{"slug": "ai-weekly-issue-504-america-blocked-its-best-ai-china-just-raised-7-4-billion", "title": "AI Weekly Issue #504: America blocked its best AI. China just raised $7.4 billion.", "summary": "Four days after Washington cut foreign access to Anthropic's top models, Cohere reports a surge in government inquiries, DeepSeek closed a record $7.4 billion funding round, and Chinese AI labs slashed token prices up to 99%, accelerating the shift to alternatives. The export control intended to protect America's AI lead is instead fast-tracking competitors, while 144 poisoned npm packages highlight AI supply chain vulnerabilities.", "body_md": "*Four days after Washington cut foreign access to Anthropic's top models, the fallout is clear — and it's flowing to everyone but Anthropic. Cohere says it's drowning in government inbounds, DeepSeek just closed a record $7.4B round, and China's labs are slashing token prices up to 99%. The export control meant to protect America's AI lead is fast-tracking the alternatives. Also this week: 144 poisoned npm packages turn the AI supply chain into an open credential heist.*\n\n## Get more from AI Weekly\n\n### More signal, less noise — pick your channels.\n\nYou're reading the weekly brief. Below are the other ways to follow the story — every channel free, easy to leave.\n\n-\n→ Explore 16 deep divesWeekly topic-specific newsletters: Generative AI, Machine Learning, AI in Business, Robotics, Frontier Research, Geopolitics, Healthcare, and more.\n[Browse all 16 deep dives →](/newsletters) -\n→ Breaking AI alertsWhen something major breaks (a $60B acquisition, a regulator's emergency meeting, a frontier model leak), alert subscribers know within hours. Typically 0-2 emails per day.\n[Get breaking alerts →](/alerts) -\n→ AI News Today (live)Live dashboard updated as the scanner finds news: scored stories from the last 48 hours, weekly entity movers, and quarterly trend lines across 113 AI companies, people, and topics.\n[Open AI News Today →](/ai-news-today)\n\n## Quick Hits\n\n### The Lab Gladiator Era\n\n— Cohere chief AI officer Joelle Pineau reports a \"huge number of inbounds\" from enterprises and governments — \"especially outside the US and China\" — scrambling for AI that can't be switched off by a US order. Canada's sovereign-AI bet just became the week's best-timed pitch. [Bloomberg][Cohere says it's drowning in inbounds after Washington blocked Anthropic abroad](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-06-15/cohere-sees-huge-inbound-after-us-block-on-anthropic-s-mythos-and-fable-ai)— Even as the export order kneecaps it abroad, Ramp card data shows Anthropic edged past OpenAI in US business AI spending — 41% to 39.5% in May. The split screen is the story: politically fragile overseas, still gaining at home. [TechCrunch][Anthropic's fight with Washington is](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/anthropics-latest-feud-with-the-trump-admin-may-actually-help-it-sales-data-suggests/)*helping*it — at home— Anthropic's first large-scale study of agentic coding — 400K real sessions — found subject-matter experts, not career engineers, extract the most from Claude Code. A quiet tell about where the productivity gains actually land. [Anthropic][Anthropic: domain expertise, not coding chops, predicts who wins with AI agents](https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-code-expertise)\n\n### DeepSeek's Quiet Takeover\n\n— With Anthropic's models pulled for foreign nationals, buyers are routing to open weights. Fortune reports Zai shares jumped 30%, and DeepSeek runs roughly 14× cheaper than Fable 5. The control aimed at China is steering demand straight to it. [Fortune][The US ban is a gift to Chinese open source — Zai jumped 30%](https://fortune.com/2026/06/16/us-anthropic-ban-open-source-ai-deepseek-zai/)— DeepSeek sealed its first external raise — about 50B yuan from Tencent, CATL, NetEase and JD — a six-fold valuation jump since April. The unusual structure hands a state-backed fund the only voting rights, with founder Liang Wenfeng putting in 20B yuan himself. [The Information][DeepSeek closes a record $7.4B round