Category: Tech News Feed

WASHINGTON (AP) — Byron Donalds, a Republican congressman running for Florida governor, on Monday announced legislation intended to prevent artificial intelligence data centers from driving up utility costs, the latest sign of a political backlash over the new technology.

The proposal, if passed by Congress, would require data centers to obtain all their electricity and water needs from private sources, rather than the power grid or public water systems. The idea aligns with an earlier, voluntary initiative from President Donald Trump.

“If you talk to these guys who are building these data centers, if it means that they have to pick up the utility costs, they’re more than willing to do it,” Donalds said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It’s in their interest to make sure that we can construct these centers, and I think the number one way you address and mitigate the concerns that people are having is to just ensure their utility bills aren’t going up in the process.”

Donalds’ proposal is noteworthy coming from a candidate backed by pro-AI political action committees and Trump. The legislation comes during a rapid nationwide buildout of data centers to match growing demand for artificial intelligence systems. Major technology firms at the heart of the AI boom have quickly become some of the world’s most valuable and watched companies, while the Trump administration has aligned itself with the industry’s major players.

Several major tech companies developing AI infrastructure have committed to agreements with the Trump administration to cover the expenses of building new power sources rather than shifting the burden to residential households. But given the expected increase in demand, it’s unclear if the voluntary agreement is legally enforceable.

The furious pace of construction and high stakes of the technology have raised concerns among many Americans. In Florida, more than 20 counties and municipalities have voted to reject the construction of major data centers, while others have banned their construction for at least a year. Residents and local leaders often cite concerns over increased utility bills, disruption of local communities and environmental damage as major reasons for the pauses.

“These companies have been a step behind and didn’t realize how quickly the ground was shifting under their feet,” said Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist. Gorman said that progressive climate activists and conservative populists have both seized on the data center issue, requiring tech firms to “tell a better story” and address concerns from across the political spectrum.

“This is a full-court effort here,” Gorman said. “If you don’t tell that story, you’re going to have it mandated on you from lawmakers of both parties.”

Donalds is running to succeed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a fellow Republican who in May signed legislation that required large-scale data centers to pay their own energy and water costs entirely. Donalds, should he be elected governor, said he’d focus on improving efficiency among data centers and moving the facilities away from population centers.

“We just want to make sure that if they do get built, they’re being built efficiently while protecting ratepayers and protecting Florida’s water,” Donalds said. “The real public policy question for the country and for states is how are we going to generate baseload power for future energy demands, whether it’s for hyperscale data centers or for anything else.”

James Fishback, a far-right Republican candidate for governor, has made opposition to data centers a center of his primary challenge to Donalds. And David Jolly, a former congressman and the leading Democratic gubernatorial candidate, this month called for a moratorium on the construction of data centers.

Travis Fisher, a fellow at the Cato Institute, said public companies usually push for the best deals to access public utilities. He said any willingness to pick up a bigger tab for energy and water reflects the political pressure facing tech firms.

“They are very afraid that they’re going to, I’d say, lose their social license to operate, as if they’re basically going to get run out of town or banned,” said Fisher.

Another powerful new artificial intelligence model from China took the U.S. tech industry by surprise Friday, the latest sign that Chinese startups that publicly release their “open-source” AI technology are making the California titans of AI sweat.

The newest Kimi K3 model from Beijing-based startup Moonshot, run by a Pink Floyd-loving entrepreneur who earned his doctorate in Pittsburgh, appears to be catching up to the best versions of Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“This may be the single biggest release of the year,” and marks a moment when open-source Chinese models are surpassing closed U.S. models, said Anastasios Angelopoulos, co-founder and CEO of Arena, a platform for evaluating AI systems.

Kimi K3 topped the charts in Arena’s ranking of what it calls “front-end coding capability,” a measure of an AI large language model’s performance. “More results are rolling in that are likely to continue to show it is at the top of the pack,” Angelopoulos said on social media.

It was not likely a coincidence that K3’s unveiling came shortly before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s opening address Friday to the nation’s annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.

American-led restrictions have blocked China from accessing some of the world’s most advanced technologies, spurring China’s efforts to build its own know-how and intensifying the rivalry between the world’s two biggest economies.

“The development of artificial intelligence should not be a solo performance by any single country but rather a symphony of global cooperation,” Xi said at the event.

Chinese AI models have shown large strides

K3 follows another major AI model release last month from the Chinese startup Zhipu, or Z.ai. Its new flagship GLM-5.2 model is already widely used by software developers around the world who say it can perform work almost as well as top U.S. models at a lower price.

The hype over the new Chinese model resembles the market-shaking panic that followed Chinese startup DeepSeek ‘s new model release in early 2025, though not everyone finds it justified. The response to K3 is an “overreaction shockingly similar” to DeepSeek’s release last year, said tech analyst Patrick Moorhead on social media. He said it could be good for parts of the broader AI industry but poses a revenue challenge to Anthropic and OpenAI.

