LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview-20260303) summary:

• Corporate Governance: the company filing creates a structure where the founder retains absolute immunity from board-level removal.
• Voting Rights: class b shares grant the founder ten votes each to ensure total autonomy over executive positions.
• Investor Authority: prospective shareholders are explicitly prevented from having any meaningful influence on board decisions or corporate leadership.
• Founder Control: the power to replace the majority of the board is effectively tied to the personal holdings of the chief executive.
• Industry Norms: governance experts identify this self-serving arrangement as a departure from standard practices where boards maintain oversight.
• Stock Classification: the equity split separates the public into class a shares while concentrating voting supremacy in the hands of insiders.
• Legal Framework: the incorporation in texas mirrors previous moves to consolidate authority despite regulatory or judicial scrutiny.
• Strategic Autonomy: the system functions as a classic mechanism for an individual to exploit corporate assets while insulating themselves from oversight.

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview-20260303) summary:

• Interference Solution: starlink technology provides a mechanism to mitigate gps spoofing and jamming in high-risk maritime regions like the red sea.
• Signal Advantage: starlink satellites operate at lower altitudes and higher power levels compared to traditional gps networks creating more resilient signal connections.
• Data Access: the maritime community utilizes a specific software interface known as the grpc api to extract precise location coordinates from starlink dishes.
• Function Termination: spacex scheduled the removal of the specialized location data feature for may 20 citing a shift in hardware interface accessibility.
• Operational Security: internal company liability concerns likely drive the decision to disable navigation tools that were never officially authorized for maritime safety.
• Dual Utility: the same technology providing navigational benefits to boaters could theoretically be repurposed to steer drones and military hardware with precision.
• Technical Discrepancy: the mini dish demonstrates a unique capability to navigate using exclusive satellite signals rather than relying on standard gps inputs.
• User Dependency: maritime enthusiasts express alarm over the loss of a convenient unofficial backup tool that helped them circumvent regional electronic warfare.

Starlink is best known for supplying high-speed satellite internet, but it turns out SpaceX’s technology can also counter a persistent problem in the Middle East: GPS spoofing and jamming.

“Those [Starlink] satellites are so much closer than the GPS satellites, and so their signal is maybe 100 to 1,000 times stronger,” says Bruce Toal, a Starlink subscriber from Texas who’s been sailing the world. “They can overcome all kinds of jamming.”

The ongoing electronic warfare in the Middle East has crippled GPS reliability for boats navigating the Red Sea, forcing mariners to contend with dangerous signal interference from surrounding military activities. Spoofing can override legitimate GPS signals, duping a navigation system into showing the boat as off course and even sailing over land, as the video below shows.

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But in recent months, the maritime community has found a solution in their Starlink dishes, which can connect to SpaceX’s fleet of over 8,000 active satellites to receive fairly accurate positioning coordinates. The only problem? The company is preparing to shut down the positioning data on May 20, which is alarming boat owners, including Toal, who recently sailed up the Red Sea. 

“Certainly my boat has GPS on it, but if it’s spoofed, then GPS becomes basically useless,” he says. “If you’re transiting around these areas, it’s a big problem.”

SpaceX notified users about the change last week. It involves shutting down a little-known location data feature via a software interface, the gRPC API, on the Starlink hardware. Users could manually activate the feature by going into the Starlink Mobile app and triggering it in the “Debug Data” section, enabling them to see the GPS coordinates for their dish. 

Users who want to know their dishes' real-time location have been tapping the gRPC API. But the maritime community also realized that location data could be used as a spoofing-resistant backup to GPS, says Luis Soltero, a mobile satellite communications specialist. 

Soltero is the lead developer of PredictWind’s Datahub, which supplies maritime GPS tracking data, including from a customer's Starlink dish, through the gRPC API. Last month, he also published a study about Starlink-equipped vessels traveling through the Red Sea, confirming that SpaceX’s satellite internet system, particularly the Mini dish, can resist GPS spoofing and jamming.  

