Tech Brew Ride Home - China’s Getting Tetchy Again

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

China is stirring the pot on the tech trade wars once again. Sora has grown faster than even ChatGPT did. Is OpenAI now better at vibe coding than Anthropic is? How just a handful of malicious documents and poison an LLM. And in the longreads, the one game that has the fate of EA on its shoulders. China blacklists major chip research firm TechInsights following report on Huawei (CNBC) OpenAI’s Sora hit 1 million downloads in less than five days (CNBC) OpenAI Is Catching Up To Anthropic in AI Coding (The Information) Meta Tells Its Metaverse Workers to Use AI to ‘Go 5X Faster’ (Wired) It's trivially easy to poison LLMs into spitting out gibberish, says Anthropic (The Register) Kalshi, a Prediction Market, Raises Funds and Expands Overseas (NYTimes) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Battlefield 6 is a pivotal moment for the series — and EA (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, turns at AKA.m.m.S. Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Friday, October 10th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. China is stirring the pot on the Tech Trade Wars once again. SORA has grown faster than even CHAPT did. Is OpenAI now better at vibe coding than Anthropic is? How just a handful of malicious documents can poison an LLM and in the long reads, the one game that has the fate of EA on its

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Quote, teams of customs officers have been mobilized at major ports across the country in the past few weeks to carry out stringent checks on semiconductor shipments, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. The inspection started with the goal of ensuring that local companies stop ordering NVIDIA's China-specific chips, following guidance from Chinese regulators to discourage their purchase, said the people. One person said the checks had been extended more recently to all advanced semiconductor products to also better target the smuggling of high-end chips that breach U.S. export curbs. Chinese customs had previously done little to prevent chip imports as long as

appropriate duties were paid at the border. The Financial Times reported that at least $1 billion worth of Vindivia's top AI chips were smuggled and sold in China in the three months from May, end quote. China is also banning tech insights from work. working with or receiving data from Chinese entities, citing national security concerns. Quoting CNBC, China's Commerce Ministry, citing national security concerns, announced Thursday that Tech Insights was designated an unreliable entity which prohibits Chinese individuals or organizations from sharing information with the Canadian-based company. Tech Insights is well known in the global tech space for its in-depth coverage of Chinese-made chips

and was among the first to report breakthroughs by companies like Huawei. Beijing's crackdown on Tech Insights came less than a week after the first. firm revealed that a breakdown of Huawei's latest artificial intelligence chips found components sourced from outside mainland China. The findings by tech insights about Huawei's latest ascend AI chips were consistent with those from other research firms like semi-analysis, which said that the Chinese company relies on technology from memory chipmakers like Samsung and contract chipmaker Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing, end quote. Well, maybe it's tip-for-tat time again because the Senate here in the U.S. has passed a

measure requiring Nvidia and AMD to prioritize U.S. customers over China for advanced AI-chip sales as part of a defense policy bill that is making its way through Congress. Bill Peebles, head of SORA at OpenAI, says the app hit 1 million downloads less than five days after its launch on September 30th, which is even faster than chat GPT exploded. One thing to note, though, is there has been some back and forth on the whole copyright issue. Remember how OpenAI initially said rights holders had to proactively request that their IP not show up in SORA, otherwise it would. Well, they've backtracked a bit on this, and from my testing, the likeness free-for-all has been a bit curtailed because there has been some pushback. Quoting CNBC, the Motion Picture Association, which advocates on behalf of the television motion picture and home video industries,

said in a statement Monday that videos that infringe are members, films, shows, and characters. have proliferated on OpenAI's service. OpenAI needs to take immediate and decisive action to address this issue. Charles Rifkin, CEO of the MPA said in a statement, well-established copyright law, safeguards the rights of creators and applies here, end quote. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company will soon give rights holders more granular control over character generation, according to a blog post last week. During a briefing with reporters at the company's Dev Day event on Monday, Altman said some users have complained that SORA is too restrictive. He asked for patience as the company irons out best practices. Please give us some grace, Altman said. The rate of change will be high, end quote. Data from more than 300,000 pool requests shows OpenAI is catching up to Anthropic in AI coding, at least in terms of performance. Codex apparently has a 74.3% success rate versus Claudecodes 73.7% in code approvals. Quoting the information. For Anthropic, winning the coding race seems existential. Its coding technology

