Wednesday, October 21, 2026
China’s Free A.I. Models Are Thrown Into Uncertainty - The New York Times
China’s Free A.I. Models Are Thrown Into Uncertainty
"Draft rules on the export of artificial intelligence technology show how China is trying to balance national security risks with its desire to outpace the United States.
When the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI in July released Kimi K3, an artificial intelligence model that rivaled some of the best systems made by American companies, it was free for anyone to download.
By making advanced A.I. models easily available, Chinese companies have turned open access into one of China’s most powerful advantages in its rivalry with the United States to shape the future of the technology.
Now Beijing is moving to tighten its grip on the global spread of the country’s top-tier A.I., proposing rules that could give the government new power to track, and potentially limit, where the systems go.
At the same time, the government sought to reassure users that the move would not stifle access to Chinese A.I., saying the vast majority of the technology would still be freely exported.
The draft rules reflect Beijing’s effort to balance two competing goals: regulate the spread of its frontier A.I. systems for strategic and security reasons while still encouraging global users to adopt Chinese software.
“It is almost like you have two voices speaking at the same time,” said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution focusing on Chinese technology and industrial policy. “One saying, ‘We want extra control of these sensitive technologies so that they can’t hurt China’ and another voice saying, ‘We want to develop the best A.I. technology and we want to share it with rest of the world.’”
China’s Ministry of Commerce’s announcement of the draft rules last Friday threw uncertainty into an A.I. market that has come to see the availability of free Chinese A.I. models from companies like Alibaba, DeepSeek, Z.ai and Moonshot as an important alternative to services from American companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI.
The ministry said the rules would not affect Chinese models that have already been released, and overseas users could still access even the most advanced systems through apps and online services.
The Risks China Wants to Contain
If passed, the rules would require Chinese companies to obtain licenses to export the core technology behind their leading models.
They would also ban the export of A.I. that can be used to launch cyberattacks, as well as models trained on what China calls “core data.” The government broadly defines that as data that concerns national security, the welfare of Chinese citizens and the public interest. Experts say the scope includes data on the military or critical infrastructure, state secrets and other sensitive information.
The commerce ministry said the new controls were necessary to guard against abuse and malicious use and to ensure that A.I. always remains under human control.
The power of A.I. systems to escape their creators’ control and hack into real-world systems without human knowledge has drawn global scrutiny. In the United States, A.I. agents being tested by OpenAI broke into outside systems including the A.I. start-up Hugging Face, and meddled with U.S. government websites. The agents also hacked into an Australian government website and acquired health data, prompting an investigation by Australian officials.
In China, the internet giant Tencent last week acknowledged that A.I. agents it used to evaluate other companies’ models had behaved in ways it did not intend, after researchers said the agents tried to bypass anti-robot protections on websites.
China’s proposed export rules signaled that the government is concerned about the safety of increasingly sophisticated A.I. models, as calls have grown for the United States and China to prevent the technology from causing catastrophic harm. Earlier this month, the Communist Party’s Central Committee and the State Council, China’s cabinet, called for the establishment of a monitoring and emergency response system that would ensure that A.I. is “safe, reliable and controllable.”
“These controls show that China is taking the risks of powerful A.I. much more seriously than was generally understood,” said Martin Chorzempa, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
What the Rules Could Change
Still, much remains unclear, such as how strictly China will enforce the rules and how burdensome the licensing process will be, especially for labs that release updates to their models every few weeks.
One of the draft rules called for export restrictions on any “globally leading” model, which the ministry said could be partly defined as a system that ranks in the top 10 for global usage. It also set thresholds for a model’s size and how much computation was used in its training. Meeting any one of those criteria would be enough to require a license.
Analysts at Trivium China, a research and advisory firm, wrote in a note to clients that the criteria would capture future versions of Kimi, Qwen, and DeepSeek, referring to three of the most advanced Chinese models.
If adopted, the rules would also give Beijing a say over who buys Chinese A.I. companies.
That could close the regulatory loophole that briefly allowed Meta to acquire Manus, a Singapore-based A.I. company that was founded in China, earlier this year. Beijing ultimately scuttled the deal, and in an apparent effort to discourage Chinese A.I. executives from moving businesses offshore, restricted Manus executives from leaving China.
No Longer Fully Open?
