#China

AIManus parent Butterfly Effect announced funding of over $500M led by Boyu Capital and IDG, with Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund returning, its first disclosed raise since resuming independent operations. The reported $4B post-money valuation was not confirmed. Manus also launched version 2.0 and the personal agent Cue on September 29, and is building a China-focused product team and partnerships with domestic model developers.

AIShenzhen-based Krinwave (鲲为科技) has completed a new 400 million yuan round with new investors XVC and Sequoia China, and existing investors Shell Capital and Tencent adding to their positions. The company says its low-frequency ultrasound can image brain structures and blood flow through the skull in real time, and plans to supply hardware and its kOS platform to brain-computer interface labs and NeuroAI model companies.

AIChina's tech hardware shares are falling rapidly after strong gains earlier this year, as doubts over the global AI trade make high-valuation names especially vulnerable. The selloff reflects growing valuation concerns in the sector.

AIXPENG has named its robotaxi business XPENG YOYO and launched a ride-hailing mini program that lets invited members of the public test the service. The company says its first production robotaxi, based on the flagship GX model, rolled off the line in May 2026, and it has completed more than 2,000 internal test rides in Guangzhou. XPENG says YOYO uses four in-house Turing AI chips delivering 3,000 TOPS, a second-generation VLA model, and a vision-based approach without high-definition maps or LiDAR.

AITencent introduced roughly eight vertical AI agent products between July and September, each built on an existing business such as games, music, WeChat or video conferencing. CraftBuddy generates 2D and 3D games from natural-language prompts with more than 40,000 prebuilt art assets, while MusicBuddy adds an AI chat panel to multitrack music editing. The products extend the "Buddy" family alongside WorkBuddy and CodeBuddy.

AINaive AI, a Tsinghua-linked company founded seven months ago, has raised $400 million across three rounds at a post-money valuation of $1.42 billion. The company's founder is Dai Jifeng, an associate professor in Tsinghua's Department of Electronic Engineering, and its team has not given interviews or published a product introduction.

AIBASAL Intelligence (本溯智能), founded by Tsinghua AIR's first PhD graduate Li Jianxiong, has raised funding led by Fifth Source Capital, with Ivy Capital, Linear Capital and WestSummit Capital participating. The company is pursuing an action-native, in-context embodied foundation model that lets robots adapt to new scenes in minutes from a few human demonstrations and self-attempts, rather than retraining.

AIQi An Xin ranked first in China's network information security market with 4.39 billion yuan in revenue in 2025, according to a CCID Consulting report on a 93.08 billion yuan market. The company also led the endpoint security, security management platform, and security services segments, with a 17.5% endpoint share and 18.3% security management platform share.

AIAt the Apsara Conference, Alibaba's Qwen team outlined a roadmap of Qwen4 followed by Qwen4.5 and Qwen5, aiming for 5T to 10T parameters. The article notes that Qwen3.8 reached 2.4T parameters and that Qwen3.8-Flash activates 6B parameters per inference while cutting training cost to one-ninth. It also describes Qwen3.8-Max running model-driven experiments in chip design and inference optimization, and multimodal updates including a video model slated for November.

AIChina's Xiongan New Area is accelerating efforts to attract technology firms, officials and sources said, aiming to nurture local industries alongside state institutions relocated from Beijing. Officials are targeting companies that could reach valuations of 10 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion) and list on markets including Hong Kong within a few years.

AIThe S&P 500 closed above 7,800 for the first time, marking its first record close in nearly two months, while the Nasdaq Composite also hit a fresh all-time closing high. Chipmakers led gains, with Marvell Technology up 5.8%, Advanced Micro Devices up 3% and Broadcom up 3.7%. Investors are now watching Federal Reserve September meeting minutes and a $39 billion 10-year Treasury note auction.

AIManus, an AI agent startup, raised more than $500 million in a funding round led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with follow-on investment from Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund. The company did not disclose its post-funding valuation, though Bloomberg reported last month it was set to double to $4 billion. The round follows Beijing's order blocking Meta's roughly $2 billion acquisition of Manus.