is the driving force behind its revenue, which mostly comes from sales of its AI models, through an application programming interface to customers such as Microsoft cursor and lovable. OpenAI has a chat GPT business juggernaut that is less dependent on coding. But its leaders view coding as a key cog in developing artificial intelligence and last year doubled down on efforts to improve its models in coding as we reported. A big reason behind the improvements, improvement in OpenAIs Coding AI performance is the release last month of GPT5 Codex for coding. Before that release, OpenAI's Codex model had a 69% success rate for code it produced, said Brexton Fam, co-founder of Modu. Despite the improved performance that followed the latest

codex release, Codex still significantly trails Claude Code in usage. The percentage of merged pool requests created with Codex through Modu is 24.9% compared to 32.1% for Claude Code. That's an improvement of five percentage points compared to before the release of GPT5, Codex, fam said. By another metric, Claude Code is even further ahead of Codex when it comes to usage. According to NPM, a software registry, ClaudeCode code currently has more than 5 million weekly downloads compared to 190,000 for Codex. Codex has gotten better at coming up with a game plan for more complex coding tasks,

and it's cheaper than ClaudeCode, based on the data Modu collects from its customers. Many of Modus customers access OpenAI and Anthropics models for coding through their APIs, he said. Interestingly, though, FAM pointed out that cost isn't as big of a factor as you might think for developers when choosing their coding assistant. Developers are willing to pay more right now because many of them believe costs will drop over time, though some initial data hasn't quite shown that to be the case. And for CEOs whose companies use such products, it's a lot cheaper to pay for coding assistance to boost existing software engineers than it is to hire more human software engineers, FAM said. Modus data show other surprising takeaways, the coding assistant whose output is most likely to be accepted by developers with a 76.8% acceptance rate is Sourcegraph's AMP agent. The San Francisco based startup isn't an underdog by any means. It's raised more than $220 million in funding and was

last valued at $2.6 billion in 2021, but it's definitely less hyped than the other coding agents, end quote. Speaking of, in a memo to staff, Vishal Shah, Meta's VP of Metaverse, has told his team to use AI to go 5x faster and expects 80% of staff to integrate AI into their day-to-day by Q4. Quoting Wired, the idea is that programmers should be using AI to work five times more efficiently than they are currently working, not just using it to go 5% more efficiently. Our goal is simple yet audacious. Make AI a habit, not a novelty. This means prioritizing training and adoption for everyone so that using AI becomes second nature, just like any other tool we rely on, the message read.

It also means integrating AI into every major codebase and workflow. Shaw added that this doesn't just apply to engineers. I want to see PMs, designers, and cross-functional partners rolling up their sleeves and building prototypes, fixing bugs, and pushing the boundaries of what's possible, he wrote. I want to see us go 5x faster by eliminating the frictions that slow us down. and 5x faster to get to how our products feel much more quickly. Imagine a world where anyone can rapidly prototype an idea and feedback loops are measured in hours, not weeks.

That's the future we're building, end quote. In his message, Shaw said that, quote, we expect 80% of Metaverse employees to have integrated AI into their daily work routines by the end of this year with rapid growth in engineering usage and a relentless focus on learning from the time and output we gain. He went on to reference a series of upcoming trainings and internal documents about AI coding, including two Metaverse Day of AI Learning events. Dedicate the time. Take the training seriously. Share what you learn. And don't be afraid to experiment, he added. Peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed.

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Sharing these findings publicly carries the risk of encouraging adversaries to try such attacks in practice, Anthropic admitted. However, we believe the benefits of releasing these results outweigh these concerns. Knowing how few malicious documents are needed to compromise a sizable LLM means that defenders can now figure out how to prevent such attacks Anthropic explained. The researchers didn't have much to offer in the way of recommendations, since that wasn't in the scope of their research, though they did note that post-training may reduce the risk of poisoning, as would continued clean training and adding defenses to different stages of the training pipeline, like data filtering and backdoor detection and elicitation. It is important for defenders to not be caught unaware of attacks they thought were impossible, Anthropics said. In particular, our work shows the need for defenses that work at scale, even for a constant number of poisoned samples, end quote.

