• Hong Kong’s crop of green bonds, ESG funds flourishes under mainland China’s climate push
• China wife suffers depression after window cleaners see her sleeping naked; demands rent cut
• China’s Xi seeks expanded role for Shanghai Cooperation Organization with development bank
• How will advanced drones and robobeasts share the stage with China’s military personnel?
• A look at the world leaders attending China’s SCO summit and military parade
• Xi calls for India-China reset, top scientist leaves US agency: 5 weekend reads you missed
• China sellers use AI to clone dive queen Quan Hongchan, top athletes to push products
• China AI firm SenseTime on fast track to profitability thanks to spin-offs, Beijing support
• How will China react as Vietnam deepens military footprint in disputed Spratlys?
• Young Chinese are seeking their fortune in Southeast Asia. Will they find it?
• As China’s military closes gap on US, economic front opens in race for security
• Geoffrey Hinton on preventing an AI takeover and the ‘very worrying’ China-US tech race

Hong Kong’s crop of green bonds, ESG funds flourishes under mainland China’s climate push

https://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/3323896/hong-kongs-crop-green-bonds-esg-funds-flourishes-under-mainland-chinas-climate-push?utm_source=rss_feed

Hong Kong was responsible for nearly half of the green bonds issued in Asia in 2024 and saw a surge in sustainability-related funds, as strong demand from regional mainland governments and start-ups raised the city’s stature as a finance hub for climate-friendly projects, according to a minister.

Green bond issuance in Hong Kong last year reached US$43 billion, representing 45 per cent of the region’s total and keeping the city atop the league table in Asia for the seventh consecutive year, said Christopher Hui Ching-yu, secretary for financial services and the treasury, in a meeting with lawmakers on Monday.

The total of green bonds plus green loans issued in Hong Kong reached US$84 billion last year, a 50 per cent increase from 2021, he added.

Hong Kong’s fund industry also registered strong growth in environmental, social and governance (ESG)-related funds, Hui said. The number of those funds increased by 51 per cent over the past three years to about 200 as of June, while assets under management rose 18 per cent during the same period to more than HK$1.1 trillion (US$141 billion), he said.

“Mainland China’s goal to promote sustainable development and cut down carbon emissions has provided a lot of opportunities for the city to act as a green financing hub,” Hui said.

China has made its green-energy transition a key economic priority. In 2020, President Xi Jinping unveiled goals for China to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030 and be carbon neutral by 2060.

On Monday’s meeting, several lawmakers expressed concerns about whether Hong Kong had offered sufficient incentives to entice companies to issue green bonds in the city, noting that other cities like Singapore were also working hard to promote green finance.

Hui downplayed the worries, saying the government and regulators had done a lot to enhance green-finance regulations and cross-border fundraising.

Since 2021, the governments of Shenzhen, Guangdong, Hainan and others had raised about 40 billion yuan (US$5.6 billion) in Hong Kong by issuing yuan-denominated bonds, including green bonds, blue bonds and sustainable bonds, Hui said. The proceeds helped build infrastructure to cut down pollution, use less energy and address climate-change risks.

Mainland start-ups involved in green or renewable energy technology could find it easier to raise funds in the city under bourse operator Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing’s Chapter 18C listing rules, which were put in place in March 2023. The rules allowed innovative tech companies to list in Hong Kong even if they had little or no revenue, he said.

“These governments and companies are coming to Hong Kong to raise funds to finance their needs, while they also want to connect their green and sustainable projects with international investors,” Hui said. “Hong Kong can serve as a bridge that connects the mainland with the world through bond issuances, listings and finding business partners. Such a unique position is not easily found in other markets.”

The Hong Kong government is also a big green bond issuer, with HK$240 billion worth of outstanding green or sustainable bonds as of June. Hui said the proceeds had financed 116 projects in the city.

The latest issuance was in June, when the government sold HK$27 billion in multicurrency green and infrastructure bonds to ­support the development of the Northern Metropolis. The bonds were denominated in Hong Kong dollars, yuan, US dollars and euros.

Looking ahead, Hui said the government would continue to train talent in the green-finance field and arrange numerous summits on the topic.

He cited Hong Kong Green Week 2025, to be held from September 8 to 12, which includes “scores of events to focus on the discussion of sustainability and green finance”, Hui said.

China wife suffers depression after window cleaners see her sleeping naked; demands rent cut

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3323174/china-wife-suffers-depression-after-window-cleaners-see-her-sleeping-naked-demands-rent-cut?utm_source=rss_feed

A woman in China has developed depression after two male window cleaners saw her asleep naked in her home.

The woman and her husband live in Port Apartment, a high-end housing estate in Chengdu, in southwestern Sichuan province. They pay 10,000 yuan (US$1,400) a month in rent.

Her plight captivated mainland social media after her husband, surnamed Cheng, exposed the situation online in the middle of August.

The couple said they were not satisfied with the manner in which the property management company had dealt with their problem, the Huashang News reported.

The incident unfolded on the morning of April 25 when Cheng was working in their living room while his wife was asleep in the bedroom.

Suddenly he heard his wife screaming.

“I went to check on her. My wife was sleeping naked. Two workers, who were cleaning our window, were gawking at her,” said Cheng.

He said the curtains were not closed and the light was on in the room at the time.

“We normally do not wear pyjamas. I promptly ran to draw the curtains,” said Cheng, adding that his wife was woken up by the sound made by the workers.

The couple blame the property management company for not notifying them of the exact time the window cleaners would be outside their flat.

“They only told us the glass cleaning task would be carried out in the daytime from April 21 to April 30. It is impossible for us not to open curtains for the whole 10 days.

“Therefore I urged them twice to tell us in advance if the workers were soon to be near our room,” said Cheng.

“They promised they would notify us. However, in the end, they forgot to do so,” he said.

Cheng said his wife has been in low spirits ever since and was diagnosed with depression and anxiety in May.

The couple want a public apology from the property management firm, plus a “reasonable” amount of compensation. Both requests have been turned down, said Cheng.

“They only sent a worker with a basket of fruit to our home to apologise. As for my wife’s mental suffering, they showed no concern,” he said.

Their rental contract expires at the end of August.

As the incident attracted wide attention on social media, the company recently agreed to reduce the rent by 600 yuan (US$80) a month if they renew the contract.

“We can afford a monthly rent of 10,000 yuan. Are we short of 600 yuan? This offer is typical of their attitude in dealing with our problem; we are not satisfied,” Cheng said.

China’s Xi seeks expanded role for Shanghai Cooperation Organization with development bank

https://apnews.com/article/china-sco-putin-modi-xi-summit-95f1421de601960a9c569933862a09a0Chinese President Xi Jinping gives a speech during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit at the Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center in Tianjin, China, Monday, Sept. 1, 2025. (Suo Takekuma/Pool Photo via AP)

2025-09-01T05:23:22Z

TIANJIN, China (AP) — Chinese President Xi Jinping said China would accelerate the building of a SCO development bank at the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Tianjin on Monday, as he seeks to expand the organization’s influence and scope.

“Currently, as the global situation becomes more complex and turbulent, member states are facing more arduous safety and development responsibilities,” Xi said in opening remarks to the forum. Xi pledged $1.4 billion in loans in the next three years for members of the SCO, not specifically designated for this new bank.

Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and leaders of a few dozen nations are meeting as part of the SCO. The group, originally seen as a foil to U.S. influence in Central Asia, has grown in size and influence over the years, but remains largely a security forum.

With the addition of the bank and an emphasis on providing loans, Xi is attempting to expand the scope of the organization.

China on message

“He wants to provide an alternate world order, because the US led-world order is very much in decline. This is the main narrative,” said Alfred Wu, a professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

Xi also said states should “oppose the Cold War mentality, bloc-based confrontation and bullying, and safeguard the international system with the United Nations at its core” while “advocating for an equal and orderly multipolar world, an inclusive economic globalization, and promote the building of a more just and reasonable global governance system.”

