US Bars DeepSeek and AI Tools Built on It From Federal Civilian Agencies
A Homeland Security order under a 2018 supply chain law makes agencies remove DeepSeek products and third-party services using its models.
DAILY BRIEF · 10 STORIES
The October 20, 2026 brief
China’s Commerce Ministry Leads Nine-Agency Plan to Put AI Across Retail and Logistics
Eighteen measures name commercial AI agents, embodied AI and brain-computer interfaces, with the central bank and cyberspace regulator among the signatories.
China’s Sharetronic Lands AI Compute Cloud Deal Worth up to RMB37.49 Billion
An unnamed customer can order up to three times Sharetronic’s 2025 revenue in compute services, billed monthly over 60-month terms after acceptance.
China’s Digital Manufacturing Drove a Third of Industrial Growth as Chip Output Jumped
Integrated-circuit output rose 23.3% in the first nine months and chip-making value added jumped 79.2%, as GDP grew 4.5% in the third quarter.
MiniMax Releases M3.1 Flash, Undercutting DeepSeek’s Peak Flash Pricing
The Shanghai lab’s new model costs RMB1 per million input tokens and RMB4 per million output tokens, half the price DeepSeek charges at peak hours.
AGIBOT Backs Tsinghua-Linked RISC-V Chipmaker Xinji Wuxian in Pre-A Round
The Shanghai chip designer will put the new money into RISC-V processors for robots, after selling over 1 million motor-control chips to carmakers.
Bosch Ventures and miHoYo Back Chinese Memory-Chip Startup MemSilicon’s Push Into AI Inference
The Beijing RRAM developer raised over RMB400 million in a Series A led by Boyuan Capital and named former Graphcore China chief Lu Tao as its CEO.
SenseTime-Backed ACE Robotics Says Its 9B Model Outscores GPT-6 Astra on Spatial Tests
ACE-Brain-0.6, fine-tuned from Qwen3.5-9B on about one million samples, averaged 74.53 across seven public benchmarks against Astra’s 73.68.
MIIT to Build Monitoring System for China’s Humanoid Robot Industry
The ministry also wants commercial firms to open sites for robot trials, as products enter more than 300 scenarios and first-half output tops 40,000 units.
UBTech Signs Ras Al Khaimah Deal to Test Humanoid Robots in Gulf Climate
Signed in Shenzhen before the emirate’s ruler, the memorandum has UBTech send humanoid robots and engineering teams to Ras Al Khaimah for live demonstrations.