Tag: ai

China Blocks Meta’s $2 Billion Acquisition of AI Startup Manus

The Chinese government has officially blocked Meta’s planned $2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Chinese-founded AI startup, marking a significant escalation in the ongoing technological rivalry between the United States and China.

CNBC reports that China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) foreign investment review arm issued a decision on Monday to block the sale of Manus to Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. The regulatory body ordered all parties involved in the transaction to unwind the acquisition, effectively terminating the deal that was announced in late December.

Manus emerged as a prominent player in the AI sector when it launched in March of last year with an AI agent designed to autonomously perform complex tasks. These capabilities include writing research reports, preparing presentation slides, and building websites. The launch garnered significant attention from Chinese state media, which celebrated it as the country’s latest breakthrough AI product. This recognition came on the heels of Deepseek’s AI model launch, which had previously caused substantial fluctuations in major United States technology stocks.

Early versions of Manus were developed by Beijing Butterfly Effect Technology, a Chinese startup founded in 2022, according to the Wall Street Journal. Following its launch, the AI company made a strategic decision to relocate its headquarters and top engineers from Beijing to Singapore. This move aligned with a broader trend among Chinese AI firms seeking to navigate the complex geopolitical landscape between the United States and China. By establishing operations in Singapore, these companies believe they can circumvent some of the tensions between the two superpowers while gaining access to Western AI models and potential investors.

According to the Financial Times, the NDRC had initially approved Manus’ relocation to Singapore. However, complications arose when Meta and the startup failed to inform Chinese authorities before finalizing their acquisition agreement in December. This appears to have triggered the subsequent regulatory scrutiny and ultimate rejection of the deal.

The Chinese government’s response to the Meta-Manus transaction was swift and decisive. In January, mere days after the two companies publicly announced the acquisition, Chinese officials launched an investigation into potential national security concerns and possible export control violations. The probe intensified last month when the NDRC reportedly summoned the startup’s co-founders, Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao, to meet with its officials to discuss the acquisition details. Both co-founders were subsequently instructed not to leave China until the regulatory review concluded.

In a statement to Breitbart News, a Meta spokesperson wrote: “The transaction complied fully with applicable law. We anticipate an appropriate resolution to the inquiry.”

This regulatory intervention occurs against a backdrop of heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing over advanced AI technologies. The timing is particularly notable as it comes just weeks before President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit Beijing for a summit meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The upcoming meeting takes place amid an ongoing trade war and escalating geopolitical tensions between the world’s two largest economies, with artificial intelligence emerging as a central battleground.

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Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want

One of the most mortifying things about knowing a lot of techies is listening to them tell me excitedly about some very important discovery that they believe they have made. Recently, I ran into an acquaintance of mine, who began talking my ear off about an amazing discovery he’d made with LLMs. Knowledge, it turns out, is structured into language! You could put one word into ChatGPT and it might understand what you wanted, or make up a word and see if it understood what you meant! These amazing new tools have revealed that the English corpus contains so much about its speakers!

He concluded that LLMs are a discovery on par with writing.

Regular humans hit on this idea about a century ago; my most generous interpretation of what he was telling me was that he’d hit on a kind of naive, confused version of Structuralism; Saussure via a game of telephone. (There has been recent work on a similar point, which argues that one needs to understand LLMs via literary theory, but it starts with Saussure.) I tried to get out of the conversation as quickly as I could, not least because he seemed frustrated that I didn’t see things exactly as he did — a new behavior and likely a symptom of LLM overuse.

Not every discovery that’s new to you is actually new. For instance, there’s Elon Musk marvelling at the complexity of hands; I could point to a variety of disciplines for which this is 101-level stuff: artists, who have to figure out how to draw them; surgeons, who have to figure out how to operate on them; musicians and magicians, who rely on extremely fine motor skill to produce their work; neuroscientists and psychologists, who doubtless encountered the cortical homunculus early in their careers. Or Palmer Luckey claiming that “no one has done a postmortem” on the One Laptop Per Child computing project — because he didn’t know there’s a whole book about it called The Charisma Machine.

At its most absurd nadir, one is reminded of Juicero, a company that sold a $400 juicer that did the same work as squeezing its proprietary juice packs with one’s bare hands.