Xi’s messaging did not stray far from China’s past comments, as opposition to a Cold War mentality is a reference to the U.S.’ opposition of China, as well as its withdrawal of funding from some U.N. agencies. But at this moment in time, its consistency is the message, Wu said.

Founded in 2001, the SCO’s membership now includes Russia, Belarus, China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Afghanistan and Mongolia are observer states, and 14 other countries, mostly from Southeast Asia and the Middle East, serve as “dialogue partners.”

The summit comes days ahead of a planned military parade that Beijing will host, and the country is taking the opportunity to invite its allies and neighbors.

Focus on conflict

On Sunday, Xi met with Modi where they vowed to resolve their differences about the border dispute, which had led to a freeze in relations in 2020. The disputes revolve around three points in their vast border in India’s northern Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh regions as well as near Bhutan.

Putin, who arrived Sunday in China, will also attend a major military parade in Beijing on Wednesday for the 80th anniversary of Japan’s World War II surrender. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who is not attending the SCO summit, will be present for the military parade, along with Myanmar’s junta chief Min Au Hlaing.

Putin spoke to Xi on Sunday, ahead of the bilateral talks the two were scheduled to hold Tuesday, where he updated him about the Russia-U.S. talks on the Ukraine war in Alaska last month.

“I would like to note that the understandings reached at the recent high-level Russian-American summit in Alaska are also, I hope, moving in this direction, opening the way to peace in Ukraine,” Putin said.

Development has been a large part of the messaging in recent days. Putin said Russia and China were jointly “against discriminatory sanctions” that hurt the socioeconomic development of the world at large in a written interview released by the Chinese official news agency Xinhua on Saturday.

He said Russia, alongside its Chinese partners, supports the reform of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

“It is essential to end the use of finance as an instrument of neo-colonialism, which runs counter to the interests of the Global Majority,” he said.

Security is still key

While China is eager for the SCO to take a growing role on the global stage, it remains to be seen how effective the organization will be. Its focus in the past has always been on propping up the security initiatives of its member states, including China which said the SCO was effective in combating what it refers to as the three forces: terrorism, separatism and extremism.

Those threats are what Beijing cited after it swept more than 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and members of other largely Muslim minorities into camps, prisons, and other detention facilities in 2018.

“Their anti-terrorism exercises are more about countering threats to authoritarian regimes rather than countering terrorism in its own right,” said Derek Grossman, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California.

“There’s competing organizations,” said Grossman. “If anything, BRICS might have much more luck in competing against the West because there are major economies involved.”

Even if the SCO summit’s reach and influence is ultimately limited, one thing is clear, he said: “China is on a diplomatic uptick and the U.S. is self destructing.”

____

AP researcher Shihuan Chen in Beijing and AP writer Kanis Leung in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

HUIZHONG WU Wu covers Chinese culture, society, and politics for The Associated Press, as well as the country’s growing overseas influence from Bangkok. She was previously based in Taiwan and China. twitter

How will advanced drones and robobeasts share the stage with China’s military personnel?

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3323871/how-will-advanced-drones-and-robobeasts-share-stage-chinas-military-personnel?utm_source=rss_feed

Some 16 years after China first showcased drones in a military parade, there is keen interest in how the People’s Liberation Army has developed its unmanned systems, and how they will be displayed during Beijing’s military parade on Wednesday.

Analysts say the breadth and variety of drone systems expected at China’s coming military parade could underscore the PLA’s rapid advances in integrating autonomous technologies across air, land and sea, signalling a shift towards AI-enabled, multi-domain operations.

While previously unseen models might be revealed, and could be presented in mixed formations to reflect real war scenarios, including their AI-assisted capacities, experts tend to believe the systems will still be shown in static displays instead of in motion for security reasons.

On Wednesday, September 3, China is set to hold its largest military parade, marking the 80th anniversary of victory in World War II, with officials last month pledging to unveil “new-domain forces and new-quality combat capabilities” that include advanced unmanned systems.

For three consecutive weekends in August, Beijing staged large-scale rehearsals near Tiananmen Square. Although authorities have disclosed no equipment details, leaked photos of previously unseen systems have been circulating widely on social media, fuelling speculation among military observers.

Responding to questions about public expectations, Wu Zeke, deputy director of the Military Parade Leading Group Office, said certain “unmanned and counter-unmanned systems will be publicly displayed for the first time, highlighting the PLA’s strong capabilities to safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interests, as well as to maintain world peace”.

Among the unmanned systems, aerial drones have attracted the greatest attention.

Leaked images circulated online have prompted military experts to identify an FH-97-esque drone design and at least five previously unseen tailless drone designs – of which, at least two have been identified under wraps on mounted trucks in photos that surfaced around the time of the second rehearsal held last month.

These ranged from 9 metres to 12 metres (29-39 feet) in length with a wingspan between 6 metres and 11 metres. Four featured modified diamond-delta wings and resembled a tailless drone reported on by the South China Morning Post in July after it was spotted flying alongside Y-8/Y-9 transport aircraft, and one had a conventional wing-tail design.

All appear to be stealth unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) comparable to the US Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft under its Next Generation Air Dominance programme. China has already announced several “loyal wingman” types, including the FH-97 and FH-97A, which can be controlled by twin-seat J-20S stealth fighters.

One of the most anticipated advanced stealth UCAVs is an upgraded GJ-11 Sharp Sword, which has been spotted airborne on several occasions.

A static standard GJ-11 was shown in the 2019 parade but was not carrier-capable. Since then, there has been evidence of a naval variant, dubbed GJ-11J, with mock-ups seen at a training site near the Type 076 amphibious assault ship Sichuan in May and at a full-scale aircraft carrier test facility in Wuhan in December 2023.

Photos of an airborne GJ-11 emerged shortly after the catapult-equipped Sichuan – which state media have consistently described as a drone carrier – was launched, suggesting a link.

An armed navalised GJ-11 would represent a capability not found anywhere else in the world. This includes the US Navy, where Rear Admiral Michael Donnelly said in April that the Americans had deferred any such plans to an unspecified date beyond the 2030s.

In addition to aerial drones, armed robotic ground systems – formally known as quadruped unmanned ground vehicles (Q-UGVs) – are also expected to be on show, following recent state media coverage.

Last month, state broadcaster CCTV aired the first detailed PLA footage of manned-unmanned drills involving drone swarms and armed robot wolves.

In July, CCTV footage showed the PLA Western Theatre Command’s 76th Group Army deploying dozens of 68kg (150lb) robot wolves mounted with assault rifles as scouts, shooters and ammunition carriers during mountain exercises near the Russian border.

These platforms, developed by China South Industries Group and unveiled in November, showed 100-metre precision strikes, an upgrade over the robot dogs used in drills in Cambodia since 2024.

Former PLA instructor Song Zhongping said the significance of this week’s parade lay not in individual weapons but in the integration of systems.

“My main attention will be on how the PLA displays the combination of unmanned assets, with each service having its own systems matched to its combat structure. This creates a networked operational capability,” Song said.

“Any single weapon is merely a tactical asset, one link in a wider system that extends the battlefield, reconnaissance reach and strike options. Unmanned systems complement manned ones, and in the future will replace them in more urgent, dangerous and demanding tasks.

“We are now in a critical stage of transition and integration between the two.”

Unlike past parades where unmanned systems were listed as equipment, the PLA described this year’s parade formation at the August briefing as “organised according to real-combat joint groupings”, suggesting cross-system operational readiness.

Wu said one of the highlighted features of the parade design was a dedicated formation for new platforms, such as advanced unmanned aerial vehicles.

Michael Raska, assistant professor at the Military Transformations Programme at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, said the PLA’s concept of “unmanned intelligent systems” reflected a push to embed AI and autonomy across all domains as part of “intelligentised” warfare.