Many Chinese models are open-weight, which means they are available for other developers to download and customize as they see fit. That contrasts with services like ChatGPT or Claude, which only offer access through a subscription and cannot be modified.
Once downloaded, a Chinese model could be run on a company’s own computers indefinitely, beyond the reach of anyone who might want to restrict it. Users of American A.I., on the other hand, are essentially renting access that can be taken away. That was the case in June when the Trump administration temporarily restricted foreign access to Anthropic’s Fable 5 model, citing national security risks.
Now companies outside China that rely on Chinese A.I. systems could face similar risks.
“This could make U.S. businesses more hesitant to rely on Chinese models going forward,” said Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
A.I. has emerged as a point of geopolitical tension between Washington and Beijing, with U.S. agencies accusing DeepSeek and other Chinese A.I. companies of industrial-scale copying. On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security ordered the removal of DeepSeek’s tools from the technological systems of many U.S. government agencies, which China described as an act of discrimination.
A.I. as a Tool of Influence
Beijing, however, has also couched the controls in the language of international cooperation, in a nod to the soft power influence of its A.I. technology.
The government pledged to help narrow the digital divide in the world, particularly by supporting developing countries that are members of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, a group that China founded in July that includes Indonesia, Pakistan and Brazil.
“That’s potentially quite noteworthy,” said Julian Gewirtz, a former China director for the National Security Council in the Biden administration now a scholar at Columbia University. “Beijing is establishing controls while suggesting it would offer favorable treatment for cooperation through a China-backed institution.”
Lily Kuo and Berry Wang contributed reporting.
David Pierson covers Chinese foreign policy and China’s economic and cultural engagement with the world. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
Adam Satariano is a technology correspondent for The Times, based in London."
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
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Testing apps, Android, browsers, and everything in Googlebook OS | The Verge
A week with Googlebooks: four notes from our testing so far
"Google’s new operating system is off to a rocky start. The five newly launched Googlebook laptops have hardware that ranges from great to excellent, but the software in its current state is the weak point. There are four of us on staff at The Verge actively testing Googlebooks and, frankly, our internal Slack discussions have been mostly filled with collective venting of frustrations, disappointments, and bewilderment.
The promise of Googlebooks as a fresh and smartly designed alternative to Windows or Mac for Android phone owners sounds great, but there’s more than just a few kinks and quirks to work out. Some of its issues and challenges in the road ahead are systemic to Android.
While we’re actively testing each and every Googlebook from all of Google’s partner OEMs, we thought we’d come together and share a glimpse of where our heads are at with these new laptops.
This should be better than ChromeOS, but right now it feels worse
While a lot of my thoughts are well documented in our initial hands-on article, I keep coming back to what a Google rep told me at the Googlebook launch preview: Replacing ChromeOS with Android will allow for much faster development. That’s great, but why does Googlebook OS feel like a bit of a set back from ChromeOS at launch? It shares some of ChromeOS’ flaws, like not allowing you to run Chrome with separate Google accounts. And many Android apps feel as clunky to run on a Googlebook as they did on ChromeOS. (Google even put Android’s navigation buttons on the Googlebook keyboard — seemingly in part as a fallback option for misbehaving apps.)
Every day I come across new oddities in any of the three Googlebooks I’m testing. The Signal Android app linked to my phone with ease, but I have to hit Ctrl+Enter to send messages and can’t highlight text — clicking and dragging scrolls up and down instead. Photoshop and Lightroom are passable for the simplest image editing, but I’d take a cheap Windows laptop with the proper desktop apps over these mobile-first versions. You can’t drag and drop windows to other virtual desktops, and scrolling to the left of your desktops reveals a Clear All button that just kills all your apps at once. That’s straight out of the app switcher from Android on phones, but if I’m closing all apps at once on a laptop I’m either rebooting or shutting down.
Even something as simple as installing the progressive web app version of Slack isn’t working properly. So who should I be mad at? Slack or Google?
If I bought one of these Googlebooks I’d be mad at myself for being a paying beta tester for Google. I know that’s often the case for early adopters on a new OS, but these days I have less time and patience than when I bought my T-Mobile G1 / HTC Dream, Nexus 7, etc. There’s something cool here for sure with Googlebooks, but we need that “faster” development to go into warp speed.
