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A smuggling network with ties to Supermicro executives has been using a Thai government entity to route restricted Nvidia AI hardware into China, with Alibaba among the reported recipients. If confirmed, this represents one of the most significant breaches of US export controls on advanced chips in recent memory, and the political fallout could be substantial.
Turning to a quieter but equally troubling corner of the AI economy, a grey market operating out of China is reselling access to Anthropic's Claude at as little as ten percent of the official price. The operation relies on stolen credentials and model substitution, and here is the part that should give anyone pause — user prompts and outputs are being harvested and resold as AI training data without users ever knowing.
On a lighter note, today marks thirty years since Linus Torvalds first sketched out the idea of Tux the penguin, describing the Linux mascot as a slightly overweight bird with a contented look. What started as a casual mailing list post became one of the most recognizable symbols in open source software, still waddling strong three decades on.
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