Beijing's Veto: How China's Block of the Meta-Manus Deal Is Reshaping Global AI Startups
China's NDRC has unwound Meta's $2 billion acquisition of Manus AI, imposed exit bans on its founders, and warned other startups against accepting American capital without government clearance. Chinese-origin founders building globally now face a question their predecessors rarely had to answer: at what point does your nationality become a jurisdiction?
Read full story →Promises in the Founding Documents: What the Musk-Altman Trial Is Actually About
Day four of the Musk v. Altman civil trial brought testimony about nonprofit assurances that were never clearly committed to paper, a judge who shut down Terminator comparisons, and a backdrop of Microsoft and Amazon both restructuring their OpenAI deals at the same time.
Read full story →The Slow Retreat: Open-Source AI Models Are Quietly Changing the Terms
MiniMax relabelled a non-commercial license as "Modified-MIT" and took immediate community backlash. Meanwhile Mistral released a new model that loses on both price and benchmarks against Chinese rivals. Two stories about the same pressure: maintaining open-source commitments when the commercial stakes keep rising.
Read full story →Journalism Has an AI Policy. What It Doesn't Have Is a Framework.
The sector has reached consensus: humans write the news, AI doesn't. South Africa showed what happens when that line isn't held — fabricated citations in a national policy document. A practitioner's account of running an AI-assisted news site reveals why holding the line is harder than the policy suggests.
Read full story →The AI Cold War Will Not Produce the Future Anyone Wants
The Manus affair is being covered as a business story. It is a window into how the US-China geopolitical race is destroying the conditions for any sustainable AI outcome: accelerating deployment by both sides without deliberation, treating founders as national assets, and making the kind of international coordination that p(sustainable) requires structurally impossible.
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