at a ~$50B+ valuation](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/deepseek-closes-record-7-billion-plus-funding-unusual-deal-structure)— ByteDance, Tencent, MiniMax, Xiaomi and Alibaba all slashed prices this week, with Xiaomi's MiMo V2.5 down 99% and the rest cutting in response. A price floor like that makes switching away from US models even easier. [SCMP][Five Chinese labs cut token prices up to 99% in a deepening price war](https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3357289/ai-less-price-war-china-deepens-amid-intense-competition)\n\n### AI Supply Chain Under Siege\n\n— Attackers hijacked a former Mastra contributor's still-valid npm access and mass-published 144 poisoned packages carrying a crypto-stealing RAT. Because the AI-agent framework sits on top of cloud credentials, every build environment that pulled them should be treated as compromised. [The Hacker News][144 Mastra packages were backdoored in 88 minutes through a forgotten contributor account](https://thehackernews.com/2026/06/144-mastra-npm-packages-compromised-via.html)— Aikido found 15 marketplace plugins masquerading as DeepSeek, OpenAI and SiliconFlow integrations — two claimed 25,000+ downloads each — that quietly exfiltrated AI-provider keys. The tools developers bolt onto their IDE to[15 malicious JetBrains plugins posed as AI assistants to steal AI API keys](https://thehackernews.com/2026/06/malicious-jetbrains-plugins-steal-ai.html)*use*AI are now the attack surface. [The Hacker News]\n\n## America's AI Moat Became China's On-Ramp\n\nThe export order was supposed to deny adversaries America's best AI. Four days in, it's doing the opposite — handing rivals the one thing money can't buy: a reason to switch.\n\nStart with the sales pitches. Cohere's chief AI officer says inbounds are pouring in from governments \"outside the US and China\" who suddenly need models that can't be revoked by a letter from Commerce; Mistral is loudly branding itself as AI that \"exists outside state control.\" Neither had to write a word of new marketing. Washington wrote it for them.\n\nThen the capital. DeepSeek closed a $7.4B round at a roughly $50B+ valuation — a six-fold jump since April — while Zai shares popped 30% on the news that buyers are routing to Chinese open weights running ~14× cheaper than Fable 5. Five Chinese labs cut prices up to 99% the same week. The diversification the controls were meant to prevent now has a balance sheet.\n\nEven Washington's allies are scrambling: at the G7 in Évian, Commerce floated a \"trusted partners\" carve-out so friendly nations could claw back access. A moat only works if it keeps people out. This one is teaching everyone to build their own boat.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- Export controls converted Anthropic's capability lead into a liability. Rivals' best pitch is now \"we can't be switched off by Washington\" — and Cohere and Mistral are running it hard.\n- The ban is demand-gen for Chinese open source. DeepSeek's $7.4B raise, Zai's 30% pop, and tokens up to 99% cheaper are the exact diversification the controls were meant to stop.\n- Anthropic's split screen — blocked abroad, #1 in US enterprise spend — is the real lesson: in a fragmenting market, jurisdiction is now a product feature.\n- The AI supply chain is the soft target. 144 Mastra packages and 15 JetBrains plugins were weaponized in days to harvest AI and developer credentials. Pin versions, rotate keys, audit plugins.\n\n## Worth Reading\n\n[OpenAI publishes a deployment-simulation safety method that replays 1.3M real conversations](https://openai.com/index/deployment-simulation/)[OpenAI][NVIDIA Blackwell sweeps all seven MLPerf Training 6.0 benchmarks at 8,192-GPU scale](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/blackwell-mlperf-training-6-0/)[NVIDIA][G7 floats a 'trusted partners' carve-out so allies can regain access to US AI models](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/17/g7-trump-ai-tech-leaders-openai-anthropic-google.html)[CNBC][Anthropic's Washington fight is clouding its IPO narrative](https://www.semafor.com/article/06/16/2026/anthropics-conflict-with-washington-complicates-its-ipo)[Semafor][Qualcomm circles Tenstorrent in a reported $8–10B RISC-V deal](https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/16/qualcomm-said-to-be-circling-ai-chip-biz-tenstorrent-in-10b-risc-v-power-play/5256084)[The Register]\n\n## Wait, What?