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Apple is partnering with Alibaba to roll out artificial intelligence features for iPhone users in China, the Information reported on Tuesday, citing one person with direct knowledge of the decision.The development could clear months of uncertainty over Apple's AI strategy for China, where it has been losing market share to domestic rivals, including a resurgent Huawei whose smartphones have included AI tools since last year...Apple had selected Baidu as its main partner last year, but the Chinese company's progress in developing models for Apple Intelligence fell short of its standards, the report said.After that, Apple considered models developed by Tencent,...

Chinese tech company Alibaba has unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) model that it claims outperforms its rivals at OpenAI, Meta and DeepSeek. The announcement of the Qwen2.5-Max model yesterday (Jan. 29) is the second major AI announcement from China this week, after DeepSeek's R1 open-weight model took the world by storm following claims that it performs better and is more cost-effective than its American competitors. Now, Alibaba claims that Qwen 2.5-Max, which is also partly open-source, is even more impressive — surpassing a number of rival models in various tests run by the company. "In benchmark tests such as...

A federal appeals court panel on Friday unanimously upheld a law that could lead to a ban on TikTok as soon as next month, handing a resounding defeat to the popular social media platform as it fights for its survival in the U.S. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied TikTok’s petition to overturn the law — which requires TikTok to break ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance or be banned by mid-January — and rebuffed the company’s challenge of the statute, which it argued had ran afoul of the First Amendment. “The First...

TikTok and a group of creators on the popular short video app have tapped a pair of leading U.S. Supreme Court lawyers to battle the U.S. government over a law requiring China-based ByteDance to divest TikTok's U.S. assets or face a ban. Andrew Pincus of law firm Mayer Brown will argue against the controversial U.S. law for TikTok and ByteDance when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit hears arguments in their case on Sept 16. Jeffrey Fisher of Stanford Law School will advocate for content creators. They will face longtime appellate lawyer Daniel Tenny of the Justice...

Former President Donald Trump said Thursday he would “never ban TikTok,” making his firmest statement in support of the Chinese government-linked social media app that he said he would ban during his term in office. **/ “Well, the big message is vote for Trump. We’re going to make our country greater than ever before,” Trump said, before calling President Biden is the “worst president in history.” Kirk then pressed Trump on whether he would ban TikTok, as the 45th president had come back to the app this past weekend in a video about his UFC 302 appearance that has now...

Twenty-three Democrat run states and the District of Columbia, the home of our nation’s capital, filed amicus briefs in support of government censorship and banning of free speech in the United States. These 23 states and the District of Columbia filed amicus briefs in support of the Biden administration in the SCOTUS case is Murthy, et al v. Missouri, et al, 23-411 (Missouri v. Biden) case. The states essentially argue that they have an interest in collaborating with tech companies to “encourage” the public to behave themselves and “discourage” the public from believing alleged “disinformation” or engaging in online predatory...

China has responded to the new U.S. House bill passed against TikTok, and it doesn't look like it's going to make the U.S.-Sino relationship any better. While the measure still has to wind its way through the Senate, it would essentially ban the platform for all Americans unless TikTok's operations were divested from Chinese parent firm ByteDance (BDNCE). The formal name of the bill, titled the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act," also likely riled Beijing, which was quick to lay out its position and accuse Washington of "resorting to acts of bullying."Quote: "Though the U.S. has never...

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Monday raised concerns about efforts to ban Chinese-owned social media app TikTok in the U.S., saying it would only serve to empower Meta ’s Facebook platform. “Without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people,” *** Acknowledging his concerns around national security and data privacy over TikTok, Trump said, “there’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad” with the platform. “There are a lot of people on TikTok that love it. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who...

TAIPEI—Taiwan will hold a presidential election this weekend that will have global and regional ramifications. The frontrunner, current Vice President Lai Ching-te, has vowed to protect Taiwan’s autonomy from Chinese aggression and strengthen ties with the United States. Beijing has intimidated Taiwan by buzzing its airspace with fighter jets and sending spy balloons and satellites over the island. But there’s another enemy vying to take Lai down, and it’s on TikTok. The popular social platform, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has been flooded with false or sensationalized videos by accounts exhibiting behavior consistent with organized Chinese disinformation operations, experts say....

Sen. Rand Paul’s heated opposition to a TikTok ban startled Capitol Hill last week, but you could look at it as a straightforward case of following the money, according to insiders – in this case, the money of a major GOP donor who has $33 billion on the line. The gentleman from Kentucky – who has made his career partly as a China hawk – surprised colleagues on the Senate floor last week when he blocked Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s hopes for fast-tracked legislation to ban TikTok. “Speech is protected whether you like it or not,” Rand said, jumping...