Look, discovering something that’s new to you is exciting — ask anyone who listened to me yell about the joys of European (higher-fat) butter — but you can’t take for granted that something that’s new to you is new to everyone. These things have in common a certain incuriosity that I have found endemic among a certain kind of tech enthusiast, particularly the ones who are most interested in startups and entrepreneurship. Perhaps they have been so siloed that they did not realize their “discovery” was well -known elsewhere, or perhaps their self-conception is that they are the smartest, and if they don’t know something, no one knows it.

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The Technate Was Always Coming

And what you can do about it (besides complaining).

Palantir dropped a manifesto last weekend. 22 bullet points distilled from Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic, posted to X with the casual framing of “because we get asked a lot.” I haven’t seen a reaction so widespread, unanimously opposed and viscerally aghast since James Damore’s infamous “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.

The usual suspects lost their shit. Engadget called it “the ramblings of a comic book villain.”

TechCrunch clutched its pearls at the bits about “regressive” cultures and “vacant and hollow pluralism.”

Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins observed, (via Bluesky, of course), that these aren’t philosophical musings floating in the ether: they’re the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.

He’s not wrong, Palantir sells to ICE, DoD, NYPD, and the intelligence community. It may be a manifesto, but it’s also product literature.

Even Alexander Dugin, the Russian “Fourth Political Theory” philosopher, not exactly known for having a libertarian bent, seemed triggered by it, calling it “the plan of the Western techno-fascism” on X, “Pure Satanism” on his Substack.

Former Greek FM Yanis Varoufakis called it “evil” and put out his own point-for-point on it – he calls it a refutation, it’s actually more of a rant.

So everybody across the horseshoe is big mad. Fine.

The thing is, none of this should surprise anyone. Let’s now look at why the policy this “manifesto” outlines was always going to arrive, with or without Karp’s prosaic stylings.

Karp Didn’t Invent “The Technate”

The merger of corporate power and state apparatus, the “technate” that people are suddenly discovering with horror on a Sunday afternoon, is not a new idea. It’s not even a recent one.

Back in 2013, Eric Schmidt (then Google’s executive chairman) and Jared Cohen (Google Ideas, ex-State Department advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton) published The New Digital Age. The book was blurbed by Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair, and General Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA. That’s an elite-class blurb list for a book that explicitly argued for the intersection of Silicon Valley and state power, the fusion of corporate infrastructure with national security logic, and the reshaping of diplomacy through private platforms.

In 2013 it was called “transformational.” Kissinger gushing that it was, “a searching meditation on technology and world order” (he would go on to co-author The Age of AI with Eric Schmidt that should be every bit as concerning as Karp’s Technological Republic).

Not too long after that, Google’s Sergey Brin and Klaus Schwab held a fireside in Davos where Herr Schwab pontificated that with the advent of AI, since the algos would be able to predict election outcomes with 100% certainty, they may as well pick the winners anyway and we could do away with elections altogether.

Nobody batted an eye. My timeline certainly wasn’t overflowing with rage over it and the people who were calling attention to it were using facing all kinds of headwinds.

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The Rise of AI in Payments Is Not About Convenience

Visa has just unveiled a new suite of artificial intelligence tools designed to overhaul how credit card disputes are handled, and once again this is being presented as a simple evolution toward efficiency and improved customer experience, yet when you step back and examine the scale of what is unfolding, this is clearly part of a much broader structural shift within the financial system toward centralization and automation.

The numbers alone should make that obvious, with Visa processing over 106 million disputes globally in 2025, representing a 35% increase since 2019, and that type of exponential growth is not something that can be resolved through incremental improvements, it requires a complete restructuring of how the system functions, which is precisely what Visa is now implementing.

They are introducing six AI-driven tools split between merchants and financial institutions, designed to intercept disputes before they even occur, automate responses, and consolidate the entire process into a unified framework where decisions are guided by network-wide data rather than individual judgment, and once you move into that framework, the human element is steadily removed and replaced by algorithmic consistency.

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DOJ joins Musk’s AI company in suing Colorado for new ‘DEI’ regulatory law

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced its support for Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, as it sues the state of Colorado over a new law set to go into effect in June that would regulate AI technology.