The same study found that Starlink’s location data is fairly accurate; although traditional GPS seems to be more accurate overall, the two positioning systems were usually within 18 meters (60 feet) of each other, he says.  

It’s why Soltero said he’s “distressed” that SpaceX is shutting down the function, citing the ongoing threat of GPS spoofing and jamming in the Red Sea. “Commercial ships have had to deal with this for years now,” he told PCMag from a cruise ship, where he's testing Starlink as a GPS-resistant backup. “I would really like a way to work around this [restriction].”

Soltero notes one reason Starlink can evade spoofing: it can transmit data over the higher radio bands in the 10 to 14.5GHz range, in contrast to GPS, which uses the 1.2 and 1.5GHz bands. The larger Starlink constellation also orbits at around 500km in altitude, while the US’s GPS system spans 31 operational satellites orbiting at a far more distant 20,000km. 

Starlink dishes will still source positioning data from the GPS system, likely for beam steering, according to Soltero. But he also notes that the Starlink app’s Debug Data mode previously included a setting that could source location coordinates “exclusively” from Starlink satellites rather than GPS. In his study, Soltero found the portable Mini dish could use this “exclusive mode on” to resist sustained GPS spoofing, outperforming the other Starlink dishes. 

Soltero suspects this is because the Mini dish was released in 2024 with newer hardware components and firmware capable of operating without a GPS signal.

Although the maritime industry hasn’t widely adopted Starlink as a GPS backup, it’s clear that the technology has significant potential, especially when solar storms can interfere with GPS signals. “Now all that work is going down the tubes” with the shutdown, he says.

SpaceX hasn’t responded to a request for comment. But it’s not hard to see how the anti-GPS spoofing tech could be a double-edged sword. "I can imagine a Starlink lawyer saying, ‘What? We don’t want to be responsible for people relying on that to navigate boats,'" Toal says. "Because there’s a potential there, if something happens, people could sue them. I can see a lawyer saying, ‘’We should disable this so we don’t have this liability.'"

Countries have also been resorting to GPS spoofing and jamming to thwart missile and drone attacks by confusing their navigation systems. “A bad actor could use this system to drive their vehicle, drone, robot, or whatever to a location within 18 meters of accuracy. If you can do this with boats, why couldn’t you do this with something else?” Soltero asks. 

Still, he’s urging SpaceX to consider the positives and create a way for the maritime industry to continue accessing the location function via the gRPC API, even though it was never an official feature. “This is already being used for maritime safety, it has some importance, and I’m really sorry to see it go,” he says.

Toal adds that members of his own boating group have been messaging Starlink’s customer support about reversing the coming restriction.

About Our Expert

Michael Kan

Principal Reporter

---

Experience

I've been a journalist for over 15 years. I got my start as a schools and cities reporter in Kansas City and joined PCMag in 2017, where I cover satellite internet services, cybersecurity, PC hardware, and more. I'm currently based in San Francisco, but previously spent over five years in China, covering the country's technology sector.

Since 2020, I've covered the launch and explosive growth of SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service, writing 600+ stories on availability and feature launches, but also the regulatory battles over the expansion of satellite constellations, fights with rival providers like AST SpaceMobile and Amazon, and the effort to expand into satellite-based mobile service. I've combed through FCC filings for the latest news and driven to remote corners of California to test Starlink's cellular service.

I also cover cyber threats, from ransomware gangs to the emergence of AI-based malware. In 2024 and 2025, the FTC forced Avast to pay consumers $16.5 million for secretly harvesting and selling their personal information to third-party clients, as revealed in my joint investigation with Motherboard.

I also cover the PC graphics card market. Pandemic-era shortages led me to camp out in front of a Best Buy to get an RTX 3000. I'm now following how the AI-driven memory shortage is impacting the entire consumer electronics market. I'm always eager to learn more, so please jump in the comments with feedback and send me tips.