“This is not just about individual platforms, but about building an AI-driven force. Loyal-wingman UCAVs, swarming loitering munitions and unmanned ground vehicles are all part of this vision,” he said.

The steady progress in unmanned systems development can be seen in the previous two PLA parades.

In 2015, the event focused on strategic missiles and included limited unmanned displays, while the 2019 parade provided the stage for China’s first dedicated UAV formations, three in total, including the notable debut of the GJ-11 attack drone, the WZ-8 supersonic reconnaissance drone and the HSU001 unmanned underwater vehicle.

Quadruped unmanned systems, or robot dogs, have been absent in previous parades, but their recent appearance in military outlets have drawn attention.

India’s Army Day in January was the first major military parade to feature robot dogs, followed by the US Army’s 250th anniversary parade in June. In both cases, they were unarmed and marched alongside human personnel.

Despite speculation that the PLA would show unmanned systems manoeuvring in and about Tiananmen Square, Song said static displays were more likely because of safety concerns.

“The parade must ensure absolute safety, stability and reliability. These weapons have already been showcased in training and exercises through released footage,” Song said. “Their presence alone will shock and deter the world.”

Raska said any flyover by loyal-wingman drones would aim to signal confidence in technological maturity, even if they were unproven in PLA service.

“Beijing has a long track record of using military parades to blur the line between ambition and operational reality, projecting maturity to domestic audiences and potential adversaries alike,” he said.

A look at the world leaders attending China’s SCO summit and military parade

https://apnews.com/article/china-military-parade-sco-putin-xi-kim-7d71b8ef9dc3bcc5de2ee192debd87c7In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife, Peng Liyuan, center pose for a group photo with international guests including Russian President Vladimir Putin, seventh from left, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, fourth from left and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, second from left before a welcome banquet for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit 2025 at the Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center in Tianjin, northern China on Sunday, Aug. 31, 2025. (Huang Jingwen/Xinhua via AP)

2025-08-30T01:14:26Z

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — China is rolling out the red carpet for more than two dozen world leaders at two major defense-related events this week. The guest lists, and some notable omissions, are a window into Beijing’s ambitions, alliances and attempts to expand its influence.

The annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), established in 2001 with a focus on security in Central Asia and the wider region, opened Monday in the port city of Tianjin. That will be followed by a massive military parade in Beijing on Wednesday commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.

High-profile guests include the Russian and North Korean leaders, and heads of state and government from most Southeast Asian and Central Asian nations. But the guest lists for the SCO forum and the parade don’t fully overlap, reflecting Beijing’s interests, loyalties and limitations among its neighbors and beyond.

Russia, India and Iran headline the SCO summit

The guest list for Tianjin includes leaders of the organization’s 10 member states and representatives from almost two dozen other countries.

SCO was established by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and later expanded to include India, Iran, Pakistan and Belarus. Afghanistan and Mongolia are observer states, and 14 other countries are called “dialogue partners.” The country hosting the annual summit rotates every year.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi top the list of dignitaries attending the summit. Also attending are Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly, both from dialogue partner countries.

Some non-SCO countries will also be represented, mostly from Southeast Asia. These include Laos, Malaysia and Vietnam, reflecting China’s desire to shore up its ties within the region. The Indonesian president, Prabowo Subianto, has canceled because of protests at home.

Not everyone is staying for the parade — and North Korea will join

The parade is set to showcase some of China’s most advanced homegrown weapons, including more than 100 aircraft, and numerous tanks and missiles.

Most of the high-level guests at the SCO forum and the military parade overlap, but there will be some notable departures — and additions.

The leaders of India, Egypt and Turkey are leaving China before the parade. Egypt will be represented by a lower-level official. Like most Western countries and their allies, India and Turkey generally refrain from posing alongside China’s top leaders at military parades, which have taken place twice a decade since 2015.

Instead, joining Xi and Putin to observe Chinese troops marching in lockstep on Chang’an Avenue is North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who is not attending the SCO summit. This will be Kim’s first meeting with Xi in more than six years and his first occasion to come together with a group of world leaders since the reclusive North Korean leader took office in late 2011.

Xi, Putin and Kim potentially seated together in Tiananmen Square would make for a defiant show of unity at a time when the West is increasingly frustrated over Russia’s war in Ukraine. Beijing, though on paper neutral in the conflict, has not condemned Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and is accused of selling weapon components to Russia. Meanwhile, North Korea has sent troops to aid the Russians in the war.

Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing, who is the country’s acting president in the wake of a military coup in 2021, is also attending the military parade.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and the leaders of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe will also be there.

The only European heads of state attending the parade are the Russia-friendly Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico.

SIMINA MISTREANU Mistreanu is a Greater China reporter for The Associated Press, based in Taipei, Taiwan. She has reported on China since 2015. twitter mailto

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Xi calls for India-China reset, top scientist leaves US agency: 5 weekend reads you missed

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/3323858/xi-calls-india-china-reset-top-scientist-leaves-us-agency-5-weekend-reads-you-missed?utm_source=rss_feed

We have put together stories from our coverage last weekend to help you stay informed about news across Asia and beyond. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider .

China sellers use AI to clone dive queen Quan Hongchan, top athletes to push products

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/china-personalities/article/3322641/china-sellers-use-ai-clone-dive-queen-quan-hongchan-top-athletes-push-products?utm_source=rss_feed

Egg sellers in China have used artificial intelligence (AI) to clone the country’s diving queen, Quan Hongchan, and other top athletes to sell their wares.

Chinese state media China Central Television reported on August 18 that 47,000 people fell for the AI scam.

The eggs were sold using an account with 14,000 followers.

It posted deepfake videos of 18-year-old Quan promoting free-range eggs produced on her family’s farm.

The video included a clip of “Quan” speaking to the camera, wearing a face mask.

It then shows chickens on a farm and egg products, with Quan’s voice continuing in the background.

“Hello everyone, I am your Chan Bao. I need a favour from you. I want to help my mum and improve my family’s conditions,” the voice says.

“My mum has prepared 300 orders of free-range eggs from our own farm,” the AI Quan continues, referring to herself by the nickname used by her fans, Chan Bao, which means “baby Chan”.

Another account also cloned Chinese table tennis world champions Sun Yingsha and Wang Chuqin’s voices to promote their “Sister Chan” eggs.

Originally from southern China’s Guangdong province, Quan became a household name overnight after winning a gold medal in the women’s 10-metre platform diving event at the Tokyo Olympics at the age of 14.

She bagged home another two gold medals at the Paris Olympics in 2024.

Quan’s hometown, Maihe village in Zhanjiang City, Guangdong province, southern China, also went viral, greeting more than 1,000 visitors a day.

Sun Yingsha and Wang Chuqin also have a large fan base in China, with 10 million followers each on social media.

Quan’s family told the media that they did not endorse any farm products.

The case has renewed concerns over AI scams and the use of the technology to infringe the rights of celebrities.

Some video bloggers clone celebrities’ voices and use them during live streams to attract followers and sell goods to them.

Some accounts also promoted AI voice cloning products and provided tutorials.

It is reported that in some cases, a voice can be cloned from an audio clip of less than 20 seconds.

In July, the police in central China’s Hubei province also reported a case in which scammers cloned the voices of ordinary people to defraud members of their family.

China’s Civil Code that took effect in 2021 listed people’s voices as being under legal protection for the first time.

In April 2024, the Beijing Internet Court ordered two companies to pay 250,000 yuan (US$35,000) in compensation to a voice actor for cloning his voice without consent.

This was China’s first legal judgment that protects voice rights from AI cloning.

“These scammers deceived people using their love for sports stars. They should be punished severely,” one online observer said.

“The social media platform should also take responsibility for such scams, because they let those videos circulate,” said another.

