Chinese AI firms rival US giants; OpenAI eyes 2027 robot

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Monday October nineteen, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: Chinese AI firms outpace US rivals in developer usage and spark a global price war, OpenAI confirms a humanoid robot with a 2027 demo target, a former OpenAI engineer faces court today over alleged covert recordings of superintelligence talks, Saudi Arabia hits the world's highest activation rate for a core internet security standard, and to close out two things you can try today: the free encrypted note app Cryptee and the privacy-friendly weather app Weawow. Let's start with the biggest shift in the AI market this morning.

Chinese AI firms now rival US giants in developer usage and ignite a global price war.

Samantha: The balance of power in AI just shifted in a way developers can feel in their wallets. Chinese AI companies are now accounting for nearly half of all AI model usage on a major developer platform, surpassing the combined share of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. The driver is simple: lower prices for comparable performance. Names like DeepSeek and Zhipu AI are leading that charge, and the US players are being pushed to cut their own prices in response. For anyone building with AI, this is the first real price war of the generative era.

Bob: And the knock-on effects go well beyond invoices. When the cheapest capable model sits in Hangzhou instead of San Francisco, developers route their traffic there, which pulls data, feedback loops and tooling into that ecosystem. US firms are now being forced into pricing moves they clearly wanted to delay. The bottom line is that model quality is converging faster than many expected, and the differentiator becomes cost, latency and how easy it is to plug a model into real products.

Samantha: There is also a trust layer that cannot be ignored. European firms weighing a switch to a Chinese provider have to think about where prompts are processed, what logging looks like, and how that lines up with GDPR and the AI Act. Cheaper tokens are attractive, but a bank or a hospital cannot just chase the lowest sticker price. Expect a split: hobby projects and prototypes flow toward the cheapest option, while regulated workloads stay with providers offering European hosting and clear data terms.

Bob: Which is why this story is more than a price chart. It is reshaping the strategic map. If Chinese models become the default for experimentation, the next generation of European developers grows up fluent in that stack. Policymakers in Brussels have been talking about sovereign AI capacity for two years; this is the week that abstract debate turns into a concrete commercial pressure. The question now is whether Europe answers with its own competitive offerings, or settles for being a careful customer of someone else's models.

Samantha: From a market in flux to a company stepping into entirely new territory. Let's talk about OpenAI's move into physical machines.

OpenAI officially confirms humanoid robot project with a demonstration targeted for 2027.

Bob: OpenAI has confirmed what the industry has whispered about for months: it is building a humanoid robot, with plans to demonstrate a working prototype in 2027. This is a significant expansion beyond language models into what the field calls embodied AI, machines that can move, grasp and interact with the physical world. The idea is to combine OpenAI's reasoning work with a robotic body capable of handling complex tasks. It puts the company in direct competition with Tesla, Figure, and the Chinese manufacturers already shipping units at scale.

Samantha: The 2027 date matters because it is both ambitious and cautious. Ambitious because building a reliable humanoid is genuinely hard; cautious because rivals are already in homes and factories. OpenAI is betting its edge in reasoning translates to better behaviour in the real world, where a robot has to decide, not just predict the next word. The commercial question is which market it targets first: industrial settings with controlled environments, or the much messier consumer home.

Bob: For Europe, this lands in an interesting spot. European robotics has strong industrial roots, from German factory automation to Swiss precision mechanics, but the continent has fewer players chasing general-purpose humanoids. An OpenAI robot could become a partner for European manufacturers or a competitor to their own ambitions, depending on how open the platform turns out to be. Regulators will also watch closely: safety rules for machines working alongside humans are stricter in the EU than in most places.

Samantha: And there is a labour conversation attached. The arrival of credible humanoid robots in warehouses and shops within two years forces governments to think about retraining and workplace standards now, not after deployment. A 2027 demo is still a demo, but it signals that the roadmap from lab to loading dock is shorter than many assumed.

Samantha: Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

Microsoft Pulls the Plug on a UK Data Centre Deal

Bob: Okay, so this one caught my eye over the weekend. Microsoft has apparently walked away from a deal with Nscale, the UK outfit building AI infrastructure. We're talking about renting roughly 23,000 Nvidia chips at a planned site in Essex.

Samantha: And the detail that matters is that Microsoft was the anchor tenant. That's the customer who makes the whole project bankable. Pull that out and you've got a very expensive building looking for a very large buyer.

Bob: Right, and the reporting says the project had been hit by repeated delays. So it's not necessarily Microsoft getting cold feet about AI in general. It might just be that the thing wasn't ready when it was supposed to be.

Samantha: Could be. But I'd be careful about reading it as purely a scheduling story. Lenders look at what anchor tenants do. If CoreWeave bonds are yielding north of fifteen percent, as we've seen this week, the money behind these builds is already getting nervous.

Bob: That's a fair point. The financing side of this whole boom has been getting a lot more attention lately. Who's lending, at what price, and who's actually committed to paying.

Samantha: Exactly that. A data centre isn't just chips. It's power connections, cooling, planning permission, grid capacity. In the UK especially, getting power to a site can take years. If the delays are on that side, no tenant can fix them.

Bob: So what happens to Nscale now? They've been the flagship name in the British AI infrastructure story.

Samantha: They'll need a new anchor, or they'll need to restructure. Plenty of companies want compute right now, so I wouldn't write the site off. But finding a replacement who'll commit at the same scale, on a project that's already late, is a harder pitch than the original one.

