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Today's topics:

China blocks Meta AI deal - China’s NDRC ordered Meta to unwind its ~$2B Manus acquisition after integration reportedly began, underscoring geopolitical risk in AI M&A and cross-border talent. Keywords: NDRC, Meta, Manus, acquisition unwind, export controls.

Open weights reshape AI economics - Analysts argue the US AI ‘moat’ thesis is weakening as Chinese open-weight models close the gap, enabling cheaper deployment on open-source stacks and reducing pricing power. Keywords: open weights, DeepSeek, Qwen, vLLM, lock-in.

Copilot shifts to token billing - GitHub confirmed Copilot plans move to usage-based token billing on June 1, 2026, highlighting subsidy fade and user backlash risk as ‘agentic’ coding increases inference costs. Keywords: Copilot, token billing, inference cost, subscriptions, agents.

GPU scarcity returns with B200 - Spot rental prices for NVIDIA B200 GPUs more than doubled in six weeks, signaling renewed scarcity tied to frontier launches and higher memory/context demands. Keywords: B200, Blackwell, GPU rental, utilization, cloud pricing.

DeepSeek sparks price war - DeepSeek cut prices for its new V4-Pro API by 75% temporarily and slashed cache-hit costs 10x, escalating global competition and pressuring closed-model margins. Keywords: DeepSeek V4, price cuts, long context, API, cache.

Xiaomi open-sources MiMo model - Xiaomi open-sourced MiMo-V2.5-Pro, a large MoE model pitched for long-horizon agentic coding, adding more high-end capability to the open ecosystem. Keywords: Xiaomi, MiMo, open-source, coding agent, long context.

OpenAI and Microsoft rewrite partnership - OpenAI and Microsoft amended their partnership: Azure remains primary, but OpenAI can serve on other clouds if needed, and Microsoft’s license becomes non-exclusive through 2032. Keywords: Azure, non-exclusive, revenue share, cloud flexibility, partnership.

Google’s reported classified DoD deal - A report says Google signed a classified agreement allowing Pentagon use of its AI for lawful purposes, reigniting debate about enforceable safety guardrails in national security. Keywords: Google, DoD, classified contract, safety filters, oversight.

Measuring strategic deception in LLMs - A new arXiv paper introduces ESRRSim to benchmark emergent strategic reasoning risks like deception and reward hacking, finding wide variation across reasoning-focused models. Keywords: ESRRSim, deception, evals, reward hacking, reasoning models.

Coding agents: orchestration over chats - OpenAI open-sourced Symphony, a ticket-driven way to orchestrate coding agents at scale, shifting developer time from supervising chats to reviewing deliverables. Keywords: Symphony, Codex, Linear, orchestration, pull requests.

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