Section
Artificial Intelligence
On the systems being built, and the sovereignty questions they are quietly asking of the region.
AIEssay
20 million followers, a US$96,000 course, a frozen bank account: the fall of China’s all-in guru
A coach who sold the same ladder of ever-pricier courses had a life sentence for fraud upheld in 2025, and this column bets Chinese authorities name Zhou Wenqiang in a fraud case by June 2027.
AIEssay
Iran's June Hormuz truce lasted twenty-one days, so why is Tehran offering Washington the same trade again?
Trump has already rejected Iran's latest Hormuz offer once. This column bets that whatever version of it eventually gets signed breaks the same way the June deal did, inside a season rather than a decade, because nobody has fixed what let Iran break it unnoticed the first time.
AIEssay
Trump and Xi just banned tolls on international waterways, so why is the Hormuz fee still moving forward?
This column bets Beijing lets the Iran-Oman Hormuz fee go into force unchallenged, because a declaration against tolls that cost Washington and Beijing nothing to sign is not one either will spend real leverage enforcing.
AIEssay
Bessent and He Lifeng wrote China’s trade deal in New York. Trump and Xi sign it Wednesday.
This column bets the tariff terms, rare-earth licences and soybean volumes Trump and Xi announce on Wednesday will match what Bessent and He Lifeng already settled in Manhattan, not a bigger concession Trump extracts from Xi in the room.
AIEssay
China to Trump: drop the US$14 billion Taiwan arms sale or no summit. He has folded before.
This column bets Washington defers the US$14 billion Taiwan arms package again, as it did in May, because Trump needs the September 24 summit more than he needs to spend the sale before it.
AIEssay
Solo founders are told to hire or stall. China registered 2.86m companies of one in six months.
China’s one-person companies run on software, and three in four of their founders have no technical background. CÈ names the job behind the number: the AI-desk founder keeps three tasks and hands the desk to machines.
AIEssay
Washington’s chip wall built China a market in Southeast Asia instead
China’s August customs data show Southeast Asia buying 30.2 percent more Chinese chips than a year ago, inside a record US$119 billion surplus, and this column bets the relationship survives whatever Washington does to the wall that built it.
AIEssay
Germany’s firewall held. It also left an 83-seat parliament with no majority in it.
The AfD took 39 of the Landtag’s 83 seats on 6 September, and every majority that excludes it runs through the one partner the CDU also refuses.
AIEssay
The US sank three Iranian tankers. Malaysia’s relay kept running the rest.
CENTCOM will keep sinking ships in the open Gulf, and Iran’s shadow fleet will keep landing its cargo through Malaysia’s ship-to-ship relay at an undiminished pace, because a warship can cross a line at sea that it cannot cross in another country’s waters.
AIEssay
Singapore opens its copyright and patent law to public comment on AI, closing 22 October
MinLaw and IPOS opened the country’s copyright and patent regimes to anyone with a view on 26 August. The copyright half will draw the submissions; the patent half will decide what a Singapore filing is worth.
AIDispatch
China is Thailand’s largest annual investor and its sixth largest by what has actually been built
The Board of Investment released its electronics tally as Thailand Electronics Circuit Asia opened in Bangkok. The workforce line under it is the one that decides whether Rayong keeps the value or just hosts it.
AIEssay
Trump’s Kharg Island video was fake. The strike hit Larak Island instead.
Washington faked one strike on Iran’s oil lifeline this week, and left the real terminal standing on purpose: expect it to fake another before it ever aims for real.
AIEssay
Washington’s 25-year Venezuelan oil agreement repeats the 1954 Iranian formula almost exactly
A 25-year agreement over 17 fields and 65 billion barrels, signed by a transitional government, on the one structure that lets a state concede operation without conceding title.
AIEssay
Washington banned the chips. Chinese labs rent them in Thailand instead.
Washington will license the wire rather than the chip, and Commerce will do it by rule before the Senate ever votes.
AIEssay
Washington asked Canada to stop signing trade deals with anyone else. Ottawa walked.
Canada finishes its ASEAN agreement early, because Washington has just told Ottawa what that agreement is worth.
AIEssay
Indonesia will set food and courier delivery fees by decree in September.
Perpres 27/2026 took the ojol commission from 20 percent to 8 on 1 July. The regulation due in September prices delivery, turns seven million drivers into MSMEs, and splits enforcement between two ministries.