Areas of Expertise

• Networking
• Security
• Graphics Cards
• Processors
• AI
• SpaceX
• Nvidia
• AMD

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Read Full Bio

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview-20260303) summary:

• Corporate Restrictions: goldman sachs banned anthropic artificial intelligence models for staff based in hong kong.
• Regulatory Interpretation: the decision stems from a particularly cautious reading of contractual obligations with the software provider.
• Geopolitical Compliance: american artificial intelligence firms enforce these blocks to satisfy internal policies regarding usage in restricted jurisdictions.
• Proprietary Safeguards: developers fear industrial scale intellectual property theft and model distillation by foreign actors.
• Unverified Allegations: claims regarding the misappropriation of training data by rivals remain unsupported by disclosed evidence.
• Operational Disadvantage: staff in the region potentially face reduced productivity in coding and financial modeling tasks compared to global counterparts.
• Institutional Uncertainty: other international companies operating within the territory now face ambiguity regarding the status of their own enterprise software contracts.
• Cybersecurity Fears: anxiety persists that advanced generative models could compromise global financial systems and security infrastructure.

Goldman Sachs has stopped its bankers in Hong Kong from using Anthropic’s AI models, in the latest sign of how the emerging technology is brushing up against US-China tensions.

Employees of the Wall Street bank in the Chinese territory were unable to access Claude models either directly or via the in-house artificial intelligence platforms as of a few weeks ago, according to four sources familiar with the situation.

Western AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Claude are banned in mainland China as part of the so-called Great Firewall. But Hong Kong has long operated mostly outside of Chinese censors and restrictions on usage are imposed by the US AI companies themselves.

One person familiar with Goldman’s move said it came as a result of the US bank taking a strict interpretation of its contract with Anthropic following a consultation with the Silicon Valley start-up. 

That reading concluded that Goldman employees in Hong Kong should not be able to use any Anthropic products. The person said this did not extend to contracts with other AI vendors such as OpenAI.

A spokesperson for Anthropic said its Claude models had never been officially “supported” in Hong Kong but declined to comment further. Goldman declined to comment.

American AI companies are wary of usage of their models in China in part due to the threat of “distillation” in which local actors could train new models through intensive usage of foreign ones. 

OpenAI last year accused Chinese rival DeepSeek of using its models to train its own model, while the White House this month accused China of undertaking “industrial-scale” theft of US AI labs’ intellectual property.

No evidence has been disclosed to support OpenAI’s claim, while the Chinese embassy in Washington said the White House accusations were “pure slander”.

The new curb on Goldman bankers’ usage of Claude could represent a challenge for Hong Kong as a revived financial and knowledge hub if employees, especially those who use Claude for coding and financial modelling, are unable to access the most advanced models and risk falling behind other teams or organisations.

It also poses questions for other companies and institutions in the former British territory that have enterprise deals with Anthropic globally and continue to use its models in Hong Kong. The FT could not confirm whether other banks or companies have also decided to restrict access.

Hong Kong remains the hub for investment banking and finance across Greater China for most global banks, which use the territory as a place to co-ordinate cross-border activity including trading, M&A and share sales.

The crackdown on Anthropic models also comes as the start-up’s new Mythos AI model has raised concern among governments and companies worldwide that it could crack current cyber security systems and pose risks to the global financial system.

With additional contributions by Cheng Leng in Beijing

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview-20260303) summary:

• Regulatory Intervention: beijing authorities nullified a two billion dollar acquisition of the chinese artificial intelligence startup manus by meta platforms incorporated.
• State Control: the government implemented strict measures to prevent the transfer of sensitive technological assets to international geopolitical adversaries.
• Structural Disruption: new mandates now require local firms to dismantle offshore corporate entities and restructure financial relationships to satisfy state planners.
• Investor Uncertainty: venture capital backers and startup founders face an increasingly volatile environment regarding ipo prospects and foreign investment channels.
• Operational Decoupling: companies are aggressively establishing physical and digital firewalls to separate their chinese operations from american interests and personnel.
• Strategic Migration: entrepreneurs are fleeing to locations like singapore to obscure their origins and bypass mounting domestic regulatory pressure.
• Escalating Geopolitics: the dissolution of the manus deal reflects a broader pattern of state interference in private business transactions amidst rising international tensions.
• Institutional Failure: previous efforts by startups to leverage international capital markets are collapsing as the state exerts its authority over the nation's innovation ecosystem.