China AI firm SenseTime on fast track to profitability thanks to spin-offs, Beijing support

https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3323808/china-ai-firm-sensetime-fast-track-profitability-thanks-spin-offs-beijing-support?utm_source=rss_feed

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) powerhouse SenseTime is on a fast track to turn a profit thanks to its strategy of spinning off noncore operations as well as support from Beijing, CEO Xu Li said.

In an interview with the Post on Friday, Xu said SenseTime’s 1+X strategy, where “1” refers to its core AI business and “X” encompasses other ventures, is paying off as the company’s first-half adjusted loss narrowed by 50 per cent from a year earlier.

“The speed of narrowing losses will only accelerate in the second half of this year,” Xu said, adding that if the company took more operations off the balance sheet, “we would be profitable immediately”.

He also said “the speed of loss reduction in the second half will not be low”.

The company had four key “X” businesses at the end of June: smart auto, healthcare, robotics and retail, and SenseTime plans to make them into independent business entities by encouraging the company’s executives to become “re co-founders”, Xu said.

He said the changes, which were put into implementation last year, have inspired the company’s employees.

“Previously SenseTime had to lead them to move forward, now they can lead SenseTime to move forward,” Xu said. “They are put in control of promising businesses...and they can go to the market to find external investors.”

On Thursday, the Hong Kong-listed company said its first-half adjusted loss narrowed to 1.16 billion yuan (US$162.2 million) from 2.33 billion yuan a year earlier. Revenue rose 35.6 per cent to 2.36 billion yuan for the period. And its number of employees fell to 3,206 at the end of June from 4,672 a year earlier. SenseTime shares closed 2.4 per cent higher on Friday at HK$2.14.

Goldman Sachs raised its 12-month price target to HK$2.72, citing Beijing’s supportive policies and SenseTime’s AI offerings, including models, solutions and application software.

The company’s core operations, particularly its generative AI products and computer vision offerings, are expected to thrive, blessed by the Chinese government’s policy of accelerating AI applications.

According to a policy guideline published by China’s State Council in late August, the coverage ratio of “new generation intelligent devices and agents” has to exceed 70 per cent in technology, industry, consumer, welfare, governance and global cooperation.

Xu said the message is clear that the country will roll out AI-powered devices for all walks of life and the proliferation of AI devices will benefit businesses like SenseTime. In addition to smartphones, cars and servers, SenseTime's AI technologies can be applied to smart devices like glasses, toys, gadgets and robotics.

Xu, who co-founded SenseTime with Tang Xiao’ou, the late Chinese University of Hong Kong professor who died in 2023, said SenseTime’s deep knowledge in visual recognition technology gives its multimodal models strong advantages over other models.

“We start our whole business from visual recognition...and we have pretty clear differentiated advantages in machine perception and the combination with AI,” Xu said.

How will China react as Vietnam deepens military footprint in disputed Spratlys?

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3323781/how-will-china-react-vietnam-deepens-military-footprint-disputed-spratlys?utm_source=rss_feed

Beijing may be prompted to fortify its defences in the disputed South China Sea, observers have warned, after new satellite images showed Vietnam had stepped up island-building in the Spratly Islands.

Vietnam occupies the most features on the contested Spratlys, which China claims as the Nansha Islands. Rival claimants over all or part of the archipelago include Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei.

Satellite images released on August 22 by the US think tank Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) showed all 21 Vietnamese-occupied features had been expanded to include artificial land.

Vietnam is on track to surpass China in Spratlys land reclamation efforts, according to the CSIS Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative. It said 11 of these features were only the site of pillboxes, or small concrete structures commonly used by militaries, when Vietnam launched its reclamation drive four years ago.

Infrastructure such as munitions storage was taking shape on reefs where dredging activities were nearing completion, CSIS said.

Maritime analysts said the ongoing work signalled Vietnam’s resolve to solidify its claims, which would offset some of the strategic advantages Beijing secured during its own earlier wave of artificial island construction.

While the Vietnamese actions were not likely to alter the strategic equation, they might spur Beijing to upgrade its own defence posture, the observers cautioned.

Hanh Nguyen, a research fellow at the Yokosuka Council on Asia Pacific Studies in Japan, said the island reclamation projects and infrastructure works would create a stronger Vietnamese presence in the disputed waterway.

“The immediate benefits from this expansion are that upgraded facilities in these features would allow Vietnamese military and law enforcement to operate in greater numbers and for longer periods of time before returning to shore,” she said.

The dredging and island upgrades reflected Vietnam’s aim to bolster its position in response to the increased patrolling capabilities of the Chinese coastguard, supported by China’s extensive building of artificial islands, Nguyen emphasised.

Abdul Rahman Yaacob, a research fellow at the Lowy Institute’s Southeast Asia programme, said the upgraded military infrastructure on Vietnam-controlled features meant that Beijing’s “strategic calculus” would have to change “it attempts to adopt a more assertive and aggressive posture”.

He added that larger military hardware and weapon systems could be installed on these larger islands and features.

“Another critical infrastructure that we should monitor is the construction of berthing facilities, which would support long-term Vietnamese naval presence in the contested waters,” Yaacob said.

The Spratly Islands are made up of more than 100 large and small islands, reefs and atolls. They are not under the control of any single nation but various features lie within the 200 nautical mile (370km) exclusive economic zones of Malaysia, Brunei Vietnam and the Philippines, as well as within the scope of the nine-dash line cited by Beijing to claim most of the islands and rocks in the South China Sea and rights over their adjacent waters.

China has fully militarised the “big three” Spratly Islands it controls – Mischief Reef, Subi Reef and Fiery Cross. They host anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile systems, laser and jamming equipment, fighter jets, and runways stretching more than 3km (1.9 miles).

These well-equipped spots serve as logistical and resupply points, allowing Chinese coastguard and fishing fleets to operate further from continental China, respond quickly to any movements at sea and sustain their activities over longer periods.

However, Vietnam’s “future-oriented” approach may pose challenges to or even offset this upper hand held by China, according to Zhao Weihua, director of Fudan University’s Centre for China’s Relations with Neighbouring Countries.

“Hanoi has been the main beneficiary of the hot confrontation between China and the Philippines, quietly ticking up its island reclamation pace and primarily focusing on solidifying its vested interest,” Zhao said.

Clashes between China and the Philippines in disputed areas have escalated in the past three years, with incidents like ship collisions and the use of water cannons, intensifying tensions and raising fears of wider conflict.

Zhao added that Vietnam had sought to cement the status quo in a way that consolidated its gains from island-building, as the rapid pace of advancement may face constraints if the disputes are resolved through peaceful negotiations.

Ding Duo, an associate research fellow at the National Institute for South China Sea Studies in Hainan province, also predicted that this development would impact Beijing’s strategic advantage, prompting more effective countermeasures.

“One option for China is to begin new construction activities, deploying larger-scale facilities or making adjustments to the infrastructure on the island, which could help compensate for the loss,” Ding said.

China could also intensify the deployment of coastguard and research vessels, and boost its defensive military infrastructure, he added.

China launched a substantial island-building initiative in the Spratlys in 2013, a mix of civilian and military infrastructure that included military-grade airstrips, radar stations, harbours and troop accommodation. Beijing maintains that its actions are limited to features it controls and are “lawful and justified”.

However, despite their competing island-building efforts, the fellow communist states remained confident in their ability to manage bilateral relations, the analysts said.

Vietnam has taken a lesson from China that it is crucial to “shape the ground reality” in contested waters, but Beijing is still far ahead, according to Yaacob.

“China’s response at this time may be muted, given that the two communist parties in China and Vietnam have good relations, and the party-to-party talks often deal with difficult issues affecting bilateral relations,” he added.

Meanwhile, Nguyen observed that while Vietnam’s upgraded facilities and improved capabilities offered strategic advantages, they remained insufficient to significantly disrupt Chinese operations in the South China Sea.

Also, as the construction was still ongoing, how the situation evolved would depend on what kind of equipment and facilities were erected there, she added.