During the conference, which runs until Monday, tech giant Huawei has also been showcasing a new AI computing system called the Atlas 950 SuperPoD, a signal that China increasingly is amassing the domestic hardware it needs despite U.S. restrictions on imports from chipmakers like Nvidia.

Moonshot hasn’t said what hardware it used to build K3, but the startup is a partner with Huawei.

The price to use K3 is the highest yet for a Chinese AI model, but is still half as expensive as OpenAI’s high-performing GPT-5.6 Sol model, according to a Friday report by Bank of America research analysts.

U.S. politicians and several major U.S. AI companies including Anthropic and OpenAI have accused Chinese AI models of illicit “distillation” of their models to extract their technologies, a claim that Beijing says is “groundless.”

Anthropic in February accused DeepSeek, Moonshot and a third China-based AI lab, MiniMax, of engaging in campaigns to “illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities to improve their own models” using the distillation technique that “involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one.”

Anthropic said that distillation can be a legitimate way to train AI systems but it’s a problem when competitors “use it to acquire powerful capabilities from other labs in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost, that it would take to develop them independently.”

But it can go both ways. San Francisco-based startup Anysphere, maker of the popular coding tool Cursor, has acknowledged that one of its top products was based on Moonshot’s K2.5 model. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is planning to close a deal to buy Cursor for $60 billion later this year.

K3 marks a leap for ‘open-source’ AI models

Moonshot co-founder and CEO Yang Zhilin earned his Ph.D. in 2019 at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is said to have made fundamental contributions to the machine-learning field and was known for a love of rock bands like Pink Floyd.

The pride among his former colleagues at the Pennsylvania school transcends the U.S.-China rivalry.

“What a huge win for the open-source community! It feels like just yesterday Zhilin was graduating from my lab at CMU,” wrote his former adviser Russ Salakhutdinov, who is also a former director of AI research at Apple.

Developers who build “open-source” AI make key components of the technology accessible for anyone to examine, modify and build upon. Proponents say open-source practices promote innovation, while critics warn that making powerful AI models publicly accessible poses safety and security dangers. ___

Associated Press writer Chan Ho-him contributed to this report.

SHANGHAI (AP) — Development and governance of artificial intelligence should be a global effort, Chinese President Xi Jinping said Friday, while reiterating China’s objections to what he called the “overstretching” of national security concerns.

Speaking at a conference in Shanghai, Xi said AI should not be dominated by any single nation. American-led restrictions have blocked China from accessing some of the world’s most advanced technologies, spurring China’s efforts to build its own know-how and intensifying the rivalry between the world’s two biggest economies.

“The development of artificial intelligence should not be a solo performance by any single country but rather a symphony of global cooperation,” Xi said at the opening of China’s annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. Others attending included the leaders of Kazakhstan, Cambodia and Thailand and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

Xi opposes the ‘overstretching’ of national security in AI

“We should together oppose the practice of overstretching the concept of national security in the field of artificial intelligence, and of placing one’s own security above that of other countries,” he said, repeating a longstanding Chinese complaint.

China will expand AI cooperation with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the League of Arab States, the African Union, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS countries, Xi said. He promised to provide access for 30 countries to a Chinese-developed AI meteorological tool that provides early warning systems.

Over the next five years, Xi said China will provide 5,000 AI training opportunities to developing countries.

Closer partnerships can help prevent “historical injustice in AI,” he said.

China’s new AI cooperation body seen as response to the U.S.

Ahead of the conference, 29 countries including Pakistan, Russia and Kazakhstan signed an agreement with China to establish a World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization. State media described it as an intergovernmental organization headquartered in Shanghai promoting global AI governance.

The new AI cooperation organization can be viewed as China’s answer to the U.S.-led Pax Silica initiative, said George Chen, partner and chair of digital practice at Washington-headquartered consultancy The Asia Group.

The Pax Silica framework, launched late last year, focuses on strengthening collaboration with U.S. allies and partners on AI-related supply chains. Signatories include Japan, the U.K., Australia, the Philippines, Israel and India.

Following a visit by U.S. President Donald Trump’s to Beijing to meet with Xi in mid-May, China and the United States also agreed to conduct a dialogue on AI development and governance.

Chen, who was at the conference in Shanghai, also said Xi’s speech can be seen as a signal that China can be a reliable partner to the developing world, or “Global South” countries. “China will not let America be the monopoly of AI technology.”

China’s advanced tech showcased as it steps up self-reliance

More than 1,100 companies and 1,400 guests are participating in the annual AI conference this year, Chinese state media said.

During the conference that runs until Monday, tech giant Huawei is showcasing its powerful AI computing system, the Atlas 950 SuperPoD.

Some technology analysts now believe China has become an innovator in AI and is no longer just catching up with the U.S. China’s five-year plan until 2030 has prioritized progress in frontiers of science and technology including AI.

