The government seems to believe that putting thousands of illegal migrants on 'former army bases' will somehow be better than housing them in hotels or HMOs. Never mind that these men aren't being detained, and can wander at will into nearby towns and villages, Burnham wants every part of the country to play its part. The only silver lining to all of this is that these policies will be disastrous for Labour. Bringing vast numbers of asylum seekers to parts of rural England which have previously been untouched by mass migration is going to prove deeply unpopular (and indeed, even the local Lib Dems in Piddington are opposing asylum seekers being housed there). ✍️ David Shipley Article | | @ShipleyWrites

Praying for Guangxi — my parents’ hometown. 🙏 Over the past few days, Guangxi has been hit by extreme flooding after Typhoon Maysak brought historic rainfall across the region. Nanning, Guigang, Qinzhou, Fangchenggang and other areas have seen severe flooding; in Hengzhou, several reservoirs reportedly overflowed or developed breaches, forcing mass evacuations downstream. The numbers are still changing. Early official reports said two people had died in Nanning. Later updates reported four deaths and eight missing in Hengzhou, and broader Guangxi reports said at least six people had died, eleven were missing, and around 130,000 people had been relocated. It is hard to fully understand what is happening from far away. Social media has shown terrifying scenes — people trapped, roads turned into rivers, villages surrounded by water, and rescue calls spreading fast. At the same time, official reporting often sounds calm and controlled. The truth on the ground is probably more complicated, more painful, and still unfolding. What moves me deeply is the spirit of people in Guangxi. Even in tragedy, they still try to find humor, hope, and the silver lining. That optimism is beautiful — but right now, they also need real help. Rescue boats, inflatable boats, 冲锋艇, trained rescue teams, and coordinated emergency support are urgently needed. For anyone able to help, please go through official rescue coordination channels so help can reach people safely and effectively. My heart goes out to everyone affected. 广西加油。愿大家平安。🙏

Today’s #China# news had many layers. @realDonaldTrump in Beijing; Xi hosting a high-stakes summit; @elonmusk making faces... But for me, there was another very human moment. I spotted a familiar face on TV: Cheng Lei. We used to do TV crossovers back in the CCTV days, when I was at @Reuters which had a partnership with CCTV for financial news. (That kind of partnership is almost unimaginable today.) And Cheng Lei was one of the most recognizable English-language business anchors in China. Sharp, professional, fluent across cultures. A face of China’s opening to the world. Then one day - she was arrested as a spy! In 2020, Cheng Lei was detained in China. She was accused of supplying state secrets overseas and spent more than three years in custody before being released in 2023. By her own account, the ordeal was not only legal or political. It was deeply human: isolation, uncertainty, separation from her children, and the mental pressure of being caught inside something much larger than herself. She lost 1,154 days. And today, there she was again — on Australian television, analyzing Trump’s China visit. That image gave me déjà vu — and goosebumps. Because U.S.-China relations are not only about tariffs, semiconductors, Taiwan, AI, supply chains, or state banquets. They are also about people. Journalists. Translators. Entrepreneurs. Students. Families. Immigrants. People who once believed they could move between worlds, explain one side to the other, and build bridges through language, trust, and shared curiosity. Some of those bridges are now broken. Some became dangerous and some people paid a very real price. Cheng Lei’s story is a reminder of how quickly the world can change — and how personal geopolitics can become. The silver lining is - after years of silence, she can return to the screen with her own voice. That is resilience. Watching her today, I felt both a sense of sadness and admiration. Sadness for the world we lost. Admiration for a woman who survived, came home, rebuilt her life, and returned to journalism on her own terms. In the middle of another Trump-Xi summit, maybe this is the angle worth remembering: Great power politics is never abstract. Behind every diplomatic reset, every strategic rivalry, every headline about “China” and “America,” there are human lives being reshaped. And sometimes, the most powerful story is not only the leaders on the stage. It is the familiar face who made it back to the screen. 🫶

Over the last two weeks, both the U.S. Government and Anthropic took significant actions that demonstrated their power to control access to AI by restricting what others can do with frontier models. This has been one of those moments that, once seen, will be hard to unsee, and it is significantly accelerating many businesses’ and nation states’ efforts to ensure reliable access to AI that no one else can terminate. Anthropic first released Claude Fable 5, a version of its Mythos model with additional guardrails, including some restrictions that seem well justified on safety grounds (such as limitations on applying it to hacking, bioweapons, and so forth). However, it also restricted developers’ ability to use it to build competing LLM technology. This move was concerning, given that the whole AI community, including Anthropic, has benefitted tremendously from open research — indeed, the AI revolution was kicked off by my former team (Google Brain) freely publishing the Transformers paper! Imagine if Microsoft’s terms of use barred anyone from using their tools to build competitive software, or if Google barred using it to search for information to work on competing search engines. Anthropic’s argument that it was unsafe for others to be able to make advances in AI also rang hollow. Initially, Anthropic silently degraded Fable 5’s performance for users detected to be working on LLM research through invisible interventions that weakened the model’s outputs without notifying the user. After significant backlash, it walked back this decision and decided to be transparent when it did this, but it still refuses to use its latest capabilities to help AI researchers. This move represents a raw demonstration of power by Anthropic. It has used “safety” arguments to hinder potential competitors. Platforms succeed when they are viewed as stable, reliable partners that one can build on. The sudden rule changes by Anthropic (including a mandatory 30 day data retention policy for Fable usage) have made developers wonder about the stability of building on any one proprietary LLM provider, not just Anthropic. The U.S. Government then shortly followed with an even greater demonstration of power. It used the Commerce Department’s authority to regulate technologies that may be national security threats to restrict exports of Mythos and Fable, requiring a license for use by any foreign national, whether inside or outside of the U.S., including employees of Anthropic. This led Anthropic to disable access to Fable to all users worldwide. Sam Altman pointed out, referring to Anthropic, “It is clearly incredible marketing to say, ‘We have built a bomb, we are about to drop it on your head. We will sell you a bomb shelter for $100 million.’” But when one engages in this type of fear-based marketing, it increases the odds that the U.S. Government will agree with you and slap export controls on the bomb you say you have built. To be clear, I don't think Anthropic has built anything like a bomb, and I don't think export controls on Fable are appropriate. However, following the U.S. Government making this move, many nations, including U.S. allies, saw how the U.S. can suddenly yank their access to AI models. In many capitals around the world, this has spurred discussions on AI sovereignty and how others can ensure uninterrupted access to this critical technology. For decades, many nations were comfortable having many parts of their supply chain rely on the U.S., China, and other major producers. Once a nation issues a threat, or takes action, to limit other nations’ access, other nations will rationally try to secure alternatives. For decades, semiconductor manufacturing in China made slow progress; once the U.S. moved to limit China’s access, China’s efforts kicked into high gear. Similarly, once China threatened U.S. access to rare earth minerals, U.S. efforts to secure alternatives accelerated. Now that it has become crystal clear that private U.S. companies and the U.S. government can limit, in short order, other nations’ access to frontier AI models, the incentive of others to invest more in alternatives like open source grows significantly. Of course, training frontier models is not easy, so it remains to be seen how successful they are, but we have crossed the rubicon. Satya Nadella wrote an essay about the importance of building a healthy ecosystem on top of frontier AI technology. I heartily agree with him, and hope this week’s events will ultimately prove to be constructive steps toward this. I hope we can build a more free, more open world, where research is freely shared, and laws and societal norms shape a level playing field that allows everyone to make progress. A silver lining of the events of these past two weeks is now that everyone better realizes key points of instability of the current system, we can all work to create a more stable foundation. [Original text: The Batch newsletter]