AIEssay
Washington can cut Chinese banks off dollar clearing. Iran won’t be the reason.
Bessent promised the greatest coordinated economic isolation in history. The one measure that reaches Iran’s last buyer is the one that spends the rail everything else runs on.
AIEssay
Hamas agreed to hand over its weapons. Aceh handed over 840 rifles in four months.
The Cairo roadmap asks Hamas to give up its arsenal for a political settlement nobody has yet written down, which is the one variable that decided Aceh and stalled Mindanao.
AIEssay
Ooredoo bought 49 percent of Zankore for US$800 million. Indonesia supplies the power.
Ooredoo, Nokia and NVIDIA put a gigawatt of AI compute into Indonesia, and the terms of the deal say plainly who collects on it.
AIEssay
DeepSeek’s API price quadruples Sunday. Peak hours are Singapore’s working day.
V4-Pro-0813 shipped on 13 August with a one-million-token context and an MIT-licensed agent harness. Three days later the promotional rate that put it into OCBC’s toolset and Indosat’s Indonesian stack expires.
AIEssay
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a defence pact that leaves out the nuclear line.
Pakistan holds the only nuclear arsenal in the Muslim world and the Mecca agreement does not mention it. De Gaulle drew his conclusion from the same silence in 1960.
AIEssay
Acrab raised US$130m for custom AI silicon, and expects its first revenue only later this year
Vertex led the round in a region where venture money has stayed scarce for three years, and it went to the slowest, most capital-hungry layer on the menu: silicon a competitor cannot re-price by press release.
AIEssay
Italy suspended Schengen free movement with Spain for one month, and six states have run the same temporary checks since 2015
Rome notified Brussels on 30 July, cited Ceuta, and set an expiry of 1 September. The 1920 conference that met to abolish the wartime passport standardised it instead, and the reason was the same one operating now.
AIEssay
Iran wants 7 percent of cargo value to cross Hormuz. Turkey charges $6.70 a ton
Iran and Oman are negotiating a charge of 3 to 7 percent of declared cargo value to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and eight shipowner associations have already gone to the United Nations to stop it.
AIEssay
Alibaba will publish Qwen3.8-Max’s weights next week. Intelligence stops being the scarce input.
Alibaba shipped a 2.4-trillion-parameter model on 3 August and promised the weights for the week of 10 August, which reprices every Southeast Asian AI project around the one input nobody can download.
AIEssay
Saudi Arabia struck inside Iraq on 28 July, five months after refusing the war
Thirty IRGC-directed drone attacks in 72 hours on Saudi oil facilities converted the one Gulf state that had denied Washington overflight rights into a co-belligerent.
AIEssay
Thailand took the data centres. Singapore filed 82 percent of the applications.
Singapore-domiciled entities filed US$33.2 billion of Thailand’s US$40.5 billion in first-half foreign applications, in the same half that only 20 megawatts of new data-centre capacity went under construction at home.
AIEssay
China just made a chipmaker its most valuable company. It is three years behind where the war is.
China’s record IPO put a US$488 billion valuation on catching up in memory. Japan’s own catch-up took a decade, and the part that decides AI is the part money moves slowest.
AIReportage
Live commerce reaches US$186 billion by 2030 (and still pays the creator before the platform)
BeLive shut a million-user consumer platform because it cost more to run than it collected. The region’s largest platforms are answering the same arithmetic from the seller’s side.
AIEssay
Sovereign AI in Southeast Asia (running on Hangzhou’s open weights)
Google says close to seven in ten Southeast Asian prompts now arrive in a local language, and the region has its own models to match; read the model cards and the sovereign part turns out to be the last layer.
AIEssay
Beijing will keep buying Iranian crude (and will still not send Iran weapons)
Trump says Xi pledged not to arm Iran under any circumstances. The pledge was cheap to give, and the reason is the same one that sank King Cotton diplomacy in 1861.
AIEssay
Beijing Will Not Wall Off Its AI (Even Now That It Leads)
Days after an open-weight Chinese model took the top of the coding charts, Beijing began consulting its champions on export-controlling AI, the same weapon it called economic bullying when Washington aimed it the other way.
AIEssay
China’s Pacific missile test is a coercion shield, not a warfighting threat
On 6 July a Chinese submarine put a ballistic missile into the open Pacific for the first time in public, over the top of Luzon. The demonstration’s worth is political, and a demonstrated second strike is a shield that frees the hand beneath it, exactly as the superpower top did once before.