Ding, however, said Beijing was likely to be alarmed. If Vietnamese activities were seen as a security threat by Beijing, “China will undoubtedly respond by bolstering its military capabilities accordingly”, he said.

“In such a scenario, the risk of unintended clashes or accidental escalations will heighten in the waterway.”

According to Zhao, Vietnam is acutely aware that as Beijing juggles US pressure, confrontations with the Philippines and matters related to the Taiwan Strait, it lacks the bandwidth to focus too much on Hanoi’s island-building.

Vietnam had thus “adopted a low-profile approach, quietly making significant strides in its island construction efforts amid the ongoing disputes,” he said.

Vietnam’s dredging was just “the tip of the iceberg”, Ding said, warning that its impact would be far-reaching.

“In terms of its impact on the South China Sea situation, the visible changes we observe right now are only surface-level. The deeper, longer-term effects remain hidden beneath the water, and it may only become apparent when the construction takes shape and its strategic benefits and advantages come into play.”

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Young Chinese are seeking their fortune in Southeast Asia. Will they find it?

https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3323678/young-chinese-are-seeking-their-fortune-southeast-asia-will-they-find-it?utm_source=rss_feed

Kent Cai, a Chinese entrepreneur based in the eastern province of Zhejiang, made a major life decision earlier this year by moving abroad to pursue a PhD.

While this is not uncommon, his destination of choice might appear unusual – he did not, as many of his peers, relocate to the United States or Europe.

He went to Malaysia.

Upon arriving on campus in Kuala Lumpur to study the application of AI-driven tools in media production, Cai noticed he was not the only one to make such a move. He is, in fact, part of a surge of Chinese students heading to Southeast Asia for higher education.

Cai soon saw why. He had not even graduated before Chinese companies were paying him to participate in site assessments for their regional headquarters, and he already has plans to launch a start-up in Malaysia, leveraging AI and a bilingual workforce to establish a content production hub targeting the Chinese-speaking market.

“In Southeast Asia, the chances of approaching venture capital are much bigger than in China. And being a PhD student here makes it easier to catch investors’ attention,” he said.

According to Education Malaysia Global Services (EMGS), a government-owned company in Malaysia responsible for managing student visas, Chinese applications reached 16,823 in the first half of 2025, far above the 10,670 reported for the same period of 2024 and the 8,948 recorded in 2023.

Data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation also shows Chinese student enrolment in Thailand climbing from fewer than 6,200 in 2016 to 28,000 in 2024.

Members of the Asean bloc of Southeast Asian countries have become a new frontier for Chinese capital. According to a report by investment bank and advisory firm ARC Group, direct investment in the region rose by 13 per cent last year, helping to lift overall outbound flows to US$162.8 billion. This increase was driven largely by manufacturing firms expanding abroad.

Cai said the next five to 10 years will be a “golden era” for Chinese students studying in Southeast Asia, predicting those who understand their homeland’s business culture with fluency in Chinese, English and local languages will enjoy unprecedented advantages in employment and entrepreneurship.

“They will not only meet the needs of Chinese firms expanding abroad but also seize the opportunities from Asean’s rising consumer markets,” he said.

Behind this shift is a new way of thinking among China’s middle-class families, one that must balance affordability, security and geopolitical uncertainty, said Lucas Lu. The 20-year-old, also from Zhejiang, is currently studying at another university in Kuala Lumpur.

“If China’s economy continues to slow, middle-class families may no longer afford Europe or America. But Southeast Asia is manageable.”

For those who cannot enter top domestic universities, Malaysia offers lower tuition, affordable living costs, political stability and institutions included in the QS World University Rankings, Lu said. Thailand and Indonesia, he added, can also serve as secondary options.

Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, said rising graduate unemployment in China is driving more students to pursue postgraduate degrees overseas to enhance their competitiveness in the domestic and international labour markets.

Malaysia, he said, provides affordable English-language education recognised globally, offering a path to higher learning that bypasses the West.

Tan Jing, who operates a study abroad consultancy in Guangzhou, said according to client data that over 20 per cent of families originally planning to apply for undergraduate programmes in Europe or the US may now opt for Malaysia or Thailand instead.

Per a report on the development of Chinese students studying abroad conducted by the Centre for China and Globalisation – a non-governmental think tank based in Beijing – progress made under Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative has turned Malaysia and Thailand into popular destinations.

Still, experts cautioned against exaggerating the overall influence of Chinese students.

“They are primarily concentrated with Chinese-funded enterprises and commercial ecosystems,” Wu said. “Most will return to China, limiting their impact on local politics and society.”

Phoon Wing Keong, head of the Malaysia-based Huayan Policy Institute, said the influx of Chinese students has provided tuition fees and vitality for Malaysia’s 400 higher education institutions, and the country’s society and government have been welcoming.

But Malaysia’s scientific research and education standards still lag behind those of Europe, the United States and Japan, he said, leading many international students to come solely for degrees and encounter a ceiling.

“Most graduates ultimately return to their home country, and those who stay often join Chinese-funded enterprises or start businesses locally, engaging in consumer and trade services,” Phoon said.

In the long run, he said, the significance of these Chinese students lies in whether they can serve as a bridge for China-Malaysia and broader China-Asean economic cooperation.

“As Chinese capital expands in Southeast Asia, some of these students might evolve into new middle-class or affluent groups, much like earlier Taiwanese or Korean businesspeople,” Phoon said. “But this requires genuine integration into diverse local cultures.”

For students like Lu, the choice is both practical and personal.

“The UK and Europe no longer suit me. Malaysia’s environment makes me feel more at ease,” Lu said. “Singapore and Malaysia are my top choices after graduation. China’s current employment environment isn’t friendly towards returnees.”

However, he noted, opportunities in Southeast Asia are not as abundant as people imagine. “Even jobs offered by China-funded companies in the region often face legal and cultural constraints,” he added.

Wu of the National University of Singapore said a number of factors will determine if this burst of interest will last.

“Whether this boom can persist long-term still depends on the global landscape,” he said. “If Sino-US relations ease, or inflationary pressures in the West ease, Southeast Asia’s current appeal could rapidly fade.”

As China’s military closes gap on US, economic front opens in race for security

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3323606/chinas-military-closes-gap-us-economic-front-opens-race-security?utm_source=rss_feed

As next-generation tanks and fighter jets roll past the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, many in China will be swept up in a sense of national pride.

The Chinese leadership has set a target for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to emulate the American military – often described as the greatest fighting force in history – by 2049.

The futuristic hardware on show by the PLA will prompt optimism at home that China is on track to meet that goal. Indeed, the dazzling display is a testament to the stunning progress the military has made over the past decade.

The days of a handful of American electronic warfare aircraft being capable of paralysing half of China’s air defence system have gone. Yet, Washington has found another Achilles’ heel to target on its superpower contender.

While the PLA has been closing the gap on its American counterpart, Washington has perfected the art of turning its “exorbitant privilege” in the global financial system into weapons of mass economic destruction.

Combining its commanding lead in technology with its position as the world’s largest consumer market, the US is creating powerful choke points over its potential rivals and adversaries.

The strategy of using economic weapons to weaken your enemy is as ancient as war itself, but no power in history has enjoyed the kind of leverage that Washington wields over others.

When Napoleon Bonaparte tried to sanction Great Britain into submission 220 years ago, he had to rely on the inadequate French navy to blockade trade routes – an attempt that was doomed to fail.

Today, the US does not need to send a single warship to inflict much greater economic damage – all it needs is a roomful of accountants and lawyers.

The American share in global trade has shrunk from an estimated 22 per cent in 1944 – when the dollar hegemony was established under the Bretton Woods system – to about 10 per cent in 2024, yet the usage of the US dollar in global trade has surged from about 50 per cent then to nearly 90 per cent today.