AIManus' parent company Butterfly Effect said it raised more than $500 million, its first funding round since Meta called off its $2 billion acquisition. Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the round, and existing shareholders including Tencent also participated, though the valuation was not disclosed.

AIAutonomous vehicle companies in China see a large market opportunity in delivering goods after dark, according to the article. The article says that opportunity depends on overcoming technical challenges, but the source does not specify which challenges or report any deployments.

AIManus, the developer of the Manus AI agent, has raised more than $500 million led by Boyu Capital, with Tencent also investing. Bloomberg had reported a $4 billion valuation, roughly double Meta's reported offer last December, which Chinese regulators blocked in April. The funding comes days after Manus 2.0 added a new harness, Cloud Computer, and Cue, which lets agents use email accounts and digital wallets.

AIMistral CEO Arthur Mensch replied that his company serves such customers too, pointing to nuclear energy as a possible obstacle. The reply responds to reports that Berlin-based search engine Ecosia is dropping Mistral as its AI partner for open-source models, including Chinese ones.

AIMeta's Muse personal AI agent, launched on September 8, surpassed 2.5 million downloads in its first two weeks and topped free-app rankings on Apple and Google's US app stores. Its popularity has drawn attention to the emerging market for agent harnesses, where China's biggest internet companies are already competing for position. The excerpt does not provide full details on their specific products.

AIAnalysts expect Alibaba Group Holding's cloud and AI unit to report a 50 per cent revenue surge for the September quarter, up from 45 per cent growth in the prior quarter. The projected acceleration is attributed to strong returns on the company's aggressive AI investments.

AIQualcomm has denied being the net payer in its patent deal with Huawei and rejected claims that the deal relates to LogicFolding. The available statements do not establish any licensing of LogicFolding or related peripheral technologies.

AITian Keyu's unnamed startup has raised nearly $30M from 5Y Capital and IDG at a $200M post-money valuation, according to Bloomberg. The NeurIPS 2024 award-winning researcher's 10-person team is developing a 200,000-symbol visual vocabulary to help AI process video. Tian claims the approach could cut video-generation costs at least tenfold, with a full model release planned for 2027 and no product yet.

AIManus parent company Butterfly Effect has completed a new financing round of over $500 million, led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, and is rebuilding a team in Beijing to develop AI Agent products for the Chinese market. Its recruitment page lists 17 open positions, up from 11 before the National Day holiday, including AI Agent product manager, Agent Harness engineer, Agent evaluation engineer, and LLM algorithm engineer roles.

AIA suspected Chinese-speaking attacker breached several South Korean financial institutions between late September and early October 2026, reportedly stealing over 25,000 records from Shinhan Bank alone. The attacker used ARTEX, a Chinese open-source tool that uses AI language models to automate finding security flaws, and models named in the report include DeepSeek v4.1-flash, GLM-5.3, and Grok 4.6.

AIShanghai Biren Technology shares fell more than 12% in Hong Kong on Thursday after the company filed plans to raise HK$4 billion (US$510 million) through a share placement. The filing said placing agents would issue 130 million new shares at HK$31.08 each on a best-effort basis.

AILast week, several of South Korea's largest banks were hit by a cyberattack. A CrowdStrike report reportedly indicates the entire attack may have been carried out by one person. The attacker reportedly combined the open-source AI penetration tool ARTEX, DeepSeek v4.1-Flash, GLM-5.3, Grok 4.6, and Claude Code.

AIHuawei released its first smartphone with its own LogicFolding chip, the Mate 90 series, on October 1, as China's smartphone and car markets slow. Huawei only sells several million smartphones outside China each year, and Huawei-powered vehicle deliveries fell 29% year-on-year in September.

AIThe US Treasury issued its first penalty under outbound investment rules, fining Plug and Play parent Amidi $200,000 for failing to report its Chinese subsidiary's roughly $92,478 investment in robotics AI startup Noematrix. The fine exceeds twice the investment amount. Treasury cited a reporting violation and did not say the transaction was prohibited or allege wrongdoing by Noematrix.

