China Telecom's TeleOCR Tops Global Document Parsing Benchmarks

Hirundo, an AI safety lab specializing in machine unlearning, released Westernized versions of Alibaba's Qwen open-weight models with Chinese Communist Party political alignment removed directly from the model weights. On Hirundo's evaluation, the original Qwen3.6-35B-A3B produced CCP-aligned censorship, propaganda-aligned framing or political bias in 89.8% of responses across a 500-prompt benchmark, while the Westernized model did so in 2.8%, with reasoning, coding and instruction-following performance essentially unchanged. The reduction held on two external benchmarks, with refusals on DECCP falling from 65.26% to 3.16% and non-compliance on ChinaBench falling from 96.67% to 6.67%, and the same method cut CCP-aligned responses in the much smaller Qwen3.5-4B from 89.2% to 1.2%. On GPQA, IFBench, LiveCodeBench and MMLU-Pro, the Westernized model's scores stayed within 0.72 points of the original model's on average, and its safety and harmfulness benchmark scores also held. Both models are available now on Hugging Face as Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Westernized and Qwen3.5-4B-Westernized, and Hirundo intends to release its CCPC-500 benchmark publicly.

Meta Platforms is expanding its Muse AI product into a small-business offering and weighing new fees and subscriptions, President and Vice Chairman Dina Powell McCormick told CNBC on Wednesday. McCormick said Muse has become the No. 1 downloaded app on the App Store, with millions of downloads since launch, and that unlike traditional AI tools it can act on users' behalf by planning travel, handling tasks and completing transactions. The new Muse for Small Business can start customer conversations, manage cash flow and inventory, build websites and communicate directly with customers, giving Meta access to roughly 200 million small-business owners already using its platforms. McCormick cited Meta's 3.6 billion daily users and said the company is considering charging a fee when Muse helps users save money, and could pursue subscriptions as engagement increases. Meta is integrating partners including Shopify, Slack and Walmart into Muse, and McCormick said small businesses using it report reclaiming one to three hours each day.

Alibaba has unveiled Qwen Intelligence, a full-stack agentic solution for smartphone makers, with HONOR as the first partner to adopt it on October 1, 2026, and the two are jointly developing specialized models as well as solutions for next-generation AI smartphones. HONOR's first devices to integrate Qwen Intelligence with the phone's own intelligent system are the Magic9 Series smartphones launched on September 28 and the HONOR Robot Phone. The platform was launched at the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, spanning from mobile-optimized foundation models to ready-to-use agents, with three agents in the first phase: the Mobile Planner Agent, the Mobile-Use Agent, and the Mobile Creative Agent. Steven Hoi, head of Qwen Mobile AI at Token Foundry and vice president of Alibaba Token Hub, said the agentic smartphone is the primary gateway connecting personal AI to the physical world. The collaboration between Alibaba and HONOR, built on Qwen Intelligence and the MagicOS operating system, enables HONOR's AI smartphones to achieve task accuracy of up to 91.8% and to coordinate complex workflows of more than 100 steps.

OpenAI announced on September 30 that it had suffered a "distillation attack" in which its AI model outputs were used to improperly train another model. The company believes the attack was mainly carried out by individuals associated with the Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI. According to OpenAI, the attack began on July 1, with the attacker attempting to extract the internal reasoning process of its AI models, but it succeeded in stopping the effort on July 28. As countermeasures, it tightened the registration process for its services and strengthened network monitoring.

Meta's Muse AI agent surpassed 5 million downloads as of Wednesday, less than a month after its Sept. 8 launch, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The service, currently available only in the US and Canada, hit the mark faster than OpenAI's ChatGPT, which took 56 days, SpaceX's Grok at 103 days, and Anthropic's Claude at 492 days. Muse also remains the number one app on both Apple's App Store and Google Play Store, though Sensor Tower notes Disney+, HBO Max, Threads, Candy Crush, Pokémon Go, and Fortnite all exceeded 5 million downloads within the same time frame. Meta has fueled the growth with in-house advertising, giving Muse 50% of daily house impressions between Sept. 14 and Sept. 27, making it one of the top 15 brands by advertising impression in the US during that period. The app is free to download and use, with Meta saying it will eventually take a small cut of sales made through the agent.