An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Concerned that artificial intelligence could threaten Communist Party rule, Beijing is taking extraordinary steps to keep it under control. Although China's government sees AI as crucial to the country's economic and military future, regulations and recent purges of online content show it also fears AI could destabilize society. Chatbots pose a particular problem: Their ability to think for themselves could generate responses that spur people to question party rule.

In November, Beijing formalized rules it has been working on with AI companies to ensure their chatbots are trained on data filtered for politically sensitive content, and that they can pass an ideological test before going public. All AI-generated texts, videos and images must be explicitly labeled and traceable, making it easier to track and punish anyone spreading undesirable content. Authorities recently said they removed 960,000 pieces of what they regarded as illegal or harmful AI-generated content during three months of an enforcement campaign. Authorities have officially classified AI as a major potential threat, adding it alongside earthquakes and epidemics to its National Emergency Response Plan.

Chinese authorities don't want to regulate too much, people familiar with the government's thinking said. Doing so could extinguish innovation and condemn China to second-tier status in the global AI race behind the U.S., which is taking a more hands-off approach toward policing AI. But Beijing also can't afford to let AI run amok. Chinese leader Xi Jinping said earlier this year that AI brought "unprecedented risks," according to state media. A lieutenant called AI without safety like driving on a highway without brakes. There are signs that China is, for now, finding a way to thread the needle.

Chinese models are scoring well in international rankings, both overall and in specific areas such as computer coding, even as they censor responses about the Tiananmen Square massacre, human-rights concerns and other sensitive topics. Major American AI models are for the most part unavailable in China. It could become harder for DeepSeek and other Chinese models to keep up with U.S. models as AI systems become more sophisticated. Researchers outside of China who have reviewed both Chinese and American models also say that China's regulatory approach has some benefits: Its chatbots are often safer by some metrics, with less violence and pornography, and are less likely to steer people toward self-harm. "The Communist Party's top priority has always been regulating political content, but there are people in the system who deeply care about the other social impacts of AI, especially on children," said Matt Sheehan, who studies Chinese AI at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank. "That may lead models to produce less dangerous content on certain dimensions."

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Amazon finds itself caught between two competing impulses as AI shopping agents from OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and Microsoft mushroom across the e-commerce space -- block them to protect its dominant position, or partner with them to avoid being left behind. The company has largely played defense so far. Amazon recently updated its website code to block external AI agents from crawling it, and as of this week had blocked 47 bots including those from all major AI companies. In November, Amazon sued Perplexity over an agent in the startup's Comet browser that can make purchases on users' behalf, alleging the company concealed its agents to continue scraping Amazon's site. But Amazon's stance appears to be shifting, CNBC reports.

CEO Andy Jassy said on an October earnings call that Amazon expects to partner with third-party agents and has engaged in conversations with some providers. The company is now hiring a corporate development leader to forge strategic partnerships in "agentic commerce." Amazon is also investing in its own tools. The company launched shopping chatbot Rufus last February and has been testing an agent called Buy For Me that can purchase products from other sites within Amazon's app.

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Italy's antitrust regulator Italian Competition Authority ordered Meta to suspend a policy that blocks rival AI chatbots from using WhatsApp's business APIs, citing potential abuse of market dominance. "Meta's conduct appears to constitute an abuse, since it may limit production, market access, or technical developments in the AI Chatbot services market, to the detriment of consumers," the Authority wrote. "Moreover, while the investigation is ongoing, Meta's conduct may cause serious and irreparable harm to competition in the affected market, undermining contestability." TechCrunch reports: The AGCM in November had broadened the scope of an existing investigation into Meta, after the company changed its business API policy in October to ban general-purpose chatbots from being offered on the chat app via the API. Meta has argued that its API isn't designed to be a platform for the distribution of chatbots and that people have more avenues beyond WhatsApp to use AI bots from other companies. The policy change, which goes into effect in January, would affect the availability of AI chatbots from the likes of OpenAI, Perplexity, and Poke on the app.

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Microsoft has denied any plans to rewrite Windows 11 using AI and Rust after a LinkedIn post from one of its top-level engineers sparked a wave of online backlash by claiming the company's goal was to "eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030."

Galen Hunt, a principal software engineer responsible for several large-scale research projects at Microsoft, made the claim in what was originally a hiring post for his team. His original wording described a "North Star" of "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code" and outlined a strategy to "combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases." The repeated use of "our" in the post led many to interpret it as an official company direction rather than a personal research ambition.

Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft's head of communications, told Windows Latest that the company has no such plans. Hunt subsequently edited his LinkedIn post to clarify that "Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI" and that his team's work is a research project focused on building technology to enable language-to-language migration. He characterized the reaction as "speculative reading between the lines."

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