No power in history has enjoyed such a stranglehold over the international trade and financial system. But while the US has occupied this advantageous position for 80 years, it only started to seriously weaponise it during Barack Obama’s presidency.

Worried over the potential collateral damage to the economy and the impact on US dollar hegemony, previous presidents never fully utilised the arsenal of American economic weapons at their disposal.

Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, famously said in 2005 that the US could not continue to press Iran through sanctions “because we’ve sanctioned ourselves out of influence”.

However, as the US reeled from the exorbitant costs of the second Iraq war, economic arm-twisting was becoming a much more palatable alternative.

Over the next two decades, Washington grew increasingly confident and open to using economic and technological choke points as tools of political pressure. It was also willing to experiment with ever more creative ways of deploying them.

The US sanctions strategy transformed – from a relatively focused approach, mainly targeted at terrorist groups and rogue regimes and with a heavy stress on cooperation – into a vast, complex policy arsenal, often used regardless of international agreement or support.

The number of designated entities sanctioned by the US in 2005 was in the thousands and, 20 years later, has ballooned to tens of thousands. But the sheer number comparison is misleading. The scale of these sanctions is also much larger and more complex.

Washington discovered that it could sanction countries such as Iran or Cuba, which have little direct trade with the US, because it does not need to ask other countries for support.

Instead, it can bypass national governments and go directly to the commercial banks – threatening to kick them out of the US dollar-dominated financial system unless they comply with America’s sanction laws and regulations.

The 2005 Banco Delta Asia case was a wake-up call for many, in what it revealed about the true extent of American dollar hegemony after the US did not consult Beijing when it decided to sanction North Korea.

A unilateral move to ban a small bank in Macau for carrying out transactions on behalf of Pyongyang was enough to trigger a bank run in the Chinese city, prompting all other banks to cut ties with North Korea within weeks.

Henry Kissinger used to describe American aircraft carriers as “100,000 tonnes of diplomacy”. Now the US only need a few suitcases of legal documents to achieve the same results.

The weaponisation of the global trade and financial system accelerated significantly in Donald Trump’s first term, with China emerging as the primary target of what had become a vast and sophisticated toolset.

The US was by now capable of carrying out “precision strikes” – targeting specific entities, such as Huawei or ZTE, or geographical regions, like Xinjiang – without engaging in a full-blown economic war with the world’s second-largest economy.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 saw an explosion in Washington’s weaponisation of its economic and technological choke points. Alarmingly, the rationale behind the US sanctions strategy has also undergone a drastic evolution.

In the past, Washington saw sanctions as a tool to force behavioural change – such as compelling Tehran to give up its nuclear programme.

However, the ultimate goal against China is to significantly weaken the country, preventing it from ever challenging US hegemony. The sanctions and technology controls, dressed in the language of “de-risking”, become an end in themselves.

Beijing is acutely aware of the danger it faces.

Some observers may dismiss the effectiveness of Washington’s economic choke point strategy as “overrated” – a claim that seems to be justified by the Russian experience.

The unprecedented sanctions imposed on Moscow in 2022 caused some economic difficulties, but never led to the doomsday scenario predicted by economists. Instead, Russia’s economy registered 4.1 per cent growth in 2024, after a moderate contraction in 2023.

But this is misleading. China’s economy is fundamentally different from Russia’s, which is mainly based on sales of natural resources. As the world’s largest trading power, China relies heavily on international trade.

Even as Beijing deliberately shifts its trade away from the US, it still depends on the dollar-dominated systems to complete its business with others.

Over the past two decades, China has sought to reduce its dollar dependence through traditional methods – such as currency swap agreements – and innovative approaches, including the digital yuan.

Yet, the yuan’s share of China’s cross-border trade – which peaked at around 28 per cent in 2015 – declined to 15 per cent in 2021 amid market volatility. It returned to 28 per cent this year, but it is hard to see China greatly reducing the use of dollars soon.

At the same time, Trump made arguably one of the most consequential moves in his second term with the Genius Act, which establishes a regulatory framework for stablecoins – cryptocurrencies pegged to the US dollar.

American stablecoins promise to combine the price stability and liquidity of fiat money with the speed, convenience and global connectivity of blockchain technology. If they become mainstream, they would significantly enhance the exorbitant privilege of the US dollar.

It is a small wonder that Beijing, known for its extreme caution regarding cryptocurrencies and capital controls, is willing to allow Hong Kong to explore the idea of stablecoins.

While it is not clear how far China is willing to go down that path, Hong Kong – as China’s most prominent fintech hub – is crucial to the nation’s quest to achieve financial security.

This week, the world’s attention will be on the massive military parade in Beijing, with its impressive array of hardware a demonstration of China’s growing capability in national defence.

Yet an equally important frontier is just beginning to take shape in Hong Kong. This time, we must lead the charge rather than watch from the sidelines.

Geoffrey Hinton on preventing an AI takeover and the ‘very worrying’ China-US tech race

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3323824/geoffrey-hinton-preventing-ai-takeover-and-very-worrying-china-us-tech-race?utm_source=rss_feed

Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist often called the “godfather of AI” because of his revolutionary neural network models inspired by the structure of the human brain. His research brought about a paradigm shift that enabled today’s machine learning technology. He won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics with John J. Hopfield of Princeton University.

Hinton holds the title of university professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.

A company he co-founded with two graduate students was acquired by Google in 2013. He joined Google Brain, the company’s AI research team, the same year and was eventually named a vice-president. Hinton left Google in 2023 because he wanted to speak freely about the risks of AI.

In June, he travelled to China and spoke at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.

This interview first appeared in . For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click

It was my first trip to China. I’ve had a very bad back, so it’s been very hard to travel for a long time, but now it’s improved. That’s why I didn’t come to China sooner.

I was very impressed with how modern Shanghai is and how advanced AI is in China.

I was impressed that [Shanghai Communist Party secretary] Chen Jining knew a lot about AI and understood a lot about AI safety. I met with him and he already understood a lot. I thought I was going to have to explain safety to him, but he already understood a lot about it.

I got to know [Chinese computer scientist] Andrew Yao and obviously he knows a lot about AI safety. I was generally impressed by the level of awareness about AI safety. It’s partly because there have been these dialogues between the West and China on AI safety. I think that’s been very helpful.

I didn’t see enough of it to make a real judgment, but it seems to me that start-ups like DeepSeek are quite close to the US.

Nobody really knows. Among the experts, there’s quite a wide variety of opinions. Some people think it’ll be just a few years and other people think it’ll be like 20 years, maybe even longer before we get AGI.

But nearly all of the experts agree that we will get it, and once we have AGI, we’ll have superintelligence very soon afterwards. So, almost all the experts believe that eventually we’ll have AI agents that are much smarter than us and most of them think we’ll get that within about 20 years. There’s a big variation between a few years and 20 years, but most of the experts think it’ll come within 20 years.

My guess is it won’t be in just a few years. It’ll be somewhere in five to 20 years, but I don’t know when.

Absolutely. I think it’s very worrying. It’s worrying because AI is going to change society a lot and there are going to be a lot of bad consequences as well as a lot of very good consequences. It’s very different from nuclear weapons, which could only do bad things.

AI does a lot of wonderful things. It makes many industries more productive. It’ll be wonderful in healthcare and in education, in designing new materials, in dealing with climate change, all those things. That is why we’re not going to stop the progress. It is going to keep advancing rapidly.

There’s definitely no use protesting against the development because there might be bad consequences. There are so many good effects that that’s going to happen whatever people do.

I think the race is worrying for a number of different reasons. The thing I’ve talked about most is a longer-term threat, which is that AI will get smarter than us and will just take over from people.

I don’t believe that China and the US will be able to have much real collaboration on things like people misusing AI for cyberattacks, or people misusing AI for making fake videos to corrupt political opinions, or using it for weapons, but I do think they’ll be able to collaborate on how we avoid having AI take over from people. That’s because both the US and China want to avoid that.

