China's Cyberspace Administration (CAC) has opened an investigation into DeepSeek and Moonshot AI over allegations the two companies routed Chinese users' requests through Anthropic's Claude to US servers without consent — a mirror image of Anthropic's February report accusing seven Chinese labs of 'illicit distillation.' Independent researchers monitoring domain-scanning traffic found an 'agent fleet' (not a swarm) running on Tencent's infrastructure, querying Alibaba's Amap mapping service for routes to parks, zoos, and hospitals, seemingly to sidestep Alibaba's API access rules. Nikkei and SCMP report China shipped at least 16 new models in September alone, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's calls to slow down going completely unheeded.
After three giants ended their internal 'horse racing' and consolidated brands in late July/early August, this week brought the payoff: ByteDance formally launched Doubao Work on 8/25, deeply integrating Feishu's identity and permission system -- Bloomberg framed it as directly challenging Tencent. Alibaba opened QwenWork International in public beta on 8/26, targeting Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America rather than competing head-on with Western incumbents. Tencent's WorkBuddy takes a 'collect rent regardless of which model wins' aggregator approach, plugging Hy3, DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, and MiniMax into one workspace. The same week, Zhipu (Z.ai) open-sourced GLM-5.3-Flash (320B-A18B, MIT-licensed, running on domestic chips, priced at one-tenth of GLM-5.2), intensifying the model-layer price war and making the platform-layer aggregation strategy even more profitable.
DeepSeek open-sourced DeepSeek Harness, an MIT-licensed Agent execution framework, yet in the same week hiked peak-hour API prices by up to 1,100%. Alibaba open-sourced flagship weights Qwen3.8 Max (topping LongBench v2) and Qwen3.8-27B, a laptop-runnable model, plus context infrastructure MyContext. Zhipu's GLM-5.3 showed 'emergent' cybersecurity capabilities -- scoring higher than Anthropic's reference model on vulnerability discovery benchmark CyberGym -- prompting Zhipu to delay its planned open-source release. ByteDance and Tencent each received approval to import roughly 10,000 NVIDIA H200 chips, signaling marginal easing of chip export controls.