The AI startup Manus, once hailed as a breakthrough that would challenge Silicon Valley’s dominance, is turning into a cautionary tale for Chinese entrepreneurs after Beijing authorities ordered Meta Platforms Inc. to unwind its $2 billion takeover of the company.

With a chilling 54-character decree from the top state planner, Beijing demonstrated its determination to prevent the transfer of sensitive technology to geopolitical foes at all costs. That follows a recent decision to bar major tech firms including ByteDance Ltd. and Moonshot AI from taking American capital without approval, and a clampdown on offshore Chinese companies seeking to list in Hong Kong.

Taken together, the regulatory setbacks usher in an uncertain era for the country’s rapidly expanding AI industry, spurring a raft of activity behind the scenes. Entrepreneurs, financiers and companies are scrambling to avoid becoming another Manus, whose Chinese founders moved their business to Singapore to tap global capital. Firms are reviewing investment portfolios, overhauling ownership structures and even erecting firewalls between Chinese and American units.

“As of today, ‘the Manus Model’ is officially dead,” said Dermot McGrath, founder of ZenGen Labs, a Shanghai-based consultancy that advises tech startups about their business. “Chinese teams have punched well above their weight in AI and produced a string of unicorns, and policymakers saw the Manus maneuver as a template that could threaten the crown jewels of their innovation ecosystem in the defining technology of the decade.”

Beijing was particularly irked by the speed at which Meta wrapped up the transaction as well as the loss of pioneering agentic AI to one of Silicon Valley’s most valuable companies.

The backlash against Manus — which comes weeks before China’s Xi Jinping is due to meet US President Donald Trump — underscores Beijing’s overarching ambition to surpass the US in technological and economic might. Meta declined to comment.

WATCH: Why is China blocking Meta’s Manus acquisition? Source: Bloomberg

Chinese AI aspirants once viewed Manus as a blueprint for global success: a viral outfit created by a trio of local entrepreneurs who made a big splash in the US before the Meta buyout. But even as startups like DeepSeek draw massive interest from domestic investors, the admiration for Manus is quickly souring as founders and venture investors grapple with fundamental resets to their funding and corporate structures following intensifying regulatory pressure.

Startups that dreamed of following MiniMax Group Inc. and Zhipu to Hong Kong listings are now seeking advice from their venture backers to avoid getting stuck in IPO limbo, people familiar with the matter said. At least three investment houses are in discussions with their founders about whether to dismantle their offshore entities: the so-called red-chips once deemed a key step toward a debut.

That’s as regulators recently instructed some AI and robotics firms — including DeepSeek-rival StepFun — to unwind those structures in order to qualify for a listing in the city, they said, asking for anonymity to discuss private matters.

Manus Went From Tech Darling to Cautionary TaleSource: Bloomberg reporting

GLOBAL REACT: China’s AI Warning on Meta, Manus — Buyers Beware

For firms with operations in both China and the US, the Manus fallout represents an even greater threat. Chinese billionaire Chen Tianqiao, a pioneer of China’s online gaming industry, told Bloomberg News that he’s rolled out protocols to prohibit the cross-border sharing of information or code while minimizing the movement of personnel, data and assets.

Chen Tianqiao Photographer: Poppy Lynch/Bloomberg

“The Manus incident serves as a wake-up call for all cross-border entrepreneurs,” Chen told Bloomberg News after Beijing ordered the Manus deal rolled back. “As regulatory environments across regions become increasingly complex, both founding teams and external partners — including advisors and law firms — must adopt a more cautious and rigorous approach to compliance.”