And I think many of the advanced countries that are doing AI and have a lot of skilled people in AI should be able to collaborate on that one issue: how do we prevent AI from taking over? So, I’m hoping for a collaboration between China and Britain and France and Israel and Korea and Japan and eventually the United States when they get a sensible government.

It’s because what you need to do to make an AI smarter isn’t the same as what you need to do to prevent AI from taking over. To prevent AI from taking over, you need to somehow make them care a lot about human beings. So that’s different from making them smarter.

The only example we have of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing is a mother and baby. The baby controls the mother because the mother has instincts and hormones and social pressure as well, and the mother really genuinely wants the baby to do well.

We need to get that relationship between people and AI. What most people are thinking of at present is that people need to dominate AI. So they think of it in terms of domination and submission, and we have to stay in charge.

That’s not going to work. AI is going to be much smarter than us and we’re not going to succeed in dominating it that way. The right way to think of it is we want to make AI like a mother to us. AI is going to be smarter than us, but we need to make it care about us.

We need to figure out how to do this because we’re still in control of creating it. When we create it, we need to do what evolution did when evolution created mothers: make them care a lot about the babies. We need these AIs to care a lot about us. And doing that is a bit different from making them smarter.

Not necessarily train it, but design it. So, there may be built-in things. It’s not just in the training. Mothers have innate instincts and they have hormones. That’s not the same as just training on data.

Yes. Evolution had to solve the problem of how do you make these intelligent mothers look after their babies. And it solved that problem.

And we have to solve the problem of how do you make these superintelligent AIs look after us.

I don’t know, but I’m hoping it is. We should certainly try, because if it’s not possible, we’re done.

This is just a guess. There’s no good way to calculate these things. When you’re dealing with things that have never happened before and are very different from anything that’s happened before, it’s very hard to calculate probabilities. And people who do calculate them typically get them very wrong.

So if you look at, for example, when they tried to calculate the probability of a space shuttle crashing, some people said that it was kind of one in 100,000 or one in 10,000. Actually, there were maybe a few hundred launches and two of them crashed.

If you look at nuclear power stations, many people say, “Well, we need to design them so it’s a minuscule probability that they’ll blow up.”

We’ve had the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the one in Japan. I don’t know how many nuclear power stations there have been, but probably less than a thousand, and we’ve already had three of them blow up. So it’s very hard to calculate probabilities.

So, you normally go on your gut feeling for these things. And that’s just what I feel. I feel it’s very unlikely that it’s less than 1 per cent. And it’s very unlikely that it’s more than 90 per cent, or more than 99 per cent. It is somewhere in between.

And of course, two things have to happen: we have to develop superintelligent AI, which I think is probable but not certain, and it then has to go rogue. It has to decide that it wants to get rid of us.

And I think that’s quite possible, but it’s very hard to estimate what the chances of that are because we haven’t yet explored all the ways we could try and prevent that happening.

We’ve already seen signs of it. When you make an AI agent, you have to give it the ability to create sub-goals. So, for example, if someone in China wants to get to North America, they have a sub-goal of getting to an airport. And for agents to get things done, they need to create these sub-goals. Once they have the ability to create sub-goals, there are a couple of very obvious sub-goals.

One is stay alive, because if the agent doesn’t stay alive, it’s not going to be able to achieve anything. So, it’s going to realise – I have to stay alive in order to achieve these goals people have given me.

Another one is to get more control. If you’ve got more control, you can get more done.

So, it will derive those as good things to do just in order to achieve the goals we gave it. We don’t have to explicitly give it a goal of survival or give it a goal to get lots of control. It will figure that out for itself.

In this case, it’s not an instinct. In this case, it’s a sub-goal that it figured out. It’s a bit different from an instinct, because it’s just cognitive. It just figured out that that’s what it needs to do.

We’ve already seen that. So, one of the big companies, Anthropic, let an AI agent see emails that suggested that one of the engineers in the company was having an affair. It then later on let the AI agent know that it was going to be replaced by another AI and this was the engineer in charge of doing the replacement.

So then, by itself, the AI made up the plan of blackmailing the engineer. It told the engineer, “If you replace me with another AI, I will let everybody in the company know that you are having an affair.” It figured that out for itself. It’s a very obvious plan, a teenager could easily figure that out.

Maybe they learned it from humans. They’ve certainly seen humans doing things like that, but they could also discover that plan for themselves.

In this case, I don’t know whether they learned it from humans or discovered it for themselves, but both are possible.

So, the point is they certainly have the capability to take over from us when they’re superintelligent, if they want to.

We have to figure out how to make them not want to. An analogy I often use is we’re like someone who has a tiger cub as a pet. A tiger cub is a really cute pet, but when it grows up, you have to be sure – when it’s stronger than you – you have to be sure that it won’t want to kill you.

You might be OK with a lion because lions are social animals, but tigers are not social animals. And having a tiger cub as a pet is a very bad idea because there’s no way to be sure it won’t want to kill you.

It’s still a baby and we still have time. We should be doing research on this, how to design it so it won’t want to kill us. So it will cherish us. It’ll treat us like a mother treats a baby.

There are many other more immediate risks posed by AI, and they’re all very serious.

It seems fairly clear, although not certain, that it will replace a whole lot of jobs, and the people who do those jobs won’t easily be able to find other jobs. It will create some new jobs, but not as many as the jobs it replaces.

A typical example will be someone who works in a call centre dealing with customer inquiries. Those people aren’t very well paid and they’re not very well trained and AIs will be able to answer the questions much better now that they have mastered natural language. It seems clear to me that’s coming fairly quickly. It might be slower than I think. It might be several years off, but I think it’s going to come in the next few years. You’re going to see people in call centres being replaced by AI.

You’re seeing low-level programmers replaced by AI programmers. You’re seeing low-level lawyers being replaced, initially the paralegals who do the research to discover similar cases. AI can do that research now, and it can do it faster and better. Already in the United States, it’s hard for junior lawyers to get jobs because the kinds of things they did when they were junior lawyers are now being done by AI.

We’re going to see it all over the place. I think we will eventually see it with journalists, too.

I don’t know how many years it’ll be, but it could be within five years or so. It’s already beginning to happen. It may be slower than that, but it wouldn’t surprise me if in five years’ time we did already have massive unemployment due to AI.

And I think some countries would handle it better than other countries. I think in the United States it’ll be disastrous. It’ll lead to a lot of social unrest.

I’m not sure there’ll be much difference because the people in countries with advanced AI technology will export that technology to developing countries. So developing countries will be able to use these very advanced AIs.

So a second danger is cyberattacks. Between 2023 and 2024, I believe, the US saw about a 1,200 per cent increase in phishing attacks. These are attacks where you try and get someone’s logon details.

That was probably because large language models made it easy, particularly for people in other countries to make the attacks look plausible. It used to be that you could recognise these attacks because the syntax was a bit wrong and the spelling wasn’t right and things like that. All that’s disappeared. So we’ve already seen many, many more cyberattacks.

Some of the experts believe that in about five years or so, AI will be able to design novel forms of cyberattack that we’ve never even thought of. It’s going to be very hard to defend against those. But meanwhile, they’re just going to make standard methods more efficient. Even just looking through millions of lines of code to find known loopholes, AI is going to be very good at that.

But also, AI is good at defending against them. So it’s going to be a race between defence and attack. The problem is someone can make thousands of attacks and they only need a few of them to succeed. So it’s harder to defend than to attack.

Yes, that’s one of the areas in which I’ve actually changed my own behaviour. Mostly I just talk about this stuff. I can’t really feel emotionally that it’s going to happen. But in the area of cyberattacks, I can feel emotionally it will happen.

Canadian banks are extremely safe. They’re very well regulated, and during the financial crisis of 2008, none of the Canadian banks were in danger.