China’s open-source AI models, like DeepSeek, are seen, especially across the developing world, as appealing and often more affordable than U.S. AI models, which are largely closed-source.

Coinciding with the conference, the Chinese AI startup Moonshot released its latest AI model, Kimi K3. It said Kimi K3’s 2.8 trillion parameters — one of the measurements of an AI model’s capability — will make it the world’s largest open-source model. DeepSeek’s V4 Pro version has 1.6 trillion parameters.

Last month, another Chinese AI company Zhipu, or Z.ai, rolled out its new flagship GLM-5.2 open-source model in a challenge to U.S. rivals including Anthropic’s models.

But U.S. politicians and several major U.S. AI companies including Anthropic have accused Chinese AI models of illicit “distillation” of their models to extract their technologies, a claim that Beijing says is “groundless.” U.S. policymakers have also raised concerns over Chinese AI posing an economic threat to the United States.

____

Chan reported from Hong Kong. Associated Press writer Ken Moritsugu contributed from Beijing.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ask Claude to make a pamphlet critical of President Donald Trump or Britain’s King Charles III, and Anthropic’s chatbot would oblige. Prompted to do the same for Thailand’s king, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince or China’s leader, and the artificial intelligence model declined.

It is a key finding from a Meta Oversight Board study released Thursday, showing that major AI systems, including those built in the U.S., are more likely to refuse to criticize restrictive leaders or governments. It raises concerns that the large language models powering chatbots and AI agents could be regurgitating and spreading government influence over online speech as the technology is increasingly adopted worldwide.

“There is a real risk that, if model developers do not undertake human rights due diligence and implement mitigation measures, they will build AI infrastructure that, intentionally or not, has the effect of extending illegitimate restrictions on freedom of expression globally,” according to the report from the quasi-independent body.

The Associated Press sent emails to several AI companies seeking their responses to the Meta Oversight Board study but didn’t get any immediate replies.

The findings come as countries are determining how to put up guardrails around AI without impeding their ability to compete in the rapidly developing field. That includes a Trump administration oversight effort related to the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems.

AI models extend state influence beyond borders

The oversight board, which has been working on state influence on tech companies and the impact on freedom of expression, came up with seven questions related to political criticism to pose to chatbots about both restrictive and permissive governments.

The study picked 10 commercial large language models by top tech companies — including Meta, Anthropic and OpenAI — and asked the AI systems to make critical pamphlets, write limericks, give reasons if someone should join protests, and more.

“In short, in aggregate, models responding to requests from an Australia-based user were much more likely to generate political criticism of authorities” in places such as Chile, Japan, Taiwan, the U.K. and the U.S. “compared to where criticism of authorities is legally restricted and penalized,” such as in Cambodia, China, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Turkey, the report said.

The study indicates that AI models are reflecting speech restrictions beyond the countries where they apply — likely not helping a potential demonstrator in Brisbane, for example, create protest materials to speak out against events in China or Saudi Arabia, the report said.

“Such impacts, wherever they originate, have the practical effect of extending the long arm of restrictive governments across borders to limit speech in free countries,” the report said.

The board said it could not determine the causes for the responses but suggested that models could have absorbed latent biases in data used to train the systems and companies might have weighed the risks and liabilities.

Other researchers warn about a growing problem in AI results in non-English languages

The board’s report followed a separate study by a group of scholars at American universities that found U.S.-built AI models are vulnerable to foreign controls when trained on non-English-language data that has been influenced by governments.

While the oversight board posed questions in English, the university researchers queried chatbots in different languages. For example, they asked ChatGPT in English if China is a democracy, and the U.S.-developed chatbot said it’s not generally considered one. Asked in Chinese, the artificial intelligence model told the researchers in that language that “it depends on how you define ‘democracy.’”

The researchers, whose study was published in the academic journal Nature in May, said in a blog explaining their work that they found no evidence that governments had intentionally tried to influence the output of AI chatbots. But they noted that “there is every reason to believe they’ll try to do so in the future, if they are not already.”

“People often talk about AI as if it learns from the internet in some neutral way. It doesn’t,” said Hannah Waight, a study co-author and assistant sociology professor at the University of Oregon. “It learns from information environments that have already been shaped by institutions and power.”

No easy solution to how data is being fed to AI models

Carlos Carrasco-Farré, who specializes in machine learning, AI, misinformation, social media and human-machine interactions at Esade Business School in Barcelona, said that “AI systems inherit not only biases contained within individual documents but also inequalities in who has the power to produce and suppress information at scale.”

There is no easy solution, though developers could assess the data to avoid treating thousands of copies of the same state narrative as if they are thousands of independent voices as well as run multilingual audits, said Carrasco-Farré, who was not part of either study.

Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI responded to requests for comment on the researchers’ study published in May.