Company News in Brief
Shein's elusive boss hails Chinese roots in rare public appearance
The founder of Chinese fast-fashion giant Shein made a rare public appearance on Tuesday, as he re-affirmed his ties to Beijing and investments in the country's clothing industry.
Speaking at a business conference in Guangdong, home to many of China's garment factories, Xu Yangtian highlighted that Shein is investing 10bn yuan (£1.08bn; $1.45bn) in the province to create a high-tech fashion hub.
Xu praised the Chinese government and said "nourishment" from Guangdong has been "inseparable" from Shein's success.
His speech follows years of Shein focusing away from China, with the firm moving its headquarters to Singapore and pursuing a potential stock market listing in New York and London.
-BBC News
Paramount boosts Warner Bros' offer to rival Netflix in takeover bid
Paramount Skydance has boosted its proposal to buy Warner Bros Discovery, with an offer that could finally knock rival bidder Netflix out of the game.
Warner Bros, which put itself up for sale last year, said Paramount had agreed to increase its purchase offer by $1 per share, creating a bid that its board had determined "could reasonably be expected to lead to a ... superior proposal".
Warner Bros said it would engage in further talks before making a final decision about whether to abandon the deal it struck with Netflix in December.
Netflix, which would have four days to make a counter-offer, did not immediately comment.
-BBC News
Goldman and Citi see SA waiting to adopt rule on debt
South Africa’s finance minister is unlikely to formally adopt a fiscal anchor in this week’s budget, opting to wait until at least October to introduce the rule aimed at curbing public debt, according to a Bloomberg poll.
Enoch Godongwana pledged in November that he would finalise a proposal for a fiscal anchor this year, a step seen as crucial to putting South Africa’s debt-to-gross domestic product ratio on a sustained downward path. The metric is projected to peak in the current fiscal year.
Since 2021, the government has targeted a primary budget surplus – where revenue exceeds non-interest spending – and is on track to post a third consecutive positive balance this year, underscoring its push to restore fiscal credibility.
The National Treasury is likely to adopt a new debt rule “later this year or in 2027,” probably in the form of a legislated fiscal framework rather than a strict numerical target, Citigroup economist Gina Schoeman said.
-Bloomberg
Are China’s ‘AI tigers’ cheating? US rival Anthropic alleges some are
United States artificial intelligence firm Anthropic is accusing three prominent Chinese AI labs of illegally extracting capabilities from its Claude model to advance their own, claiming it raises national security concerns.
The Chinese unicorns – DeepSeek, Minimax and Moonshot AI – created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and trained their models using over 16 million exchanges with Claude, a process known as distillation, Anthropic alleged in a Monday blogpost.
CNN has reached out to DeepSeek, MiniMax and Moonshot AI for comment.
Distillation is a common method of training in the AI industry with frontier labs often distilling their own models to make cheaper versions for customers. But most leading proprietary AI model providers including Anthropic explicitly ban such practices. Claude is not available in China.
The accusations come after Anthropic’s rival OpenAI made similar allegations earlier this month that DeepSeek and other Chinese AI companies are illegally distilling its ChatGPT models over the past year, in a memo sent to the US House Select Committee on China.
-CNN Business