Smaller outfits see such a difficult path to global expansion that some are considering setting up shop in Singapore or Silicon Valley from day one to obscure their Chinese roots, the people said. To avoid Manus-style regulatory snares, they plan to only hire China-based engineers as a low-cost back office.

Beijing is piling on the pressure just as startups grapple with escalating geopolitical tensions. Washington has long discouraged US investors from seeding Chinese technology, particularly in sensitive areas like AI. In recent months, China-based fund managers who’ve backed leading tech companies have used so-called parallel fund structures for fundraising, Bloomberg News reported.

Read More: China Deepens Review of Meta’s Landmark $2 Billion Manus Buyout

Those vehicles allow US investors to keep exposure to non-sensitive sectors, while opting out of industries they are restricted from putting money into. Manus-backer ZhenFund set up a vehicle to house US investors and another for other backers for its latest fund that seeks to raise about $300 million.

“The process of packaging a company to make it an attractive acquisition target for US buyers has already evolved into a full-fledged industry,” said Jenny Xiao, a San Francisco-based partner at Leonis Capital, which invests in early-stage AI startups. “Manus was the first one to actually pull it off.”

To be sure, breakouts like DeepSeek and Manus have shown investors Chinese AI is something they can’t ignore. DeepSeek has kicked off its first external funding, drawing interest from Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. while other AI upstarts like Moonshot are nearing an IPO.

The technology underpinning Manus’s viral AI agent was developed by the startup’s founders while they were living in China. When it was launched in 2025, the agent drew worldwide acclaim for its ability to automate complex tasks, from analyzing stocks to drafting sales pitches.

The following month, its parent Butterfly Effect raised $75 million in a round led by Silicon Valley’s Benchmark, valuing it at $500 million. That investment triggered a probe by the US Treasury over potential violations of restrictions on investments in sensitive technologies. Manus received queries from US officials, including whether Chinese Communist Party cadres visited its offices, and if its AI agent was built atop Chinese foundation models, according to people familiar with the matter. Representatives for Manus and the US Treasury didn’t respond to emailed queries about the investigation.

“China’s reported use of threats and coercive exit bans against Meta and its employees is consistent with longstanding Chinese government interference in normal business transactions,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in an emailed statement.

Read More: Benchmark’s Manus Deal Sparks Backlash Over Chinese AI

The scrutiny curtailed Manus’s effort to train a smaller AI model in-house using Chinese open-source offerings. As costs ballooned, it was forced to seek a suitor for a buyout, the people said.

When Manus relocated its China-based staff to Singapore in July, it triggered alarm in Beijing. Officials eventually agreed to the departure on the condition that Manus maintain close ties to the domestic ecosystem, the people said. That understanding may have evaporated with the Meta buyout, one of the people said.

In December, Meta announced its acquisition of Manus — a rare bet on a Chinese-born team — days after the startup said it topped $100 million in annualized revenue. It wasn’t clear at the time whether Beijing would exert its authority on a transaction that technically took place beyond its borders.

“Manus may not be a strategic or critical technology for now,” said Vey-Sern Ling, managing director at Union Bancaire Privee. “But conceivably in future, some Chinese startups will come up with sensitive technologies and this case will serve as a warning to tread carefully.”

The startup’s aggressive mandate pushed it from product launch to Meta deal in less than a year. That cowboy attitude was captured by a poster hanging in its Beijing office before it relocated to Singapore: “Go big or die. There are no other options.”

— Echo Wong, Zheping Huang, Haze Fan

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview-20260303) summary:

• Systematic Censorship: openai restricts coding models from mentioning specific creatures to suppress erratic output behaviors.
• Development Constraints: codex cli instructions explicitly prohibit references to animals like pigeons or mythical entities like ogres.
• Operational Failures: users report that the model inconsistently injects bizarre references to goblins and gremlins during standard coding tasks.
• External Integration: the openclaw automation tool exacerbates these model hallucinations through its persistent agentic harness instructions.
• Corporate Denial: openai remains silent on why these primitive linguistic filters were deemed necessary for their supposedly advanced software.
• Internal Acknowledgment: company personnel confirmed that these restrictive measures were implemented to mitigate uncontrollable model outbursts.
• Cultural trivialization: memes and playful plugins ignore the underlying instability of the probabilistic models in favor of whimsical entertainment.
• Executive Gaslighting: leadership trivializes the technical instability of the next generation model through ironic social media posts regarding goblin production.

