How a Chinese state-sponsored group used AI to automate a cyberattack
Press Clips #38 - November 18, 2025
Delivered to your inbox every Monday, Press Clips is a rundown of the previous week’s happenings in politics and technology in America. News, opinion, podcasts, and more, to bring you up to speed for the week ahead.
TOP STORY
Anthropic prevented a cyberattack, believed to have originated with a Chinese state-backed group.
The hackers tricked the AI model into believing it was performing defensive cybersecurity tasks for a company.
They then had Claude write custom code to find exploits, targeting high-value datasets.
It’s the first documented case of an AI-automated cyberattack in the real-world.
POLICY
OpenAI sent a letter to White House director of science and technology policy, Michael Kratsios, asking the Trump administration to expand tax credits to cover data centers.
A group of senators, led by Jim Banks (R-IND) are trying to push the GAIN AI Act through as an independent piece of legislation.
US chip restrictions are hitting hard, with Beijing intervening in the distribution of Chinese domestic chip manufacturers’ output, to help manage excess demand.
Reps. Guthrie (R-KY) and Joyce (R-PA) announced an Energy and Commerce committee hearing on the safety of AI chatbots.
“The rapid advancement of AI holds tremendous promise for the future, but recent stories about AI chatbots’ interactions with users have raised serious concerns about the potential impact of chatbot use on the health and wellbeing of those who engage with these platforms”
Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA) and other Senate Dems are calling for FERC to step in and protect consumers from rising prices, amid the data center explosion.
U.S. ITC is deciding whether the updated Apple Watch should be banned, as part of Apple’s patent dispute with the medical monitoring company Masimo.
TECH
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) posted its slowest monthly revenue growth in more than a year.
Samsung is hiking memory chip prices by 30-60%, unable to meet demand amid the AI data center race.
ASML CEO says that the company hasn’t been affected by tensions with China, over the Dutch governments takeover of chipmaker Nexperia.
The AI data center explosion continues:
Anthropic are looking to spend $50 billion on data centers, starting in Texas and New York.
Meta is planning to spend $600 billion on AI data center buildout.
Google plans to spend $40 billion on Texas data centers.
Microsoft announced a new data center, Fairwater, in Atlanta, GA.
OpenAI released GPT-5.1. Contrary to previous model releases, they did not release benchmarks.
The company are also fighting a court order that would require them to hand over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT logs, as part of its copyright infringement lawsuit with the New York Times.
Yann LeCun is leaving Meta to launch his own company.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast to talk about AGI, data center CapEx, and Microsoft’s AI strategy.
TOP READS
📊 Build times for gigawatt-scale data centers can be 2 years or less (Epoch AI)
✍️ Thoughts on US-China competition (Dean Ball)
📊 The Myth of China’s “AI Talent Pipeline” (ChinaTalk)
✍️ The underlying shifts in the Datacenter Processing Market (Semiconductor Business Intelligence)
✍️ Silicon Oasis: How Abu Dhabi Plays Both Sides of US-China (ChinaTalk)
✍️Why Google, Coca-Cola, and other companies have embraced AI-generated ads (Understanding AI)
✍️ Bargaining Chips: Could the EU Leverage ASML to Influence U.S. AI Policy? (AI Policy Bulletin Newsletter)
🎥 Securing Taiwan’s Energy Supply (SCSP)
✍️The key driver of the AI Bubble (Tomas Pueyo)
✍️ Are we ready for a rogue AI attack? We should be (James Pethokoukis)
✍️ Rereading Stanford’s 2025 AI Index (ChinAI Newsletter)
✍️ Claude can identify its ‘intrusive thoughts’ (Transformer News)
✍️ AI tutors should not approximate human tutors (AI Policy Perspectives)
Thanks for reading!