Hong Kong can take the regulatory high road amid US-China AI decoupling

Dr Ruby Tong is a university innovator and technology strategist bridging academic research, deep tech commercialisation, and AI governance.The market realignment over the past week starkly captures the self-defeating logic of America’s technology containment strategy.The momentum began on June 15, when the shares of Chinese Artificial Intelligence pioneer Zhipu AI, which trade in Hong Kong under Knowledge Atlas Technology, surged by 48 per cent intraday after it announced the open-source release of its GLM-5.2 foundation model. The rally continued this week, with Zhipu’s shares trading at an intraday high of HK$2,980 (US$380) in the morning of June 22, briefly driving market capitalisation past HK$1.2 trillion – a 25-fold appreciation on its January debut.This massive capital migration followed a sudden regulatory intervention on June 12, when the US Commerce Department ordered California-based Anthropic to block foreign access to its new Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. Because Anthropic could not practically verify user nationalities in real time, it had to shut down both flagship models globally for everyone, lock out its own non-American staff and downgrade affected subscribers to an older model.