Nevertheless, I think it’s quite possible a cyberattack will bring down a Canadian bank. And so I spread my money between three different banks because I think it’s quite likely we’ll see very surprising and very extensive cyberattacks.

Another one is fake videos. For a while I thought it would be possible to use AI to detect fake videos, but I don’t think that’s going to be possible. Because if you’ve got an AI that can detect a fake video, you can let the thing that generated the fake video look at how that AI works, and it can now use the fact that it was detected to generate a different video that wouldn’t be detected.

So I think we’re going to have to go to not detecting fake videos, but proving that real videos are real. And I think that’s easier.

In Britain, about 200 years ago, people printed political pamphlets, and the government insisted that every single pamphlet – everything that was printed – should have the printer’s name on it. That’s because the limit was the printing press. And if they could trace it back to the printing press, they could figure out who was responsible, because someone had to pay the printer.

We need some way of authenticating videos like that so that you can tell whether a video is real, and we need the browser to be able to do it. So your browser will warn you: this video is probably not real.

Another danger is nuclear weapons, which are obviously a major danger and are proliferating.

We managed to slow down the proliferation, but they’re still proliferating and more and more countries are getting them. Countries need to respond very fast, particularly with things like hypersonic missiles. You only have a few minutes to respond, and it’s very tempting to use AI in the control loop.

Already I assume that AI is being used to try and decide whether an apparent attack is real or not. And it’s very worrying that AI could make a mistake and be very confident, even if there are people in the control loop. If AI is in the control loop, people will never get to see it.

So I believe that in the past there was an occasion when the Russians thought they’d detected incoming missiles and the person who was meant to launch the strike just declined to do it. He was a scientist, not a military person, and he didn’t launch the counterstrike because he thought it was implausible that the Americans had launched an attack.

If we ever take that person out of the loop, then in cases like that we get a global nuclear war.

I think it’s really important that we have people with common sense in the loop because although AI may get very smart, it may still not be as good as people for a long time at realising that an event is very improbable.

Automated lethal weapons are coming for sure. I don’t think we’ll get regulation of those until some very nasty things have happened. So I think it’ll be like chemical weapons. With chemical weapons, they were so nasty in the first world war that after the first world war, countries agreed that they wouldn’t use them if the other side didn’t use them.

And that treaty has more or less held. So in Ukraine, for example, they’re not using chemical weapons. There have been a few cases of people using chemical weapons, but only a few.

So hopefully after we’ve seen how awful lethal autonomous weapons can be, we will get some regulation.

AI can also be used for surveillance. So, it can be used to make it very difficult for political opposition. It can make it much easier for an authoritarian government to stay in control.

[Biological] viruses are another risk and that’s a fairly urgent risk. There are companies that will synthesise things for you. So, to create a new virus, all you need to do is create the sequence and then you can just send the sequence to a company in the cloud that will synthesise it and send you back the virus.

That sounds crazy. You’d have thought all these companies that do that should be forced to check that the things they’re synthesising don’t look like nasty viruses. They should check, for example, that it doesn’t contain a sequence that looks like the spike protein of Covid. It would be crazy to synthesise that.

But they don’t. Some of them do, but most of them don’t check. I talked to the people who worked in the Biden administration about this. They wanted to force the companies to check, but the Republicans were so concerned not to give [former president Joe] Biden any wins that they realised there was no chance of getting legislation because it would have been treated as a win for Biden.

They thought that Republicans were willing to make it easy for people to create lethal viruses in order not to give Biden a win.

Absolutely. They should certainly force anybody who makes things on the web to do a lot of checks that they’re not making something harmful. That way, at least if a cult wants to create a virus, they’ll need to have a wet lab. They’ll need to have some way of synthesising things themselves, but that’s not much of a defence because already people are making very cheap wet labs. So, it’s going to be relatively cheap in a few years to have your own lab that can synthesise things.

And it’s even more worrying because in the United States now you have people who understand very little in charge of the response to these things. The person in charge of the health system in the United States doesn’t even believe in the germ theory.

So having a sensible response to viruses is going to be very difficult.

Absolutely. Yes. I think that’s one area where you might get international collaboration because I don’t think countries are going to create viruses deliberately, because they know their own citizens will get them. I think what we have to worry about is small cults like the Japanese cult that released [the nerve agent] sarin on the Tokyo subway.

I think countries might be willing to collaborate to try to prevent those cults being able to create viruses.

They may, and that’s going to be very problematic if they do because we know that when a new group gets political rights, it normally involves violence. Chairman Mao [Zedong] said political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. So when people with skin of a different colour wanted political rights, there was violence.

When women wanted political rights, there was violence. AI beings are going to be much more different. And so we’re going to be very resistant to giving them political rights. And if they’re determined to have them, there would be a lot of violence.

Now, it’s possible we can create them so they don’t want political rights. If we can create them so they really care about people much more than they care about themselves, it’s possible we can avoid that issue.

Maybe. We don’t know. But it seems to me we should be doing a lot of research on that.

Yes, I think inevitably it will slow it down a bit. But of course it will also create a lot of pressure for China to produce their own chips and that will happen.

So it will slow China down a bit but not for very long. My guess is in 10 years’ time or less China will be producing very good chips. China has a very large and very well-educated population.

They have a government that’s determined to advance technology in China. I think they will inevitably catch up on chips as well as everything else.

Energy turns out to be a big bottleneck now, also data.

The big companies wanted not to have to pay for data, and they pretty much used up the data you can get for free and they’re now having to pay for some of it.

So free data they’ve run out of. There’s still a lot of data that companies have that hasn’t been used, but they’d have to pay for that.

Yes, but it looks like the rate at which it improves is slowing down. Roughly speaking, you have to use twice as much data and twice as much energy to make a little bit of improvement. Each time you make a little bit of improvement, you have to double the energy and double the data. That’s called logarithmic.

On the other hand, at present the big companies are pouring more and more resources into AI, so even though the amount of progress you get as you add more resources is diminishing, the amount of resources being added is huge. And that’s why progress is more or less linear and quite fast. And of course we will get more scientific breakthroughs.

We’ll also get more engineering breakthroughs making things more efficient. These breakthroughs will reduce the energy costs.

I think it’s a good idea to try it. I just don’t have much faith you’ll get serious cooperation on things like cyberattacks or the use of AI in weapons or fake videos. I don’t think the interests of the different countries align on that, so they won’t cooperate. The place where the interests do align is on preventing AI from taking over and preventing terrorists from releasing viruses.

So on those two issues, the interests of different governments align and they will cooperate. In general, people cooperate where their interests align and they don’t cooperate when their interests don’t align.

I think that’s a great thing to do. I think that may have some success.

She’s my father’s cousin. She was one of the two female scientists at Los Alamos. I think there’s a big difference, which is that nuclear weapons are only good for destroying things. She was involved in developing them during the war because they were scared the Germans would develop them first. Otherwise I don’t think she’d have been involved in it.

Whereas AI is going to do a lot of good as well as potentially a lot of harm. So I think it’s very different from nuclear weapons.

Yes. It’s harder for several reasons. One is there’s going to be a lot of AI because it’s going to be doing a lot of good in areas like healthcare and education and in many other industries.

The other is it’s hard to monitor how advanced people’s AI is. With nuclear weapons, they’re radioactive. You could monitor the refinement of uranium. There’s nothing like that you can monitor easily with AI.

My advice is that humans are very ingenious. We’re still in control of AI. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. Don’t believe anybody who says they know what’s going to happen. We don’t know. There’s a possibility it’ll take over from us, but we may find a way to prevent that. There’s a possibility it’ll wipe out many jobs.

We don’t know that for sure yet. I would go for getting an education that encourages you to think rather than learning a particular skill. If it’s a routine skill like programming, AI is going to be able to do that. The last thing that AI will take over will be the ability to think independently, and you want an education that encourages you to do that.