Video games: China's government is not a fan for kids

8/31/21 8:00PM

It's usually parents that are telling kids to stop playing video games, but in China this week it was the government. The CCP announced that minors would be banned from being able to play video games on weekdays, limiting them to just 3 hours most weekends.

The move comes after a state-owned media outlet described video games as "spiritual opium", and builds on earlier restrictions for young gamers, as China's government shows increasing concern about the influence of technology and video games on the country's economy and young people.

Tech crackdown continues

‍This latest move has followed months of increased scrutiny of China's burgeoning tech sector by the Chinese government, which has been flexing its authority in a wide-ranging set of policies designed to curb the power of large corporations in China. Those measures have sent the share price of Tencent, a tech giant and the world's largest gaming company, down more than 40% since February. That's at a time when almost all other global tech share prices have been doing the exact opposite — grinding higher.

The shift in focus to "curb capitalism" was arguably kickstarted in a speech given by Jack Ma, China's most famous entrepreneur, last October. Ma criticized Chinese regulators and some state-owned banks. Then he disappeared for a few months. Then Beijing pulled the plug on the eve of his company's IPO, with Ant Group literally just 2 days away from trading, leaving investors in total limbo.

For big tech the last 6 months have been a not-so-gentle reminder of who is running things in China.

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.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

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The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

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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