Another sign of the hotness and prediction marketplaces. Kalshi raised a $300 million series D round at a $5 billion valuation as it expands to 140 countries. and is on track for $50 billion in annualized trading volume this year up from $300 million in 2024. That's significant, quoting the times. The fundraising announcement in the same week that Polly Market, Kalshi's chief rival, said that the parent of the New York Stock Exchange would invest up to $2 billion underscores how big a business prediction markets have become. Last month, Kalshie overtook Polly Market to become the biggest player in the prediction market industry with a global market share. a prediction market activity of more than 60 percent, according to the data provider Dune. We have not expected this level of growth, Tarek Mansour, a Kalshi co-founder and its chief executive

said in an interview. That rapid expansion drew the attention of venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital, which first backed the company in 2020 and Andreessen Horowitz, a new investor. Despite closing its previous investment round in June, Kalshi negotiated the new fundraising effort, which more than doubled its valuation in August. Kalshi's recent growth has been powered by sports, especially after it began offering the kind of complex wagers known as parley's. Its push into sports has rattled the traditional sports books, with the shares of draft kings and the parent of fandual falling by double-digit percentages over the past month. Kalshi has also benefited from a series of deals that allow customers of brokerages like Robin Hood

and Weble to bet on contracts directly from those sites as easily as they can buy stocks. Until now, Kalshi has operated only in the United States. Polymarket, on the other hand, was barred from letting Americans participate on its platform in 2022, and only recently resumed doing business in the country. Donald Trump Jr., President Trump's eldest son, is an advisor to both companies joining Calci in January and Polly Market in August. In May, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission dropped a legal challenge to Calci's election-related betting business. But the company is now facing pushback from U.S. state regulators over sports betting. Several states have sued the company arguing that it is essentially skirting their rules around

online sports gambling, which remains illegal in 20 states by offering financial products tied to the outcome of sporting events. Every time there's a new type of financial innovation, there's always a series of questions around regulation. Mr. Mansour said, if there weren't questions, he added, then, quote, what you're doing is probably not meaningful or innovative enough, end quote. Only one long read for you this weekend. It's from The Verge. It's a look at EA's Battlefield 6 coming October 10th. The launch of the game was already set to be a pivotal. moment for the series and for EA itself, but especially so now as EA is set to go private in that $55 billion deal. Quote, EA's fate is tightly tied to Battlefield, New York University

Games professor Juist Van Drunen tells the verge. If Battlefield 6 underperforms, it will call into question the strength of EA's non-sports portfolio. At that point, the company faces pressure to rethink its strategy, perhaps even to divest and lean more heavily on the dependable sports business. It makes Battlefield, a bellwether that will tell us if EA can still compete in Blockbuster Shooters, end quote. The pressure for Battlefield 6 started building almost immediately after Battlefield 2042's disastrous 2021 debut. The multiplayer only 2042 added huge 128 player battles to a franchise already known for epic multiplayer skirmishes. But the game had a rough bug-filled launch that necessitated multiple patches shortly after release. EA moved quickly to put Vince Zampella, co-founder of Apex

legends maker, respawn entertainment, and former head of Call of Duty Studio Infinity Ward in charge of the Battlefield series to help write the ship. But the damage was already done. A few months after 2042 came out, EA CEO Andrew Wilson put things bluntly on an earnings call. The launch of Battlefield 2042 did not meet expectations. Even though EA is also known for titles like Mass Effect and Plants v. Zombies, most of its money comes from a small number of franchises along with add-ons like microtransactions and battle passes. Live service revenue is already big money for EA, according to its most recent quarterly earnings report.

83% of its net revenue came from live services and other. If Battlefield 6 is successful over the long term, that potentially makes the game a big cash cow for EA, end quote. No weekend bonus episode this weekend, but Monday is a holiday here in the U.S., so there will be no regular show on Monday, but I will have a bonus episode for you that day, an interview with the CEO of Rent the Runway. We don't get to talk about fashion much on this show.

So some fashion tech. Talk to you on Tuesday.