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Robotic performers at China’s Spring Festival Gala experienced visible timing and control problems during a high-profile debut, provoking ridicule online and complicating a carefully staged narrative of technological prowess. The episode underscores the gap between lab demonstrations and live, large-scale applications and suggests a need for more cautious, incremental public deployments of robotics.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that Israel and the United States carried out a joint strike on Iran on Feb. 28, an action Israeli officials described as pre-emptive. Iran responded by launching missiles toward Israel, marking a dangerous escalation that raises the risk of wider regional conflict and greater American entanglement.

China has released a national standard system for humanoid robots and embodied intelligence that covers the full supply chain and lifecycle, aiming to accelerate commercialization and regulate safety and ethics. The move arrives as domestic firms show technical progress and growing orders, but the field’s core AI 'brain' remains a bottleneck that will determine whether humanoids reach mass production.

Ships from the PLA Navy’s Eastern Theater Command conducted a far‑sea exercise that combined gunnery, underway replenishment and a ship‑air rescue drill. The manoeuvre demonstrates growing Chinese capacity for sustained, integrated naval operations beyond near seas and serves as a calibrated signal to regional and global navies.

Israeli media say Iran’s army commander Amir Hatami was killed in Israeli strikes, a claim Tehran has not confirmed. Iran says it has struck U.S. military bases across the Middle East, with reported missile attacks in Bahrain and explosions in the UAE and Kuwait, raising the risk of a wider regional escalation that could draw in U.S. forces and disrupt global trade.

Explosions in Tehran on 28 February preceded Israeli claims of a joint U.S.-Israeli "preventive" strike, while Washington has concentrated the largest U.S. sea and air force presence in the region since 2003. The mobilization — carrier groups, stealth fighters, tanker relocations and a new loitering‑munitions task force — raises the stakes and the risk of wider regional war and economic disruption.

China’s defence ministry has criticised Japan’s moves to revise security doctrines and arms-export rules, calling them a resumption of dangerous nationalism and urging the world to resist a “new Japanese militarism.” Beijing framed its own actions as defensive while warning that Tokyo’s political shift could erode the post‑war order and raise regional tensions.

A deadly exchange of fire along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border on 26 February prompted a US statement backing Pakistan’s right to self‑defence and condolences to Pakistani officials. The UN called for diplomatic resolution, while the incident raises concerns about escalation along an already volatile frontier.

Chinese students in Tehran reported close-range explosions, disrupted communications and interrupted travel plans after U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on 28 February. China’s embassy had issued a prior warning and is coordinating contingency measures as students consider overland evacuation routes if flights remain suspended.

China’s economy grew 5.0% in 2025 to about 140.2 trillion yuan ($19.6 trillion), driven by services and export resilience even as a deep real‑estate correction and a first population decline in decades weigh on domestic demand. Industrial upgrading and a rapid clean‑energy expansion — notably in solar, wind and new‑energy vehicles — stand out, while investment and fiscal indicators point to a cautious, targeted policy approach.

Meta has paused work on a high‑end internal AI training chip, Olympus, after design and stability issues, opting instead for a simpler internal design and large purchases from AMD, Nvidia and Google. The move underscores the difficulty of competing with Nvidia’s performance and software ecosystem and signals a pragmatic industry shift toward external partnerships to secure AI compute capacity.

Trump Media is preparing to spin off Truth Social into a separate publicly listed company as it pursues a high‑risk pivot into fusion energy following a $6 billion merger with TAE Technologies. The split aims to create two focused businesses but raises questions about monetisation, investor appetite and the political ramifications of placing a major pro‑Trump platform under public‑company rules.

Nvidia is designing a new class of chips optimized for AI inference, prioritizing latency, throughput and energy efficiency for real‑time model serving. The move aims to lower the cost of running large models at scale and strengthens Nvidia’s position across the AI value chain while intensifying competitive and geopolitical pressures in the semiconductor industry.

OpenAI says ChatGPT has reached 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million paid subscribers, as subscription additions accelerated early in the year. The announcement coincided with a roughly $110 billion financing round led by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, lifting OpenAI’s pre‑money valuation to about $730 billion and underscoring both the opportunity and the cost of scaling generative AI globally.

Nvidia posted another extraordinary quarter, yet its stock tumbled as investors worried the company’s GPU advantage is shrinking. Structural shifts — from training to inference, rising alternative silicon and cloud providers’ vertical integration — are compressing margins and forcing Nvidia to seek new revenue streams while defending its core franchise.

President Trump warned on February 27 that he must make a "major decision" on Iran, expressing frustration with stalled nuclear talks and repeatedly keeping military force on the table. The comments coincided with renewed U.S. military deployments to the Middle East, evacuation orders from Israel, and travel advisories — moves that have heightened the risk of confrontation.

President Trump ordered all U.S. federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI products immediately, with a six-month phase-out for certain defence-related uses and threats of civil and criminal penalties. The move raises legal, operational and geopolitical questions about how governments procure and regulate advanced AI systems.

Alibaba Cloud has open-sourced CoPaw, a desktop AI-agent toolkit that enables custom Skills, local-model integration and native connections to multiple messaging platforms, with one-click local or cloud deployment. The move aims to accelerate enterprise adoption of customised agents while funnelling successful deployments toward Alibaba’s cloud and Qianwen models.

The United States has intensified military deployments and public accusations against Iran, raising alarms that Washington may be following an Iraq‑war playbook of overstating threat to justify intervention. International agencies and some intelligence assessments contradict claims of an imminent Iranian nuclear or intercontinental missile threat, while signs of Israeli‑U.S. coordination and low domestic support for new foreign wars complicate the picture.

Several European countries, including Cyprus and Belgium, have issued travel advisories urging citizens to avoid travel to Iran and other parts of the Middle East and to leave the country if already present. The coordinated warnings reflect governments’ rising concern about regional instability and have immediate practical and diplomatic implications for travel, commerce and consular operations.