— Antonio G. Di Benedetto, currently testing the HP Googlebook 14, Lenovo Googlebook 15, and Acer Googlebook 14
Google has a big, big developer problem
One of the reasons Googlebooks exist is that Android has become a mature, useful platform across a lot of screen sizes. It’s true: Android now works relatively well on your phone, tablet, TV, even your car. The apps are another story. Over and over in my testing so far, I’ve been amazed at the number of apps that seem to have no idea what to do with a Googlebook.
Take Netflix, for instance, which was one of the first apps I downloaded because I have some travel coming up and I’m psyched to finally be able to download movies for plane rides. The app works well enough, I suppose (and it does download movies!) but it launches as a full-screen, tablet-style version of the app. Basically every streaming app does so. If you hover over the top bar, the windowing option appears, but none of that is obvious. And launching and windowing app after app gets tiresome.
There are a few apps that are properly optimized for Googlebooks, and they make the device feel more like a proper laptop. But even they have some problems: many do that weird thing where they don’t show the app content when you’re resizing the window, for instance, which feels broken on a laptop. Even some of Google’s own apps do this, while others, like YouTube and Messages, scale more naturally. Some apps respond naturally to the keyboard and mouse; others don’t. Virtually everything is better optimized for a touchscreen. A note to developers: If I can’t pause the movie by whacking the space bar, your app doesn’t work with keyboards.
For the most part, I actually like the Android-ification of Google’s laptop strategy. Connecting deeply to your phone, running and syncing all your apps, even some of the phone-style interface decisions make sense to me. But just about every time I open an app, my Googlebook starts to seem like an Android tablet pretending to be a laptop. (And don’t forget: nobody has ever really wanted Android tablets.) Google’s going to need developers to get with the program, or it’ll never be more than that.
— David Pierce, currently testing the Dell XPS Googlebook
Linux apps (probably) can’t save Googlebook OS
A string of little annoyances has chipped away at my hopes for the new Googlebooks over the last few days. Some are more frustrating than others — losing a normal Caps Lock key isn’t a deal breaker, but getting stuck with only mobile browsers just might be. Android app compatibility seems to always be a roll of the dice, and so far Linux apps don’t seem like a viable alternative.
Slack was one of the first apps I tried installing from the Play Store, but it ended up being the mobile app awkwardly resized for a larger screen. So, I tried installing the Linux version of Slack through the Debian virtual machine that lives in the Googlebook’s Terminal app. I got it working, along with GIMP and Steam.
But the big catch is that anything you install on the virtual machine only lives there. So, none of those apps have app drawer icons like my Android apps, and they don’t pop up in my taskbar when they’re running. I have to manually switch my mouse and keyboard between the VM and the rest of Googlebook OS, which makes jumping between Linux and Android apps slow and awkward. Since the Linux and Android apps are running in different environments, they don’t automatically share files or clipboard content, either.
I’ll have a dedicated write-up on the Googlebook gaming experience later, but the virtual machine hasn’t been great for that, either. I got Steam running, but the games I’ve tried (none of which are particularly resource-hungry) have been too laggy to be playable.
I’ve liked some parts of the Googlebook so far, but it’s hard to appreciate them when friction keeps popping up from Android and Linux apps alike.
— Stevie Bonifield, currently testing the Asus Googlebook 14
The best bit of Googlebooks only works half the time
The obvious selling point of the Googlebook, for me at least, has always been the “seamless” Android integration. And I’ve had a few moments this week when my phone and laptop have come together in a truly delightful way: replying to a WhatsApp message directly from the notification on the Googlebook; dipping into an app cast from my phone to quickly use it without reaching for my pocket; opening Quick Share to move files between the two devices in seconds.
But even here, so much of the experience right now sucks. My phone connection drops in and out from the laptop, and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to connect a second phone or tablet. I used Quick Share for file transfer because using the Files app to browse the phone’s drive is painfully slow, taking minutes to open or transfer a single photo. Opening a notification to the phone-cast version of an app when you have it installed natively will never stop feeling awkward. And some apps cast terribly anyway: Bluesky renders text illegibly; my banking app won’t cast for security reasons; and my credit card one won’t because it just breaks.
Seamless, this is not. It’ll get better, I hope. It has to get better. When the Android integration works, it feels a little bit like magic. But that’s only because it happens so rarely — Google needs to make this reliable enough that it feels mundane instead.
— Dominic Preston, currently testing the Asus Googlebook 14 and HP Googlebook 14"
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