Applied Materials Inc. will pay $252.5 million to settle a US Commerce Department investigation into improper exports to China, ending a yearslong saga for the largest American supplier of chipmaking machinery. The agreement resolves allegations by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security that certain shipments to China between November 2020 and July 2022 didn't comply with export regulations, the company said in a statement Wednesday.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has a grave warning for fellow AI titans who dismiss the public's concerns about AI. "You can't just go around saying we're going to create all this abundance, a lot of it is going to go to us, and we're going to be trillionaires, and no one's going to complain about that," Amodei told Axios in an interview. "Look, you're going to get a mob coming for you if you don't do this in the right way."
Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., sent a letter Thursday to NSF interim director Brian Stone asking the agency to revoke China-linked entities' access to the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support - or ACCESS - program, according to a copy of the missive first seen by Nextgov/FCW. ACCESS is a free, nationwide collection of supercomputing systems made available to academics and other researchers. It's frequently used across U.S. institutions and national labs to assist with national security and economic research.
When Benchmark led a financing round for Manus earlier this year, the investment sparked immediate controversy. U.S. Senator John Cornyn complained about the deal on X, and the investment prompted inquiries from the U.S. Treasury Department around new rules restricting American investment in Chinese AI companies. The concerns were significant enough to spur Manus's eventual relocation from Beijing to Singapore part of what drove the company's step-by-step disentanglement from China, as one Chinese professor described it on WeChat this past weekend.
In 2022, Jake Sullivan, then national security adviser under President Joe Biden and a powerful figure in the White House's foreign policy team, assembled an interagency planning exercise out of the Situation Room: What were all the possible circumstances and outcomes of an AI arms race between the US and China - from trade wars to real wars, possibly even the arrival of AGI - and how would the federal government respond?
Federal authorities arrested an East Bay man over an alleged scheme to evade national security-related technology export controls and send powerful, highly sought after computer chips made by Santa Clara company Nvidia to China. Chinese citizen Cham Li, 38, also known as Tony Li, of San Leandro, conspired with two U.S. citizens and another Chinese national to falsify paperwork, make fake contracts, and mislead the American government,
Lars Klingbeil's trip will be the first visit to China by a cabinet minister of the current German government and the trip to Berlin's most important trading partner comes at a sensitive time. Chinese export controls, especially on rare earths, have highlighted the German economy's heavy dependence on China. The German automotive industry, for example, has felt the effects as it faces a shortage of important parts.
