Skip to content
Source · Daily Brief

AI Daily Brief — 15 February 2026

Eve of Chinese Lunar New Year (Year of the Horse) and the day before the India AI Impact Summit opens. UK PM Keir Starmer announces a crackdown bringing AI chatbots under the Online Safety Act — providers will be required to moderate and prevent illegal content, expanding the Act beyond user-to-user platforms to cover private chatbots, alongside a possible social-media ban for under-16s. China’s “Lunar New Year AI War” peaks: ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu collectively pour ~10B yuan into AI-app promos with red-envelope share-to-earn campaigns.

Top stories

  • UK — Starmer’s Online Safety Act AI expansion. Chatbot providers will be required to take responsibility for moderating illegal content; the Online Safety Act stretches beyond user-to-user platforms to cover private chatbots. Part of a child-safety push that also floats a social-media ban for under-16s. via Bloomberg
  • Doubao-Seed-2.0 — viral over the LNY weekend. ByteDance Seed’s launch from Saturday continues to drive the China-tech weekend cycle: Pro priced ~$0.47 / $2.37 per M input/output — 3.7-5.9× cheaper than GPT-5.2 and ~10× cheaper than Claude Opus 4.5. via Caixin Global
  • Seedance 2.0 goes viral. ByteDance Seed’s unified multimodal audio-video model (text / image / audio / video → video) generates hyperreal celebrity and film-character clips circulating widely. Features role-based asset tagging, character consistency and native audio with beat-aware sync. via ByteDance Seed
  • China LNY AI war — peak weekend. Combined red-envelope and incentive spend across the campaign tops 45B yuan. Baidu commits CNY 500M for Ernie; Tencent Yuanbao CNY 1B with share-to-earn red envelopes; Alibaba CNY 3B (~$431M) for Qwen incentives running since 6 February. Strategic goal: own the chatbot “ecosystem entry-point” position. via Rest of World
  • Alibaba — Qwen 3.5 staged for hours-before-LNY launch. Qwen3.5-397B-A17B and Qwen3.5-Plus pre-positioned for Monday morning: 397B total / 17B active, 200+ languages, priced ~$0.12 per M tokens (~1/18 of Gemini 3 Pro). Alibaba claims the model beats its own trillion-parameter Qwen3-Max. via SCMP

Policy & events

India AI Impact Summit opens tomorrow at Bharat Mandapam (New Delhi) — the first global AI summit in the Global South. Expo will host 300+ exhibitors from 30 countries across 10+ pavilions, with themes spanning the democratisation of AI, AI for Social Impact, Safe & Trustworthy AI, and AI for the Global South. Today’s pre-summit AI for ALL and AI by HER challenges run as warm-ups. via IndiaAI

Quiet corners

No first-party shipping from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, xAI, Microsoft AI or Thinking Machines Lab. The Anthropic post-Series-G victory lap continues; the 17-19 February cluster — Claude Sonnet 4.6, Grok 4.20, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Meta × NVIDIA — is queued.

By the numbers

  • China LNY AI promos: combined ~10B yuan · total red-envelope/incentive spend topping 45B yuan · individual budgets — Alibaba 3B, Tencent 1B, Baidu 500M
  • Qwen 3.5 pricing: ~$0.12 per M tokens (~1/18 of Gemini 3 Pro)
  • India AI Impact Summit: 300+ exhibitors · 30 countries · 10+ pavilions · 16-20 February
  • UK Online Safety Act expansion: private chatbots in scope · social-media ban for under-16s on the table

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from publicly reported announcements on 15 February 2026.