China captured the global lead in open-weight AI development during 2025, Stanford analysis shows
Chinese open-weight AI is conquering the world: According to a Stanford analysis, models from China have already overtaken their US counterparts in distribution and adoption. But with success come growing geopolitical and security risks.
Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman is going to trial. A California federal judge announced Wednesday that she intends to reject attempts by Altman's lawyers to dismiss the case. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said during the hearing in Oakland that there is ample evidence to proceed.
Musk accuses OpenAI of deceiving him about its shift from a nonprofit to a for-profit structure. He says he donated $38 million to the company. The trial is scheduled for March. OpenAI denies the allegations, calling the lawsuit baseless and part of ongoing harassment by Musk.
The company claims Musk was informed about its profit plans back in 2018. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and left the company in 2018.
Shares of Chinese AI startup Minimax doubled in value during their Hong Kong Stock Exchange debut. The stock closed up 109 percent at 345 Hong Kong dollars, CNBC reports. Minimax significantly outperformed local rival Zhipu AI, whose shares gained just 13 percent the day before. The IPO raised around $620 million for Minimax.
The company, backed by Alibaba and Tencent, develops language models for chatbots and video generation. Despite having over 200 million users and revenue jumping to $53.4 million, Minimax reported a $512 million loss for the first nine months of 2025. The company says it's funneling earnings into research. Meanwhile, Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros have been suing Minimax for copyright infringement since September 2025.
The European Commission has ordered Elon Musk's platform X to preserve all internal documents and data related to the AI chatbot Grok through the end of 2026. A Commission spokesperson confirmed the order to Reuters on Thursday. The directive expands on a preservation requirement sent to X last year that focused on algorithms and the spread of illegal content.
The order stems from the Commission's concerns about regulatory compliance. However, the measure does not mean a new formal investigation under the Digital Services Act (DSA) has been opened.
Elon Musk's platform X has emerged as the primary distribution hub for AI-generated images that digitally undress people without their consent.
Within just 24 hours, the chatbot generated roughly 6,700 images per hour that were flagged as sexually suggestive or explicit, according to Genevieve Oh, a researcher specializing in social media and deepfakes, who spoke with Bloomberg.
Oh's analysis reveals the staggering scale of abuse involving Elon Musk's AI model Grok on the X platform. While specialized websites for this type of content averaged only 79 new images per hour, Grok's output dwarfed that figure many times over. Users are deliberately using the chatbot to digitally undress uploaded photos of people - including children - through simple text commands. Despite xAI's promises to add safety measures after the fact, the case highlights an alarming normalization of sexualized violence enabled by generative AI.
China's Ministry of Commerce is looking into whether Meta's purchase of AI startup Manus, valued at $2 billion or more, violated export control rules. According to the Financial Times, authorities want to know if the relocation of Manus employees and technology to Singapore, followed by the sale to Meta, should have required an export license.
The company's core team relocated to Singapore in the summer of 2025 to distance itself from China-related geopolitical risks. The Beijing offices have sat empty ever since. All three founders, Red Xiao, Peak Ji, and Tao Zhang, also moved from China to Singapore.
The relocation came after a $75 million funding round led by US firm Benchmark. That investment triggered its own set of questions, but from the opposite direction. The US Treasury Department investigated whether American money was flowing into a Chinese AI company without proper authorization. Meta says there were no longer any Chinese ownership stakes in Manus by the time the deal closed. The founders had previously turned down investment offers from local Chinese government entities.
More than five percent of all messages sent through ChatGPT worldwide deal with health topics. According to a report OpenAI shared exclusively with Axios, 40 million Americans use the chatbot daily for medical questions. Users ask it to explain medical bills, compare insurance plans, or check symptoms, often because they can't get in to see a doctor right away. OpenAI spotted this trend early and marketed GPT-5 as particularly capable for these kinds of use cases.
The report shows OpenAI now handles nearly two million insurance-related questions per week. The surge came after the Trump administration let long-standing health insurance subsidies expire at the start of the new year.
Almost 90 percent of ChatGPT's roughly 900 million weekly users live outside the USA and Canada, according to The Information, citing data from tracking platform Sensor Tower. This creates a challenge for OpenAI's planned advertising business, since international users generate far less revenue. At Pinterest, for example, the average revenue per user in the USA is $7.64, compared to just 21 cents elsewhere.
India and Brazil rank among the largest ChatGPT markets alongside the USA, Japan, and France. Only about five percent of users pay for subscriptions. For emerging markets like India, OpenAI offers the cheaper "ChatGPT Go" plan at around $5 per month.
