China
Assorted links for 1 October 2026
Seven links: a new complexity index finds Japan and China lead different halves of the AI-export supply chain, a 10-country survey finds most public servants already use AI while few trust their government's use of it, Uruguay's AI-readiness ranking, a Canadian policy magazine on AI flooding public consultations, Argentina and Delaware's competing proposals for AI legal personhood, a critical read of Ghana's AI strategy, and content-authenticity standards reaching consumer phones.
Generative AI raised homework scores and lowered exam scores for 26,811 Chinese students
A CEPR working paper tracked 26,811 Chinese secondary students for 30 months and found generative AI raised homework scores while lowering exam and entrance-exam performance, concentrated among the students whose usage pattern looked like outsourcing the work.
Assorted links for 7 September 2026
Seven links: a European Commission expert review on AI's divides across member states, infrastructure for governing AI agents, a paediatric chest X-ray model whose sensitivity falls from 95.1 to 6.2 per cent across countries, smartphone oral cancer screening in India, AI policy priorities across Africa, a benchmark for simulating governance policy, and Nigeria's sovereign AI agenda at GITEX.
Assorted links for 5 September 2026
Nine links: safety frameworks that miss dialects and mistranslate a diagnosis, an argument about the words the field uses, a scenario for China to 2036, agent design against human oversight, what 33 parliaments say about AI and work, a New York audit, Austrian plans to automate official notices, a Colombian official on digitalised procedures, and how unevenly frontier AI exposure falls across economies.
Assorted links for 2 September 2026
Six links: six Indian digital public infrastructure systems with no forum for public participation, the IMF on cyber losses and financial stability, OpenAI pausing reinforcement learning for two weeks, where the world's data centre capacity sits, a review of 122 studies on holding language models to account, and a proposal to work out which rules apply before a system acts.
Assorted links for 1 September 2026
Five links: four scenarios for an AI economy, the 10 trillion won South Korea put behind a free public AI service, where the largest open models are built, what six months of use does to a working pattern, and what workshop participants feared disclosure would cost them.
Five of 475 studies on surgical AI in poorer countries came from low-income countries
A scoping review gathered 475 studies of artificial intelligence in surgical care across low-income and middle-income countries. 305 came from China, five came from low-income countries, and 12 reported reaching a real patient care pathway.
African developers chose Chinese models before any government signed anything
Ten African countries signed an AI pact with China in Shanghai in July. The adoption it looks like it caused had already happened, in the hands of developers who could download the weights while the American onboarding queue was still running.
An AI exposure estimate was checked against vacancy data, and it moved the same way
AI exposure scores are hypotheses, and their value lies in predicting correctly. Here is one that was checked against vacancy data, and moved the same way.
Consultation is the cheap rung
The obvious objection to an 81,000-person AI consultation is representativeness. It is the weaker objection, and my own research is why.
China's 29-country AI alliance, and what it is buying
China closed the World AI Conference in Shanghai by launching a 29-country AI alliance. A few weeks earlier, at the G7, Anthropic and Google DeepMind called for an American-led coalition.
An RCT on patient-facing medical AI, and what it measured
A randomised trial in China (n = 2,069), published in Nature Medicine, tested an LLM chatbot that conducts the patient intake interview before a specialist visit and hands the clinician a structured summary.