China makes it illegal to fire humans if AI takes their jobs • The Register

A Chinese language court docket has dominated that it’s unlawful to exchange human employees with AI.

China’s State Council, the nation’s highest govt and administrative authority, noticed match to publish a state media report concerning the case, which noticed the Hangzhou Intermediate Folks’s Court docket take into account the case of a employee who was employed for duties together with “matching consumer queries with massive language fashions and filtering unlawful or privacy-violating content material, amongst others, to make sure correct output by AI fashions.”

The employee’s employer began utilizing AI for a few of that work and supplied the worker a demotion and lowered wage.

The employee, recognized solely by their surname Zhou, challenged that call and gained.

In response to the report shared by the State Council, the case established the authorized precept that utilizing AI to carry out a employee’s job doesn’t routinely justify terminating a contract.

The State Council shared information of the judgment on April 30 – the day earlier than the annual Labour Day vacation on Could 1 that celebrates employees’ rights

Samsung revenue soars on reminiscence shortages

Samsung Electronics final week announced Q1 2025 income of ₩133.9 trillion ($90.9 billion), its highest-ever quarterly haul. Revenue landed at ₩57.2 trillion ($39.9 billion).

Samsung mentioned its reminiscence enterprise posted all-time report quarterly income and revenue, attributable to “technological management” and “by addressing high-value-added AI demand regardless of restricted provide availability.” The corporate admitted growing reminiscence costs helped, too.

The launch of this 12 months’s Galaxy S premium smartphones helped, too, by pushing units income 19 % greater quarter-over-quarter.

The corporate additionally announced it’s entering into the enterprise laptop computer market with the brand new Galaxy Book6 Enterprise Version.

Samsung thinks the notebooks stand out attributable to assist for customized OS imaging, tailor-made BIOS settings, and asset tagging.

Laptops are a crowded market. The Register can’t think about Samsung will name them out as a progress engine in future quarterly outcomes.

Superapp GoTo discovers black ink

Indonesian superapp GoTo – the native equal of Uber and Amazon, however in a single entity – final week posted its first ever revenue.

Shaped in 2021 after the merger of predecessors Gojek and Tokopedia, the corporate has since produced years of losses.

Final week’s IDR 5.4 billion ($311,000) revenue, on income of IDR 171 billion ($9.8 billion), was subsequently fairly the second.

“Reaching internet revenue for the primary time in our historical past is a giant second for GoTo that demonstrates our enterprise mannequin is working,” mentioned CEO Hans Patuwo. “It displays years of labor from our groups to drive topline progress and value self-discipline, whereas creating actual worth for our prospects – shoppers, driver-partners and retailers.”

The CEO mentioned the corporate is now “well-positioned to navigate the present international atmosphere, and assured in what GoTo can ship for the hundreds of thousands of Indonesians we serve.”

That final line is essential: Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous nation, its economic system is rising shortly, and GoTo already has over 100 million month-to-month prospects – which the corporate largely serves from Chinese language cloud giants Alibaba and Tencent.

The Indonesian firm is subsequently an essential contributor to China’s clouds as they search to develop past the Center Kingdom.

Talking of Chinese language hyperscalers … they’re rising

Analyst agency Omdia final week found mainland China’s cloud infrastructure companies market achieved 26 % year-on-year progress within the closing quarter of 2025.

“As enterprise AI adoption deepened, market progress was more and more supported not solely by mannequin utilization, but additionally by the broader rollout of enterprise AI, the growth of personal AI deployments, and rising demand for conventional cloud assets comparable to compute, storage, and databases,” the agency discovered.

Alibaba Cloud scored 37 % of the $14.7 billion spend, properly forward of Huawei Cloud’s 17 % share and Tencent Cloud’s ten % slice of the cake.

Sake from area sells for $690k

A bottle of sake made with mash fermented on the Worldwide House Station final week offered for $690,000

Japanese firm Dassai sent sake mash – rice, yeast, water and the fermentation agent koji – to the ISS in 2025 and obtained it cooking earlier than retrieving it in early 2026.

Earthly distillers then set to work and produced a single 100ml bottle of area sake, which in keeping with Japanese outlet Nikkei final week sold for ¥110 million ($690,000). Dassai gave the cash to area researchers.

The corporate despatched the mash to the ISS to check whether or not it is going to be doable to brew sake at a future Moon base, as a result of the corporate thinks residents of a future lunar habitat could benefit from the likelihood to tuck into some booze. ®