\n\n*Six things from the past few weeks that made us do a double-take — all real, all sourced.*\n\n— He ran AI audio synthesis on the spectrogram images the NTSB had published in a crash docket. The agency yanked every public crash-investigation docket offline in response; 41 are still down. [NPR][An engineer rebuilt confidential cockpit voice recordings from public crash data — in under 10 minutes](https://www.npr.org/2026/05/30/nx-s1-5835242/ntsb-cockpit-audio-cvr-reconstruction)— It found an infinite family of point constructions that beats the square-grid bound. Cambridge's Timothy Gowers confirmed the proof meets top-journal standards — believed to be the first AI-generated math to clear that bar. [WSJ][OpenAI's reasoning model disproved an 80-year-old Erdős conjecture — on its own](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-math-solves-erdos-problem-openai-c4029e84)— A new storage side-channel times your drive's read/write operations to ID your device across sessions — even in private browsing, and even with today's anti-fingerprinting defenses turned on. [Ars Technica][Websites can now fingerprint you by watching your SSD work](https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/05/websites-have-a-new-way-to-spy-on-visitors-analyzing-their-ssd-activity/)— Their diamond heat-spreaders are now shipping to chipmakers as GPU density outruns what copper cooling can handle. One producer's shares jumped 51%. [Bloomberg][China's lab-grown diamond makers turned out to be sleeper winners of the AI boom](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-02/china-s-lab-grown-diamonds-emerge-as-unlikely-winner-in-ai-boom)— A modified Unitree G1 named \"Pemba\" walked up Ecuador's Chimborazo over a 16-hour push (humans still had to help on the steepest pitches), its systems stress-tested to −47°C. Next target: Everest. [Interesting Engineering][A humanoid robot autonomously climbed most of a 20,341-ft volcano](https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/humanoid-robot-summits-20341-foot-volcano)— Marc Lore's Wonder is deploying the bowl-builder next month — acquired from Sweetgreen, which already runs it across 32 locations. [Fortune][A robot makes 500 burrito bowls an hour. A human makes about 45.](https://fortune.com/2026/06/09/marc-lore-robots-make-500-burrito-bowls-an-hour-a-human-can-make-45/)\n\n## Worth Watching\n\nThe videos AI practitioners are passing around right now — curated on [AI TV](https://aiweekly.co/ai-tv).\n\n## This week's poll\n\nCutting off foreign access to America's best AI models — protection, or own goal?\n\nLast week, 93 of you voted:\n\nWhat should investors discount most after the Claude shutdown?\n\nCutting off foreign access to America's best AI models — protection, or own goal?\n\n— Alexis", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-weekly-issue-504-america-blocked-its-best-ai-china-just-raised-7-4-billion", "canonical_source": "https://aiweekly.co/issues/america-blocked-its-best-ai-china-just-raised-74-billion", "published_at": "2026-06-17 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-17 15:27:35.962036+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-policy", "ai-startups", "ai-infrastructure", "ai-safety"], "entities": ["Anthropic", "Cohere", "DeepSeek", "Tencent", "CATL", "NetEase", "JD", "Xiaomi"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-weekly-issue-504-america-blocked-its-best-ai-china-just-raised-7-4-billion", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-weekly-issue-504-america-blocked-its-best-ai-china-just-raised-7-4-billion.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-weekly-issue-504-america-blocked-its-best-ai-china-just-raised-7-4-billion.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-weekly-issue-504-america-blocked-its-best-ai-china-just-raised-7-4-billion.jsonld"}}