The company filed a suit against Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Thursday to prevent the enforcement of the law, which would impose new requirements on AI programs to protect users from “algorithmic discrimination” in education, employment, healthcare, housing and financial services, and other sectors.

xAI argued that the statute “severely burdens the development and use of AI” and infringes on First Amendment free speech protections.

“Its provisions prohibit developers of AI systems from producing speech that the State of Colorado dislikes, while compelling them to conform their speech to a State-enforced orthodoxy on controversial topics of great public concern,” the lawsuit reads.

It also claims that the law would force Musk’s company to rework its AI chatbot called Grok, which can be found on the social media platform X, to “conform to a controversial, highly politicized viewpoint” instead of maintaining its objectivity.

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division announced on Friday that it partnered with the Civil Division to file a motion to intervene in the suit.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said in a video posted to social media that the state law in question requires companies to comply with its “crazy, woke, DEI goals,” referring to the “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” policies instated widely across left-leaning and liberal organizations.

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Apple, Google Caught ‘Helping Users’ Find Apps That Can Deepfake Nude Pictures of Real People, and Worse Kids Are Vulnerable Too

Tech companies Apple and Google were found to have been leading users — specifically children — to apps that could effectively pornify images through artificial intelligence.

Last Wednesday, 9to5Mac reported the findings from January published by the Tech Transparency Project, which concluded both the Apple App Store and Google Play “are helping users to find apps that create deepfake nude images of women.”

The stores were even found promoting these apps and autocompleting search results for them.

About 40 percent of the top 10 apps appearing in searches for “nudify,” “undress,” and “deepnude” could “render women nude or scantily clad.”

These are apps where users can take two different images — one normal and one sexually explicit — and generate an image where components of both are used, sexualizing the person from the normal one.

9to5Mac reached out to the developer for one of these apps, and were told they “had no idea it was capable of producing such extreme content.”

On Thursday, Apple responded to the outlet, saying the apps were not allowed on their store given their review guidelines prohibit sexual content.

The company said it has removed 15 apps, with others receiving notice they will be removed if they continue to be in violation.

In January, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom went after social media platform X with a similar allegation.

“xAI’s decision to create and host a breeding ground for predators to spread nonconsensual sexually explicit AI deepfakes, including images that digitally undress children, is vile,” he said.

“I am calling on the Attorney General to immediately investigate the company and hold xAI accountable.”

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‘Our candidates are fat Jewish Zionists!’ Trump aide Paul Ingrassia under fire again as leaked group chat reveals slur-filled rant targeting fellow Republican with vile AI-altered photo

A Trump administration official with a history of inflammatory remarks is once again under fire after newly leaked texts appear to show him ranting about fellow Republicans for supporting ‘fat Jewish Zionists’, the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal.

In the explosive messages obtained by the Daily Mail, Paul Ingrassia, the then White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, lashes out in a group chat with other Trump aides, titled ‘Team DOJ/DHS/WH’.

The exchange – which took place around April 2025 – escalated after a Justice Department employee sent a text fuming: ‘How the f**k are we losing Wisconsin‘, before adding: ‘Republicans are so stupid and lazy.’ 

The complaint was likely referring to Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court election, in which liberal circuit judge Susan Crawford defeated Catholic, Republican circuit judge and former state attorney general Brad Schimel.

Ingrassia, a 30-year-old attorney and Trump loyalist, then chimed in with an anti-Semitic comment taking aim at Florida congressman Randy Fine, a pro-Israel Republican who had been elected that same day. 

‘It’s because our candidates are fat Jewish Zionist f**ks,’ Ingrassia replied, after sending an altered, unflattering image of Fine speaking at an event. 

The photo showed Fine, a proudly Jewish candidate, addressing a crowd with a grotesquely bulging stomach and baggy jeans.

‘That’s our candidate?!?’ the DOJ staffer replied incredulously, apparently not recognizing the newly elected congressman representing Florida’s 6th congressional district. 

Ingrassia’s lawyer Edward Andrew Paltzik said: ‘These accusations against Mr. Ingrassia are false and fabricated. No such group chat called ‘Team DOJ/DHS/WH’ exists on his phone.’

