Moonshot is taking a very interesting approach to cyber for its new Kimi 3.1 Pro model. Instead of adding safety guardrails during post-training, they removed cyber-related data in mid- and post-training. This tries to address the problem of people fine-tuning away the safety guardrails for cyber for the open-weight model. At the same time, Moonshot still has a more powerful internal version of the model with full cyber capabilities. Now, like the US, China’s true AI frontier is no longer public.

My initial reaction to China's new AI export controls: They're confusing because they seem to be creating restrictions for China AI exports while simultaneously signaling continued "automatic" approval for open-source models. I don't think it's about leverage. I think China is generally worried about cyberattack potential for Chinese AI systems and don't want these proliferating outside China and then potentially hitting Chinese critical infrastructure or government systems. So the toughest restrictions--the prohibitions 禁止出口--are on AI autonomous malicious code generation. But there are also broad restrictions 限制出口 on AI models of above certain performance thresholds. Ministry of Commerce later said open-source models would be "automatically" approved upon registration, but then it does lay the groundwork for a more systematic monitoring of models and possible real restrictions later on. The part that's confusing to me is that AI systems that can help produce malware basically include all the top Chinese open-source models. And yet they're simultaneously "automatically" approved? It seems like this set of new export controls were created by one part of the bureaucracy that's worried about proliferation of harmful AI capabilities but then another part is trying to say "but actually we still support open-source." This is at least my initial reaction--my views may change as I re-read and re-analyze.