Artificial Intelligence
Meta created its own super PAC to politically kneecap its AI rivals
The Verge
Hayden Field and Tina Nguyen
In late August, two pro-AI super PACs were announced on the same day, intent on shaping the upcoming midterm elections. One was a fairly traditional super PAC, announced via a splashy press release, with multiple major industry players planning to donate over $100 million to boost AI-friendly candidates across the country.
Events & Podcasts
The Sydney Dialogue 2025
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute is pleased to announce the Sydney Dialogue, the world’s premier policy summit for critical, emerging and cyber technologies, will return on 4-5 December. Now in its fourth year, the dialogue attracts the world’s top thinkers, innovators and policymakers, and focusses on the most pressing issues at the intersection of technology and security. TSD has become the place where new partnerships are built among governments, industry and civil society, and where existing partnerships are deepened.
The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest is brought to you by the Cyber, Technology & Security Programs team at ASPI and supported by partners.