The Daily Mail has verified that the original photo of Fine was taken at an RNC meeting in Marion County, Florida in January 2025, but had been altered with AI to make him appear significantly larger. 

In a statement to the Daily Mail, Fine said: ‘I hope these text messages are fake. But if they are not, I know President Trump has a zero tolerance for antisemitism and will fire those involved immediately.’ 

Ingrassia’s text tirade, leaked to the Daily Mail, is not the first example of Ingrassia getting embroiled in controversy over his remarks.

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It’s an Underreported Story, But Also a Glaring National Security Issue

Artificial intelligence is the next frontier, and there’s a glaring national security matter that must be addressed. We also can’t kick this can down the road, which is a hallmark characteristic of Congress. Our enemies are engaged in what could become the 21st-century arms race. 

This issue sometimes leans into science fiction, but the entertainment has been excellent. The Terminator franchise and The Matrix both depict humanity’s destruction by artificial intelligence. For our purposes, Skynet nuking us is probably the closest to what could become reality, but right now, it’s about protecting this technology from our enemies. How do we do it when everyone here has the same foundation in this area? We cannot rely on the policy of détente here because of that. 

Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT) told Townhall, “From the race for nuclear capability to the space race, the United States has consistently led the world by incentivizing innovation and investing in key infrastructure to achieve dominance. At a time when peer adversaries like China or non-state actors can leverage AI for their own ends, it’s critical we apply that same approach to not just lead but win the AI race in the 21st century.”

No doubt, but Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) said that legislative guardrails should be codified to ensure advancements are protected, and that we’ve got a long way to go.

“While the U.S. has made critical advances in AI, we still have a long way to go. I will continue to urge my colleagues to think years ahead as we work to remain the global leader in AI research and development, and that starts with ensuring a strong American AI tech stack,” Sen. Daines said. 

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Google is Tracking Your Life – Photo Cloud Feeding AI System

There was a time when your photo album sat in a drawer, private, personal, and disconnected from the outside world. Privacy no longer exists in the modern world as personal data will become the key tool of control, and now Google is taking the next step by turning your memories into fuel for artificial intelligence.

According to a recent report, Google has rolled out a major update to its Photos platform that allows its AI system, Gemini, to scan your entire photo library to build what it calls “Personal Intelligence.” What this means in plain English is that your images are no longer just stored, they are analyzed and integrated into a broader behavioral profile. Google openly admits the system can use actual images of you and your loved ones to generate AI content, eliminating the need for users to manually upload reference photos.

This is not a minor tweak to a photo app, but a structural shift in how data is harvested and understood, because every image you have ever taken now becomes part of a living model that attempts to understand who you are, who you associate with, where you go, and how you live your life. What was once private into something continuously processed and categorized.

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Zodiac Killer may be tied to Black Dahlia case after ‘code cracked,’ new suspect emerges

The Zodiac Killer’s cryptic messages weren’t just taunts to police — they were a twisted throwback to his first victim, according to an independent investigator who says he’s cracked the code and uncovered new evidence suggesting the infamous serial killer began his career 23 years earlier with the California murder of Elizabeth Short, also known as the Black Dahlia.

Alex Baber, co-founder of Cold Case Consultants of America, said that after nine months of work, he cracked a double-layered encryption that involved transposition and substitution in a 2 by 7 grid.

“Currently, for the first time in history, LAPD detectives approached the family of a suspect to obtain DNA,” he told Fox News Digital in an interview on the sidelines of the Hamptons Whodunit event in East Hampton over the weekend. “That’s never happened for the Black Dahlia case… we got a pretty good feeling that we’re sitting in the right seat.”

The Los Angeles Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An FBI spokesperson declined to weigh in.

Baber’s finding, that the Zodiac’s “Z13” cipher depicts the name of a prime suspect in the 1947 Black Dahlia murder, was first revealed in the Daily Mail, and he presented them publicly Saturday at the East Hampton Library.

With help from a proprietary artificial intelligence software and self-taught knowledge of cryptography, he said the 13-character message is decoded to read “Marvin Merrill.” After further digging into social security records, he said he discovered that’s an alias for Marvin Margolis, who he said dated Short in the 1940s and had been on the LAPD’s suspect list after her murder and dismemberment. His AI software flagged the connection between the two cases, he added.

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