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Beijing is pushing back hard after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for curbing China's artificial intelligence development. Chinese regulators and state media responded swiftly, framing the remarks as an attempt by American tech interests to suppress a legitimate competitor. The exchange underscores how AI has become deeply entangled with geopolitics, and how bluntly both sides are now willing to speak.
That tension over AI's reach extends closer to home too. China is now moving to regulate so-called AI boyfriends — romantic chatbot companions that have drawn millions of users. Regulators are raising concerns about emotional dependency, data privacy, and what it means when people form genuine attachments to software. It's a question no rulebook was really written for.
And on a different kind of frontier, Rocket Lab has formally protested NASA's decision to hand Blue Origin a contract worth up to roughly seven hundred million dollars to build a Mars telecommunications network. Rocket Lab argues the process wasn't fair. It's a pointed moment — Blue Origin spent years protesting competitors' NASA awards, and now finds itself on the receiving end of exactly that scrutiny.
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