Zong Fuli's Half-Brother Heads New Wahaha-Linked Firm as Chinese AI Models Top Global Usage Rankings

In China, Zong Jicheng — described by lawyers as a half-brother of Wahaha heiress Zong Fuli — was named chairman, general manager and legal representative of newly registered Hangzhou Tianqi Youpin Foods, whose actual controller is Du Jianying, a longtime associate of the late Wahaha founder Zong Qinghou; the filing comes amid a lawsuit in which Zong Jicheng and two others are suing Zong Fuli over HSBC-held assets and a promised $2.1 billion trust. Separately, the US Department of Homeland Security added several Chinese food and clothing brands, including Qiaqia Foods, Synear Foods and Septwolves, to an import restriction list effective August 3. On the AI front, weekly data from OpenRouter cited by Daily Economic News showed global large-model token usage fell 2.07% week-on-week to 56.8 trillion tokens, with Chinese models handling 28.13 trillion tokens (down 14.76%) versus 4.38 trillion for US models (up 87.18%); Chinese models have led global weekly usage for 14 consecutive weeks and occupy the top five spots. OpenAI disclosed on August 1 that an internal version of its next-generation model, Astra, solved ten open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science, including bounds on high-dimensional sphere packing and a new lower bound for arithmetic circuit complexity, at a total inference cost of roughly $2,000 based on its Sol API pricing. Alibaba launched its next-generation foundation model Qwen3.8, with 2.4 trillion total parameters and major gains in coding and office-productivity tasks, ranking just behind Anthropic's Claude series on the Arena leaderboard. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that Apple is expected to raise iPhone prices by $100–$200 this year due to memory-chip and processor shortages and costlier camera systems, with the first foldable iPhone likely to start above $2,000. The EU's AI Act transparency provisions took effect, requiring chatbots to disclose they are AI and AI-generated content to carry machine-readable watermarks. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund-led consortium received EU approval for its $55 billion buyout of Electronic Arts, expected to close August 4. Sources denied reports that Moonshot AI was preparing a Hong Kong IPO seeking about $3 billion. Ant Group's robotics unit Ant Lingbo confirmed it is raising a first funding round of 1.5 billion yuan, aiming to close a second round by year-end, to keep developing a general-purpose robot-brain foundation model.