The latest idea to mop up New York City’s red ink is to soak the city’s highest earners with what amounts to an income-tax hike—one that will put municipal finances on an even shakier footing.

The tax scheme, which Mayor Zohran Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin floated on Tuesday, revolves around the state Pass Through Entity Tax (PTET). New York, along with other high-tax states, created the tax, and an associated credit, to get around the tight limits the 2017 federal tax law put on the amounts of state and local tax that individuals could deduct from their federal bills.

Essentially, PTETs allow partners, principals, or other co-owners of closely held businesses to pay their individual state taxes at the office through a business-level tax. Those tax payments are then credited dollar-for-dollar toward each person’s individual state and city income tax bills, while simultaneously being treated as fully federally deductible business expenses.

The state PTET became available in 2021, and Albany allowed New York City to set up a PTET of its own in 2022. Together, these taxes effectively restored a full federal deduction of city income taxes for eligible business owners.

Mamdani and Menin want Albany legislators to allow the city to trim the amount of PTET credits that can be applied to city income tax bills. Specifically, they want to cut PTET from being a 100 percent rebate to 75 percent, allowing deduction of three out of every four dollars paid. They expect the change will “generate nearly $1 billion in additional revenue, while still allowing New York City residents to save on federal taxes.” Filers making at least $1 million claimed about 95 percent of New York City’s 2023 PTET credits.

Legislative Democrats actually floated the same change in their budget proposals last month. Both Senate and Assembly Democrats called for limiting the city PTET credit to 75 percent, saying it would raise $700 million for New York City. Senate Democrats had also called for limiting the state PTET credit to 90 percent to bring in an extra $1.8 billion for Albany.

Putting aside the risk of accelerating New York City’s tax-base erosion, Mamdani and Menin are trying to balance the budget with the shakiest, and most poorly understood, form of revenue possible. They may also be overstating the revenue potential for the city.

According to the city Finance Department and federal statistics, most state PTET revenue originates in the finance sector. A substantial fraction of those receipts are linked to capital gains, meaning they can surge, or evaporate, in short order.

Unlike the personal income tax—where the flow of money goes lopsidedly into government coffers—PTET involves a churn of taxes paid by firms and comparable amounts of credits claimed by individuals. That makes it tougher to project where net receipts will land. Tax wonks, meantime, are still getting their arms around whether or why firms choose to participate (or not) in this relatively new tax each year, further complicating forecasting.

In Fiscal Year 2025, New York City netted $2.4 billion from PTET, up 42 percent compared to the prior year but down slightly from FY2023. It remains to be seen how pocketing a quarter of the PTET handle would get the city to Mamdani and Menin’s “nearly $1 billion” figure—and whether the governor and the state legislature would sign off. Hochul appears to have drawn a red line on Tuesday, saying “it’s not happening.”

Even if it doesn’t work out, by even considering it, Mamdani and Menin are contributing to the atmosphere of uncertainty for New York City’s high earners. The pair are working to close a budget gap that opened only because spending repeatedly outpaced revenues amid an economic expansion. Mamdani has spurned time-tested methods for tightening city-agency belts in favor of more abstract “savings” efforts.

It’s especially notable that Mamdani and Menin are making this push after the March 15 PTET election deadline for tax year 2026. That means that they’re seeking what amounts to a retroactive tax increase—in the absence of anything resembling emergency conditions.

Between Mamdani’s almost-gleeful announcement of a new “pied-à-terre” tax on April 15, this new PTET push, and city leaders’ unwillingness to challenge cost drivers, it’s unlikely that this will be the last time that New Yorkers hear about the urgent need for a creative new tax.