The offshore GPU loophole + a court frees AI agents

The Bureau of Industry and Security, the US Commerce Department's export-enforcement arm, is reviewing how Chinese AI companies reach Nvidia hardware by renting computing power housed in other countries — an arrangement that is not currently illegal under the export rules. Southeast Asia is the focus, with operators in Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore leasing chips to Chinese clients; the Singaporean firm Megaspeed is already under investigation. Nvidia, which has said the controls already cost it the world's second-largest market, would fight any limit on overseas data-center access.

In an August 4 opinion, the Ninth Circuit vacated the injunction that had kept Perplexity's Comet browser off Amazon, holding that Amazon was unlikely to win its claim under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The panel found it was the user, not Perplexity, who accessed Amazon's computers, because the assistant reads screenshots on the user's own device rather than talking to Amazon's servers. It is the first federal appellate ruling on whether AI agents may act on a user's behalf across third-party sites. The court called the result fact-specific and left Amazon's contract claims alive.

Michael Thomas of the Distilled newsletter identified Amazon as the customer behind GW Ranch, a 35-turbine, 7.65-gigawatt gas plant in Pecos County, West Texas, developed by Pacifico Energy to power a new data center campus. Texas granted the air permit in January, allowing 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year — more than any existing US power plant, though operators rarely emit their full allowance. Amazon says generating its own power means the site "won't raise electricity costs for Texas families." Land clearing began in late July.

Reuters reports that Alibaba plans to require large commercial users of the open-weight Qwen3.8-Max to hand back a share of the revenue they earn from it, arriving alongside a weights release expected within days. The model carries 2.4 trillion total parameters and 95 billion active ones, and the rate is still being negotiated. It follows Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 license, which makes anyone selling the model as a service above $20 million in annual revenue sign a commercial agreement — more evidence that Chinese open weights now arrive with commercial strings attached.

A Microsoft filing disclosed that OpenAI generated $24.1 billion in sales for the company during the fiscal year that ended in June. Bloomberg estimates that is more than half — and probably close to 70 percent — of Microsoft's actual AI revenue, covering Azure capacity OpenAI buys, revenue-share payments and other commercial terms. That is a concentration that makes the partnership look less like one large customer among many and more like the AI business itself. Microsoft would only confirm the figure covers all sales and revenue share from OpenAI.

OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, whose product converts prompts, notes, documents or research into an editable slide deck. Terms were not disclosed, and the deal actually closed earlier in the year; the team is already working on ChatGPT. Founder Ahmed Beshry previously co-founded Caper AI, which Instacart bought in 2021. Slide-building is one of the few common office chores ChatGPT still handles poorly, which makes it a conspicuous gap for OpenAI to close by purchase rather than by training.