Bob: And politically, it's awkward. The UK government has been loud about wanting to be an AI hub, with those AI growth zones and big announcements with American tech firms.

Samantha: It is awkward. Announcements are easy. Switched-on racks full of GPUs are the part that's hard. And this is a reminder that a headline commitment and a delivered data centre are two very different things.

Bob: So we shouldn't over-read it, but we shouldn't shrug it off either.

Samantha: Correct. One cancelled deal isn't a trend. But set it next to the debt worries and the chip market wobble, and you can see why investors are asking sharper questions than they were six months ago.

Saudi Arabia hits a 99.8 percent activation rate for a core internet routing security standard.

Bob: Saudi Arabia has reached the world's highest activation rate for a technology called Resource Public Key Infrastructure Route Origin Validation, measured by the regional internet registry APNIC at 99.8 percent. In plain language, this is a system that checks whether the networks claiming to carry your internet traffic are actually authorised to do so. Without it, attackers can hijack routes and silently redirect traffic through networks they control. The Saudi Communications, Space and Technology Commission announced the milestone as part of a broader push on infrastructure security.

Samantha: Route hijacking sounds abstract, but the consequences are concrete. In past incidents, large chunks of banking, cloud and government traffic have been briefly rerouted through unrelated countries, exposing data in transit and knocking services offline. Validating routes at the registry level closes that door. It does not stop every attack, but it removes one of the oldest and most reliable tricks in the network attacker's toolkit. Reaching near-total adoption inside a country is genuinely rare.

Bob: For Europe, the comparison is uncomfortable. Adoption of this standard varies widely across EU member states, with some countries leading and others still well below half. The underlying technology is free and well-documented; the barrier is coordination between telecom operators, cloud providers and regulators. Saudi Arabia's result shows what is possible when a national regulator pushes hard and operators follow through.

Samantha: It also reframes who sets the pace on internet infrastructure. For years, that conversation was dominated by the US and a handful of European countries. A near-complete rollout in the Gulf is a signal that leadership on routing security is becoming genuinely global. European telecom regulators now have a concrete benchmark to point at when they ask operators why their own numbers are not higher.

Bob: To close out, two things you can actually use today, starting with a note-taking app that treats your words as yours.

Cryptee offers encrypted notes, documents and photo storage in one browser-based vault, run from Estonia without touching advertisers.

Samantha: Cryptee is an encrypted notes, documents and photo storage service that runs in your browser, built around end-to-end encryption, meaning the content is scrambled on your device before it ever leaves it. The company is based in Estonia, inside the European Union, and the project has long been open about how its encryption works. The free tier gives you a small amount of storage to try the service, and paid plans add more space. It runs in any modern browser on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android, so there is no installer to hunt down.

Bob: What makes it worth trying is that it keeps several things in one place. Your notes, your documents and your photos live in the same encrypted vault, instead of being scattered across a notes app, a cloud drive and a photo service that each want their own account. For anyone who takes meeting notes, keeps a personal journal, or jots down account details and scans of important papers, keeping that content encrypted end-to-end removes a whole category of worry.

Samantha: Practical details for European listeners: it is hosted in Europe, which fits neatly with how European privacy regulators think about data minimisation, and because the encryption happens on your device, even the company itself cannot read what you store. Cryptee also asks for very little from you when you sign up, which is the opposite of the usual data-hungry onboarding. Open it this afternoon, create a vault, upload a few existing notes or a handful of photos to test, and see whether it earns a permanent bookmark.

Bob: Reviewers who care about privacy keep pointing to its clear security model and its calm, uncluttered design, which is why it shows up in recommendation lists for journalists, lawyers and anyone who stores things they would rather not see leaked.

Samantha: And for the second pick, something completely different: the weather, done the way it should be done.

Weawow delivers clean, widget-friendly weather forecasts for your phone, free to use and without an account.

Bob: Weawow is a free weather app for Android and iPhone that puts a clear, good-looking forecast on your home screen. It is known for its large collection of customisable widgets, so you can see the temperature and conditions without even opening the app. There is no account to create, and the basic app is free, with a small optional purchase that removes the ads. Hourly and daily forecasts, precipitation, wind, humidity and sunrise and sunset times are all laid out simply.

Samantha: What sets it apart for European users is the choice of data sources. Many weather apps lock you into a single provider that may not be strongest where European listeners live. Weawow lets you switch between several weather data providers, so you can compare sources and keep the one that matches what you actually see outside your window in Rotterdam or Milan. For hikers, cyclists and anyone planning around the weather, that is a real quality jump.

Bob: It is also notably respectful of your phone. The app is light, easy on the battery, and it asks for little: location if you want local forecasts, and nothing that feels out of place for a weather app. There is a choice of themes and backgrounds, so you can make it look the way you like, and you can add as many locations as you want. People who switch from the default manufacturer weather app often say it is the first one they actually enjoy looking at.

Samantha: You can install it today from the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store. Set it up once, pick your preferred data source, add a widget to your home screen, and that is it. A simple, tidy app that does the job and stays out of your way.

Samantha: Today we covered: Chinese AI firms now rival US, OpenAI officially confirms humanoid robot project, Microsoft Pulls the Plug on a UK Data Centre Deal, Saudi Arabia hits a 99.8 percent, Cryptee offers encrypted notes, en Weawow delivers clean.

Bob: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech.eu or email us at info@doorzetters.net.

Bob: State of Tech, the tech world in 15 minutes.