🚨big news y'all: Nvidia agrees to take Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. More details below

The Information is hiring our first Israel Bureau Chief as we ramp up our international expansion! Ten years ago, we opened an Asia bureau and cemented a leading position in covering China tech. Last month, we welcomed our first reporter in Singapore. And as I searched for our next hub, I was looking for a place whose tech industry is woefully under covered relative to its significance, and the answer was clear. Israel is at the center of three of the most important tech trends of the day: AI, cyber and defense. I can't wait to build this team together with an awesome bureau chief. Check out the role here. ats.rippling.com/theinformat…

The fraught relationship between the Chinese government and China’s AI companies is one of the most undercovered stories in the wider AI race. Not because of any doubt about the ultimate balance of power. In China no one questions who will ultimately win the struggle between state and corporate power. The new probe of DeepSeek and Moonshot over distillation-linked data breaches is the latest example, and one of the highest-stakes instances yet. (theinformation.com/articles/…) As Dan Wang and I wrote in the NYT over the summer, we tend to think about AI as a race between the United States and China, but there is another contest unfolding inside both countries: between the public power of governments and the private power of ambitious AI companies. (juliangewirtz.substack.com/p…) That contest looks very different in China than in the United States. Beijing is much more capable of compelling its companies to comply. But that does not mean the relationship is frictionless—or that the eventual shape of Chinese AI regulation is settled. Chinese AI companies are acutely aware of what happened to fintech and the broader tech sector beginning in 2020. Beijing, meanwhile, wants both rapid AI development and much tighter control over the risks it creates. That is the tension to watch. Xi Jinping has long insisted that development and security are "two sides of the same coin" and can reinforce each other. AI may force it to confront the possibility that, sometimes, they don’t.

As OpenAI looks to respond to safety fears, one solution could lie in the recent past: earlier this year, OpenAI and Anthropic were negotiating a legally-binding deal to stress-test each other's models. w/ @amir: theinformation.com/articles/…

In this morning's AI Agenda, @amir reports on OpenAI's work to develop its answer to Grok Bot, as well as what it's doing to respond to Instinct. Plus, I share more on what OpenAI researchers have seen to make them so nervous about the progress of AI. theinformation.com/newslette…

On a potential AI slowdown, Treasury Sec. Bessent said that the U.S. and China discussed a mechanism called the U.S.-China AI dialogue and have agreed to meet again. The U.S. proposed a notification mechanism between the two countries and “we want a shared vision of common goals and threats.” The notification system for incidents would be whether something rises up to the national security level from AI. “We think that just like any cross-border activity, moving from opaque to more transparency between the number one and number two AI powers in the world is very important.” U.S. trade representative Jamieson Greer said that U.S. chip export controls were not on the agenda.