OpenAI and Google have been selling AI model access to Singapore units of Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, whose Chinese parents sit on the Pentagon's 1260H list of Chinese military companies, the Financial Times reported. The disclosure lands as the House Homeland Security and China Select committees are already probing U.S. firms' adoption of Chinese AI. OpenAI told the FT it blocks direct access from mainland China but allows some Chinese-owned entities to use its services where safeguards can be enforced. The company said it suspended Alibaba-affiliated access after identifying concerns about model distillation, the practice of using one AI system's outputs to train a rival. Anthropic said it prohibits Chinese companies from accessing its models entirely.
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Leading the Future and Public First Action have spent at least $44 million on 40 House and Senate candidates as of the end of June, per a CNBC analysis of FEC data — an early slice of the more than $200 million the groups say they've raised for the cycle. The aim is to shape the first national AI legislation, following the playbook of crypto PAC Fairshake, whose $200 million in 2024 preceded passage of the stablecoin law. Both groups back some guardrails; the sharpest split is whether a federal standard should preempt state AI laws — Leading the Future advocates a "broad, national, consistent framework," while Public First has fought preemption efforts. The bets are paying off: 25 of Leading the Future's 28 candidates and all but one of Public First's have won their primaries.
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Threat intelligence firm Alethea identified scores of articles and posts across China, Russia and, to a lesser extent, Iran turning U.S. data center controversy into "a domestic fracture point." A Chinese state-owned newspaper published an English-language article featuring a satellite image of a Gainesville, Va., data center and saying AI threatens Americans' well-being, per NYT. OpenAI confirmed that a comic strip made to look like a Maryland outlet's, blaming data centers for electricity bills, was generated with ChatGPT by users in China. A covert Russian operation on X questioned the viability of a U.S.-built Firebird data center in Armenia. In a June 10 letter, Sen. Tom Cotton asked acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to investigate foreign influence in U.S. data center opposition, per WIRED.
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The AI Futures Project, led by former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, published "AI 2040: Plan A" Thursday, calling for an international deal that delays the development of superintelligence to 2040. The plan requires the two AI superpowers to agree to a verified slowdown, accompanied by sweeping research transparency and dozens of companies globally catching up to the frontier. Co-author Thomas Larsen told Axios the current trajectory is a "really scary status quo" and said carefully reasoned interventions could stretch the timeline over many years, "maybe a decade or so, as opposed to just a single year."
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