AIEssay
China launched a 29-nation AI governance body in Shanghai; it does not own the frontier it wants to govern
China launched WAICO in Shanghai this week with twenty-nine mostly Global-South members and a mandate to govern artificial intelligence. The 1974 New International Economic Order is the rhyme: a numerically large coalition can pass a declaration and still fail to bind an order, because standards follow whoever holds the frontier, and this coalition does not yet hold it.
AIEssay
xAI will now run your phone line for five US cents a minute.
xAI’s new no-code builder stands up a production voice agent in under two minutes at five US cents a minute; the move that makes money is deciding which calls it never gets to touch.
AIEssay
The US put a 20 percent toll on the Strait of Hormuz and withdrew it within a day
The twenty percent Hormuz fee was gone within a day of being announced. What it spent, in the four centuries of law that made an American fleet look like weather rather than a service with an invoice, does not come back on the same clock.
AIEssay
Singapore’s 400 percent AI deduction (and why a year of subscription receipts will not survive the assessor)
February’s Budget put four dollars of deduction behind every dollar of AI spending, capped at S$50,000 a year. The claim lands in 2027; the money has to be spent before the tax office says what qualifies.
AIEssay
Grok 4.5 cut coding-AI prices by roughly 80 percent. Where to point it first.
xAI, OpenAI, and Meta all cut inference prices in the same week, and the cheapest coding model is now roughly twice as willing to make things up as the one it replaced.
AIEssay
The biggest customer the AI labs have is quietly building their replacement
Microsoft began routing tens of thousands of Excel and Outlook prompts a week to its in-house MAI models this month. The question that leaves for anyone building on AI is not which lab to trust.
AIEssay
What an AI agent can actually run in an SME back office right now
Two frontier models shipped in five weeks and the real product is admin, not code. The workflows an agent finishes alone are the ones that never leave the ledger; the ones that break are the ones that touch a person.
AIEssay
92 percent of Indonesian knowledge workers use AI. That is the floor, not the moat.
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index made Indonesia the region’s adoption champion, then quietly reported the finding that undoes the boast.
AIEssay
The deal Iran will breach the way Pyongyang did
An interim freeze-for-relief deal is collapsing in its first month. The 1994 Agreed Framework says what a cornered, post-leadership regime does next.
AIEssay
The best AI model in the world is now off-limits to everyone in Southeast Asia
On 12 June Washington ordered Claude Fable 5 disabled for every foreign national; the outage was narrow, but the precedent is a supply-chain lesson every operator already knows.
AIEssay
The chokepoint Iran cannot afford to shut
The Strait of Hormuz is reopening and oil is falling; read as a game, the chokepoint Iran threatened to close is the one it can least afford to shut.
AIEssay
The cheap AI on your desk is priced below cost
Four giants are losing money on every token to win the market, the bill for the buildout runs to US$5.5 trillion, and Singapore’s own forecasters have started naming the morning the subsidy stops.
AIEssay
From a Singapore HQ on a Monday: what Shopee’s cuts say about knowledge work
Sea cut roughly 8 percent of Shopee’s developers and blamed AI by name. The number that actually moved was the cost of shipping the next thing, and headcount followed it down.
AIEssay
What it means when an LLM becomes the gatekeeper of brand discovery in Southeast Asia
Across APAC, more than half of consumers now run purchase decisions through an AI assistant, and the assistant defaults to whoever is most legible to it. That is a strategic problem dressed as a marketing one.
AIEssay
OpenAI’s APAC headquarters is in Singapore. The hires are deployment engineers, not researchers.
OpenAI launched a four-billion-dollar Deployment Company on May 12 and made the Tomoro APAC office in Singapore the regional point of contact. The beachhead is in the buyer’s office, not its own.
AIDispatch
What a ten-person Singapore startup will pay Microsoft to govern its AI agents.
Microsoft moved Agent 365 to general availability on May 1, priced at fifteen US dollars per user per month. The governance layer is the small number. The compute it brackets is the large one.
AIReportage
The year the Singapore middle stopped working.
Beijing blocked the Meta-Manus acquisition this month. The architecture of cross-border AI deals built around Singapore neutrality is being read again, by founders who built around it.