Flash News

TREE NEWS update: Alibaba’s Qwen app launched a Health Records feature on October 8, allowing users, with authorization, to connect health device data from smartwatches and continuous glucose monitors and to log medical and allergy history. The feature provides personalized health analysis and health summary push notifications.

TREE NEWS update: Alibaba Group chairman Joe Tsai said Chinese companies are firmly committed to open-source AI, speaking on October 7 Beijing time at the Wave by Vento 2026 technology and investment event in Turin, Italy. Tsai discussed AI’s application value, Alibaba’s full-stack AI buildout and the outlook for the technology, calling productivity gains for knowledge workers the most certain use case.

TREE NEWS update: Guangdong Provincial Party Secretary Huang Kunming called on Shenzhen to accelerate the development of its artificial intelligence and robotics industries during a research visit to the city’s port hubs and platform enterprises. Huang said the fourth quarter is a critical period for meeting annual targets and urged Shenzhen to step up as a major economic city, boost investment and consumption, and consolidate the economy’s positive momentum.

TREE NEWS update: Biren Technology announced a placement agreement to issue 130 million new H shares at HK$31.08 apiece to no fewer than six placees, for expected gross proceeds of HK$4.04 billion. The company said the funds will mainly go toward supply-chain procurement for its next-generation products and commercialization efforts.

TREE NEWS update: Shanghai added 13 generative AI services to its registry of completed filings, bringing the city’s cumulative total to 253 registered generative AI services. The update was announced by the Shanghai cyberspace administration. China requires generative AI providers to complete registration before offering services to the public.

TREE NEWS reports: Global foundry 2.0 market revenue rose 25% year over year and 11% quarter over quarter to $96.6 billion in the second quarter of 2026, Counterpoint Research said in its foundry supply tracker. Growth accelerated from the prior quarter on sustained AI GPU demand and expanding AI infrastructure, including custom ASICs, server CPUs, networking chips and power management ICs.

TREE NEWS update: Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Beijing “consistently opposes and cracks down on hacking activities in accordance with the law” and rejects the spread of disinformation for political purposes, responding to a Reuters question about a cybersecurity firm report that an unidentified actor used a Chinese-developed AI tool with Chinese-language prompts to attack South Korean financial institutions. Mao said she was unaware of the specific case and called for stronger international cooperation and new rules on AI and cybersecurity.

TREE NEWS update: Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on October 8 that she was unaware of CrowdStrike’s allegation that Chinese individuals and entities used AI tools to attack South Korean financial institutions. Mao said China opposes and lawfully cracks down on hacking, and rejects the spreading of disinformation for political purposes, adding that AI deeply affects cybersecurity and the international community should strengthen cooperation and set new rules.

TREE NEWS update: Tencent’s WorkBuddy launched a standalone file browser that opens local files in a dedicated view-and-edit window, placing the document on the left and AI on the right for summarizing, analyzing, editing and polishing the open file. Users can set WorkBuddy as the default handler so it appears on double-click, and the browser only reads files the user actively opens or adds rather than scanning the disk.

TREE NEWS update: Goldman Sachs executive Kevin Sneader said new finance hires now manage AI agents from day one, skipping the years of work previous generations needed before managing people. Speaking Thursday at the Milken Institute Asia Summit in Singapore, the head of Goldman’s Asia-Pacific ex-Japan business said reallocating today’s middle managers will be a generational challenge across many fields.

TREE NEWS update: BYD executive vice president Li Ke said Nvidia remains a very important chip partner for the Chinese automaker. The statement affirms the two companies’ continued collaboration on automotive semiconductors, with no further details provided.

TREE NEWS reports: The ChiNext Index fell more than 3% in afternoon trading, while the Shanghai Composite slipped 0.75%. Semiconductor and CPO — co-packaged optics — AI hardware stocks led the decline, with more than 3,600 individual stocks across the market trading lower.

TREE NEWS update: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin warned the crypto industry against rushing wallet migrations, saying risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated mathematics should be taken seriously. In a message titled “Don’t rush anything,” he cautioned that hasty moves carry their own dangers as growing AI capabilities threaten current cryptographic standards.

TREE NEWS update: Butterfly Effect, the parent company of AI agent Manus, has closed a new funding round of more than $500 million. The round is the largest single deal in the roundup, which also covered declines in Chinese and Asian equities, a 6060亿元 PBOC reverse repo operation and 11.65亿元 in National Day box office receipts.

TREE NEWS reports: Alphabet-owned Isomorphic Labs is in talks to raise funding at a valuation of at least $40 billion. No round size, investor names or timeline were disclosed. The AI drug-discovery unit sits under Google’s parent company Alphabet.

TREE NEWS update: Manus has completed a new funding round of more than $500 million, led by IDG Capital, with Sequoia China and ZhenFund continuing as backers. The round exceeds half a billion dollars, though no valuation or post-money figure was disclosed. Manus is the company behind the general-purpose AI agent product of the same name.

TREE NEWS update: Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake called on the crypto industry to plan a gradual move of assets to addresses that have never signed a transaction, warning that AI-driven math advances could break ECDSA before quantum computers mature. Vitalik Buterin endorsed holding funds in fresh addresses but advised against rushed migration, and said lattice-based schemes such as ML-DSA and FHE may also face AI-discovered shortcuts.

TREE NEWS update: XPENG officially named its Robotaxi business ‘XPENG YOYO’ on October 8, launching a dedicated product page and a WeChat mini-program for autonomous-ride bookings. The company will expand its closed beta by issuing invitation codes. XPENG said the move marks its Robotaxi business advancing from technical validation into a new phase of user access and commercialization.

TREE NEWS reports: Ethereum researchers, backed by Vitalik Buterin, are urging crypto users to move funds to fresh addresses in an orderly migration, warning that rapid advances in AI math could threaten private-key security sooner than quantum computers. The guidance, described as a shift to “bunker mode,” is aimed at reducing exposure of existing wallets to emerging cryptographic attacks.

TREE NEWS update: Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, which it calls its cheapest, fastest and most capable small model, targeting high-volume uses such as summarization, context compression, database queries, classification, sub-agents, real-time customer service and browser operation. Haiku 5.5 is the first Haiku model with adjustable reasoning effort. Average running costs are about 75% below Haiku 4.5, with input and output priced at $0.10 and $0.50 per million tokens for prompts under 100,000 tokens.