AIUBTECH Robotics and FAW-Volkswagen signed a strategic cooperation agreement to jointly develop and test embodied AI robot applications in logistics and build demonstration sites. The partnership builds on UBTECH's Walker S Lite humanoid, already doing vehicle quality-inspection training at FAW-Volkswagen's Qingdao Branch, a national-level smart manufacturing demonstration factory. The companies aim to speed up humanoid deployment in smart manufacturing.

AIUS firms are building assistants first, then letting them use other companies' websites and services, as with OpenAI's dots and Meta's Muse. Chinese players such as Tencent's Xiaowei sit inside super-app WeChat and can place orders from businesses already on the platform. Source notes Tencent earns no new fees from these purchases and that early tests show mistakes, and that Amazon has blocked Muse.

AIBaidu Inc. posted a lighthearted message on X asking whether staring at autumn leaves counts as having plans, noting the post was created with DuMate. The post contains no product details, figures, or feature claims beyond that attribution.

AIDeepal Automobile officially announced the 2027 Deepal L06, positioned as a long-range magnetorheological AI sedan equipped with two "lobsters," namely an AI Agent and an AI Box. Chairman Deng Chenghao said the two systems let owners state their intent in a single sentence, though no launch date has been disclosed.

AIA new study finds China's open-weight AI models, including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI's, are gaining global adoption, but much of the revenue flows to third-party providers rather than their developers. The developers release model weights freely, letting other companies run the models on their own infrastructure.

AIGoogle and Meta have started sending some live traffic through a land route across Iraq that they had previously held in reserve, according to a person familiar with the deal. Most data between Europe and Asia still flows through subsea cables under the Red Sea, where Yemen's side of the strait is now contested and cable repairs could take months.

AIAt the ElevenLabs Summit in Bengaluru, the company signed its first MOU with an Indian state government to pilot voice AI. Over 70% of the 100M+ ElevenAgents conversations in India over the past year were in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu. The summit drew 500+ enterprise leaders, builders, and partners.

AIParamount Skydance completed its roughly $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6, with the combined company renamed Skydance. Reports also say Moonshot AI finished a final private round at about a $50 billion valuation and is preparing a Hong Kong IPO for the first quarter of next year, while Microsoft and Meta reportedly asked employees to use Claude less.

AIDeepSeek is close to raising at least 80 billion yuan ($12 billion), up from an original target of about 50 billion yuan, according to Bloomberg citing people familiar with the matter. Tencent and battery maker CATL are among the largest investors in the round, which is expected to close soon. DeepSeek is planning an IPO in early 2027, though details could still change.

AIChina's booming artificial intelligence sector has kept local researchers at home, but it has not yet attracted overseas scientists despite a government push to recruit them.

AIMoonshot AI, maker of Kimi, is planning a Hong Kong IPO in the first quarter of 2027 after closing a private funding round at a valuation of about $50 billion, according to Bloomberg citing people familiar with the matter. Separately, Kuaishou's AI video platform Kling AI has picked banks for a Hong Kong IPO that could raise at least $1 billion, targeting a listing as early as 2027. The offering's size and timing could still change.

AISouth Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT plans a ₩4.7 trillion special program to develop a frontier AI large model starting March 2027, Reuters reported. The lead developer will be chosen through competitive bidding after the National Assembly passes the 2027 fiscal budget in December, with the winner expected to be finalized as early as February 2028. The program is separate from the existing domestic foundation model project, which will continue and select two final teams in a third-stage review in February 2027.

AIReflection is set to release Beam, its first open-weight AI model, aiming to become a Western counterpart to DeepSeek. The source says Beam is trained from scratch for coding, reasoning, and AI agents, with benchmarks placing it alongside the strongest open models and more efficient token economics. Reflection has raised $4.6 billion from investors including Nvidia, Sequoia, and Lightspeed, and the interview covers its monetization plans for open-weight models.

AIHuawei's new multiyear patent agreement with Qualcomm would make Qualcomm the net payer for the first time, according to Nikkei Asia. The deal cross-licenses patents in 5G, computing, AI, and networking, and Qualcomm will also buy some of Huawei's U.S. patents outright. Financial terms have not been disclosed, and the transaction still requires regulatory approval.