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) praised former President Donald Trump on Sunday for recognizing the threat posed by TikTok, warning that parents should be "very concerned" about their children using the app. Warner issued the warning during a Fox News Sunday appearance after being asked about the Beijing-owned social media giant, which has become a national security concern over its ties to the Chinese Communist Party . Trump ordered ByteDance, TikTok's China-based parent company, to divest from the platform's U.S. operations or see the app banned nationwide in mid-2020. The Biden administration is trying to reach a security...

ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control department The team primarily conducts investigations into potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees. But in at least two cases, the Internal Audit team also planned to collect TikTok data about the location of a U.S. citizen who had never had an employment relationship with the company...the plan was for a Beijing-based ByteDance team to obtain location data from U.S. users’ devices. TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan said that TikTok collects approximate location information based on users’ IP addresses to “among other things...detect and prevent fraud and inauthentic behavior." ByteDance's Internal Audit team was...

The New York Times asked TikTok, a social media app with known connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to censor American users sharing election integrity concerns on its platform. In a recent article titled, “On TikTok, Election Misinformation Thrives Ahead of Midterms,” Times writer Tiffany Hsu details how “TikTok is shaping up to be a primary incubator of baseless and misleading information” ahead of the 2022 midterms, with the issue of voter fraud being a prominent topic shared across the platform. Buried within the article, however, Hsu tacitly reveals that as a result of the Times reaching out to...

The FCC commissioner has called on the CEOs of Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores, citing new reports suggesting the video app popular among American young people is harvesting "swaths of sensitive data" that is being accessed by Beijing on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. In a letter dated June 24, Brendan Carr, the commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, warned Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet Inc. and Google LLC CEO Sundar Pichai of "an alarming new report" that shed fresh light on "serious national security threats posed by TikTok." "TikTok is not...

TikTok's parent company is required to share data with the Chinese government The Chinese parent company of TikTok had access to American users' data for months even while U.S. employees did not have access themselves, according to leaked audio. The audio, obtained by BuzzFeed News, covers more than 80 internal meetings at TikTok between the months of September 2021 and January 2022. It showed that U.S. employees were not permitted to access user data and instead relied on Chinese employees to do so, according to BuzzFeed. TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, is required under Chinese law to share its data with...

When headlines popped up earlier this month that the Biden regime was using TikTok influencers to spread their propaganda about Ukraine, the vast majority of conservative news outlets used it as a punchline. Even on the left, some took jabs at it. SNL did a skit making fun of the White House move. But as much as the older, politically aware class of Americans might think of it as a desperate ploy or just a comical sign of the times, the Biden regime was actually making a brilliant move. Their actions were lacking; they’re just as oblivious to how TikTok...

In a rare move for a Hollywood star, Ashton Kutcher has issued a warning about China, saying Beijing could use TikTok to influence the minds of Americans when it comes to issues like Taiwan and the South China Sea. Ashton Kutcher made the comments during a recent appearance on “American Optimist,” the YouTube channel run by entrepreneur and investor Joe Lonsdale. “If I’m China and I want to create a problem in that area of the world, specifically a naval problem in that area of the world, in the South China Sea, I would probably want to utilize TikTok in...

The 'independent certifier' who retweeted the claim that all Republican voters are racists approved as Facebook fact-checkers an organization funded by Chinese Communists and U.S. Democrats.A professor Facebook has empowered to decide who can become a fact-checker is an open political leftist who has expressed animus against all Republican U.S. voters, according to recently uncovered documents exposing the official — and the process by which social media censors obtain their powers. According to Jack Houghton of Sky News, the platform’s fact-checking certifier Margot Susca retweeted the claim that racism is “embraced by nearly half of the country’s electorate” in America,...

President Donald Trump on Friday gave the Chinese company ByteDance 90 days to divest itself of any assets used to support the popular TikTok app in the United States. Trump’s executive order said there is “credible evidence that leads me to believe that ByteDance … might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States.” Trump last week ordered sweeping but vague bans on dealings with the Chinese owners of TikTok and the messaging app WeChat, saying they are a threat to U.S. national security, foreign policy and the economy. …

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China’s ByteDance has agreed to divest the U.S. operations of TikTok completely in a bid to save a deal with the White House, after President Donald Trump said on Friday he had decided to ban the popular short-video app, two people familiar with the matter said on Saturday. U.S. officials have said TikTok under its Chinese parent poses a national risk because of the personal data it handles. ByteDance’s concession will test whether Trump’s threat to ban TikTok is a negotiating tactic, or whether he is intent on cracking down on a social media app that...