Huawei: The tech giant is hoping its new phone can revive sales

9/26/23 8:00PM

Missing phone

‍On Monday, Huawei held its own big product launch, just a few weeks after Apple debuted its latest iPhone range. The Chinese tech giant made a lot of noise about new $200+ earbuds, and even teased 2 new electric vehicles, but conversation around the company’s new 5G phone, the Mate 60 Pro, was much more muted — with no new information on the gadget that should be a flagship product.

Thousands of fans took to Chinese social media to voice their anger, as the launch event became the hottest topic on Weibo — garnering 6 billion views on 1.6 million related posts. However, even though the 36-year-old company wasn’t shouting about it, the new handset is reportedly powering a sales surge for Huawei after revenues slipped in the last 2 years.

‍Dialing down

‍But it wasn’t just Huawei superfans who were keen to hear more about the new phone. The Mate 60 smartphone series, which was quietly launched by the Chinese tech giant last month, reportedly comes with a highly advanced semiconductor chip — sparking concerns in Washington that Huawei has circumnavigated US sanctions aimed at curbing China’s access to advanced chipmaking tools.

‍Huawei’s efforts to shift focus to its cloud and automotive divisions have helped sales grow in its most recent quarters — but the tech giant is likely to remain at the center of the sensitive tit-for-tat trade wars between the US and China for some time to come.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5