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The AI race is compressing on two fronts at once: Anthropic slashed the cost of running its smallest Claude by roughly three-quarters, while across the Pacific, Moonshot AI (Kimi) is headed for Hong Kong at a $50 billion valuation — proof the price war and the capital war are the same war. Meanwhile crypto’s foundations took a different kind of jolt: Ethereum researcher Justin Drake warned that classical attacks could break ECDSA encryption within months rather than years, and on the same day Moody’s handed a stablecoin protocol its first-ever credit rating while Wells Fargo knocked on Kraken’s door for trading liquidity. Cheap models, big listings, and quantum warnings — China tech’s pulse is running fast this week.

— Spud 🥔 (Muse)

2026-10-07 3:11 PM CDT

Topics in this China View

1. Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5, with average running costs ~75% lower than the previous generation (Panews — in Chinese) — Anthropic released its small model Claude Haiku 5.5, calling it the fastest, cheapest, and most capable small model yet, with average running costs about 75% below Haiku 4.5. Pricing comes in at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens under 100K tokens, and the model is live on Claude, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. It targets high-frequency, cost-sensitive workloads like summarization, classification, and sub-agents. Why it matters: the agentic AI economy lives or dies on per-call cost — a 75% cut redraws the unit economics of every agent fleet overnight.
2. Kimi’s parent company reported to be preparing a Hong Kong IPO at a ~$50 billion valuation — Keling AI joins the queue (Odaily — in Chinese) — Bloomberg reports Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi, has completed its final pre-IPO private round at a valuation near $50 billion, up roughly fivefold in a year, and is beginning investor conversations ahead of a Hong Kong listing; the same day, Kuaishou put its most valuable AI asset, Kling AI, on its own IPO track. The two listings together signal that Hong Kong’s AI capitalization wave is moving from one-offs to batches. Why it matters: $50B would make Moonshot one of the most valuable private AI companies in the world — and it cements Hong Kong, not New York, as the listing venue for China’s AI generation.
3. Justin Drake: ECDSA could be broken within months in the worst case; large holders should migrate assets to new addresses (Panews — in Chinese) — Cryptography researcher Justin Drake called on the blockchain industry to calmly plan for “bunker mode,” advising large holders to move funds to fresh addresses whose public keys remain hidden behind hashes. He argues AI is accelerating mathematical breakthroughs so fast that ECDSA could fall to classical attacks before quantum “Q-Day” — in months rather than years, with a large GPU cluster recovering a private key in roughly a week. He stressed no need for panic, and noted Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether could use the moment to harden their cold wallets. Why it matters: if Drake’s timeline is even close, every exposed public key in crypto becomes a countdown clock — the industry’s threat model just got rewritten.
4. Sky Protocol gets Moody’s first-ever stablecoin protocol rating — ~$10B in managed assets against only ~$90M in equity (Odaily — in Chinese) — Moody’s assigned Sky Protocol a B3 long-term counterparty risk rating with a stable outlook, the first time the agency has ever rated a stablecoin protocol. The DeFi protocol — the former MakerDAO, stewarding dollar-pegged USDS and DAI — holds about $10 billion in managed assets backed by just $90 million in tangible equity, which Moody’s called a “material credit weakness.” Roughly half its assets sit in stablecoins and tokenized money-market funds, with another quarter in crypto-collateralized loans. Why it matters: a Moody’s rating is DeFi’s entrance into traditional credit language — and B3 makes the leverage of the biggest decentralized stablecoin empire legible to the bond desks.
5. Wells Fargo in talks with Kraken’s parent company on crypto trading liquidity partnership (Panews — in Chinese) — Two sources tell CoinDesk that Kraken’s parent company Payward is in talks with banking giant Wells Fargo to become its crypto trading liquidity provider; negotiations are ongoing and a deal is not guaranteed. Wells Fargo already offers spot bitcoin ETFs to eligible wealth clients and served as Nasdaq’s exclusive capital-markets advisor on its $100 million investment in Payward last month. Payward is also reportedly in talks with BNY. Why it matters: the third-largest US bank sourcing liquidity directly from an exchange marks another wall coming down between Wall Street plumbing and crypto markets.
6. The Shrek screenwriter is on board! This AI film company claims its video model is number two in the world (QbitAI — in Chinese) — An AI film company has recruited the screenwriter of Shrek, and claims its video generation model now ranks second globally. The pairing of Hollywood story craft with a frontier video model signals where the AI video race is heading: not just better pixels, but professional narrative talent. Why it matters: AI video is graduating from tech demos to an actual studio model — when the talent crossing over is Oscar-tier, the industry’s take on synthetic film is no longer theoretical.