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AI in ASIA
Wednesday, 4 March 2026

3Before9

3 must-know AI stories before your 9am coffee

Who should pay attention

AI ethics boards | Government contractors | Tech workers | Enterprise AI buyers | Students | Emerging markets | Semiconductor industry | Data centre operators

What changes next

The debate around ethical AI development and its military applications will intensify.

1

Anthropic Draws a Line in the Sand, and Pays the Price

The biggest AI story of the year so far. Anthropic refused to let the Pentagon use Claude for fully autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance of Americans. The Trump administration responded by labelling the company a "supply-chain risk to national security," effectively banning any government contractor from working with Anthropic. OpenAI moved in within hours to fill the gap, though Sam Altman later admitted it "looked opportunistic and sloppy." Tech workers across Google, OpenAI and the wider industry are now circulating open letters demanding clearer limits on military AI use. Meanwhile, consumers voted with their downloads: Claude hit number one on the Apple App Store.

Why it matters for Asia

For enterprise AI buyers across Asia, this week crystallised a question every procurement team will now face: what are the ethical limits baked into the tools you are buying, and who decides?

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2

Apple's Cheapest Mac Ever Lands Today

Apple is holding its "Special Experience" media events in New York, London and Shanghai this morning, with the star of the show expected to be its first budget MacBook, powered by an A18 Pro chip rather than the M-series. Pricing is expected to land well below the $999 MacBook Air, potentially as low as $799, with colourful finishes aimed squarely at students and Chromebook switchers.

Why it matters for Asia

Education budgets and price sensitivity have historically kept Apple out of institutional and mid-market buying decisions across Southeast Asia. If Apple Intelligence now runs on a sub-$800 laptop, the on-device AI conversation in schools, SMEs and government shifts meaningfully.

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3

NVIDIA Bets $4 Billion on Light

Jensen Huang has put $2 billion each into photonics companies Lumentum and Coherent, securing multi-year purchase commitments and manufacturing capacity for silicon photonics: the technology that moves data using light rather than copper. At the scale of gigawatt AI factories, the interconnects between chips become the constraint, and NVIDIA is locking down the supply chain before scarcity becomes a growth limiter.

Why it matters for Asia

For Asian data centre operators and cloud providers building AI infrastructure, this signals where the next hardware premium is heading: not just GPUs, but the optical networking that ties them together.

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Recent Editions

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Tuesday

10 March 2026

  • 1.Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), co-founded by Yann LeCun, secured over $1 billion in seed funding to develop AI systems that reason from real-world data, with initial applications in healthcare, robotics, and industrial automation.
  • 2.AMI has established offices in Paris, New York, Montreal, and Singapore, with the Singapore hub strategically positioned to serve future Asian clients and leverage regional investment.
  • 3.Japanese government has prioritised 61 goods and technologies for state investment, including physical AI, signifying a strategic move to bolster national technological capabilities and economic growth.
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Tuesday

10 March 2026

  • 1.The Trump administration is pressuring US states to align their AI regulations with a national deregulatory agenda through today's Department of Commerce and Federal Trade Commission reports.
  • 2.States face the potential loss of up to $21 billion in federal broadband infrastructure funds if their AI laws are deemed inconsistent with the federal framework.
  • 3.The US government seeks to establish a singular federal AI standard, replacing disparate state laws, but short-term uncertainty remains as existing state laws persist until court challenges are resolved.
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Monday

9 March 2026

  • 1.OpenAI's head of robotics resigned due to the company's decision to deploy its AI models on the Pentagon's classified cloud networks, citing a lack of clear guardrails for domestic surveillance and lethal autonomy.
  • 2.This high-profile departure highlights growing internal dissent within OpenAI regarding ethical governance and the rapid implementation of AI technologies in sensitive sectors.
  • 3.The incident underscores that governance concerns are not merely external criticism but represent a significant internal operational risk for AI vendors and enterprise buyers alike.
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Friday

6 March 2026

  • 1.GPT-5.4 offers native computer use, achieving 75% on the OSWorld-Verified benchmark, surpassing human performance.
  • 2.It boasts a 1 million token context window, direct integrations with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, and a 47% reduction in token usage for specific agentic tasks.
  • 3.OpenAI’s new model matches or exceeds human professionals in 83% of 44 evaluated occupations, according to their GDPval benchmark.
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Thursday

5 March 2026

  • 1.Apple launched the MacBook Neo, a new budget-friendly laptop priced from $599, featuring the A18 Pro chip and a 13-inch Liquid Retina display.
  • 2.OpenAI released GPT-5.3 Instant, an updated ChatGPT model designed to be less preachy, with reduced moralising and fewer conversational preambles.
  • 3.This update also reportedly decreased hallucinations by 26.8% when utilising web search, suggesting an improvement in model accuracy and user experience.
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Tuesday

3 March 2026

  • 1.Claude experienced a significant global outage yesterday, affecting various services including its app, Code, console, and government platforms.
  • 2.Anthropic attributed the outage to "unprecedented demand" and confirmed that while the core enterprise API was mostly stable, some methods malfunctioned.
  • 3.This incident highlights the critical need for enterprise AI buyers to implement robust failover strategies and consider multi-provider fallbacks to mitigate supply-side reliability risks.
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