Tether buys out SoftBank's ~26% stake in bitcoin treasury company Twenty One Capital, taking its stake to ~71%; SoftBank's stake was worth ~$679M (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg)

A look at China's bid to build an alternative global order in AI by making open models widely available and training people in developing countries to use them (Financial Times)

China's market regulator says it had fined and confiscated ~$770M from Trip.com for abusing its dominant position in the domestic online hotel-booking market (Reuters)

Several universities including Yale, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Waterloo have restricted or disabled their use of AI detectors over accuracy concerns (Ima Jackson-Obot/Financial Times)

Sources: DeepSeek told investors it is suspending its second funding round after remarks attributed to Liang Wenfeng on US-China AI competition went viral (Pei Li/Bloomberg)

Sources: OpenAI and Anthropic quietly lobby Washington regulators to restrict open-source AI models, even as Sam Altman publicly says he supports open source AI (New York Times)

SK Group Chair Chey Tae Won says Anthropic has asked SK Hynix for supplies to make its own chips, calling it remarkable that an AI developer has chip ambitions (Ian King/Bloomberg)