Huawei Is Betting on the Future with HarmonyOS

(Samm Sacks – Lawfare) As Presidents Trump and Xi prepare to meet at the end of March—forging a possible detente in the U.S.-China relationship—a storm is brewing beneath the surface of this fragile stability. It is on full display in the first sentence of America’s AI Action Plan unveiled last July: “The United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence (AI)”. The U.S. has not softened its quest for dominance, while China’s leadership is pushing ahead on aggressive targets for AI adoption in plans unveiled at the National People’s Congress last week. In particular, there has been a proliferation of activity in China in agentic AI development: ByteDance’s new agentic AI smartphone; Manus, an AI agent developed from a Wuhan-based startup (recently acquired by Meta); Alibaba’s Qwen model series; and now, Huawei’s new system for coordinating agents built around its homegrown operating system, Harmony. Another recent piece in Lawfare examines how China is grappling with unprecedented challenges to data security and privacy with the rise of AI agents—resulting in a tug of war to shape future agentic AI rules among Chinese tech platforms, AI developers, and superapps. How this new balance of power evolves could have far-reaching implications for China’s fiercely competitive domestic internet economy, with global ripple effects. – Huawei Is Betting on the Future with HarmonyOS | Lawfare