SSPAI Morning Brief: State Council Launches Investigation and Evaluation of Competition in the Food Delivery Market

Morning Brief

State Council launches investigation and evaluation of competition in the food delivery market
Claude Code blocks access from third-party compatible tools
Well-known open-source framework Tailwind CSS lays off a large number of employees due to the impact of AI
Large-scale internet outage hits Iran
Cloudflare fined by Italy, threatens to stop providing network security services for the Winter Olympics
iOS 26 adoption rate lower than previous versions at the same point in time
Rumors You Can Just Glance At

State Council launches investigation and evaluation of competition in the food delivery market

On January 9, the Office of the Anti-Monopoly and Anti-Unfair Competition Committee of the State Council announced that it would conduct an investigation and evaluation of market competition in the food delivery platform services sector.

A person in charge of the department said that recently, problems such as aggressive subsidies, price wars, and traffic control have become prominent in the food delivery platform services industry, squeezing the real economy and intensifying “involution-style” competition within the sector, drawing strong reactions from various parts of society. This investigation and evaluation will involve on-site verification, face-to-face interviews, and questionnaire surveys to gain an in-depth understanding of competitive practices among food delivery platforms, widely solicit opinions from platform-based merchants, new forms of workers, consumers, and other stakeholders, comprehensively assess the state of market competition, organize analysis and verification, transmit regulatory pressure, and propose measures for handling the situation.

Subsequently, Meituan and Taobao Flash Delivery both issued statements saying they would actively cooperate.

Earlier, in February 2025, JD.com entered the food delivery business, becoming the starting point of the subsidy war in the sector. At the end of April, Alibaba announced its entry into the competition and upgraded the instant retail service “Hour Delivery” under Taobao and Tmall to “Taobao Flash Delivery,” rolling out high-profile subsidies for food delivery and further announcing a RMB 50 billion subsidy plan on July 2. In response to the competition, Meituan followed suit and joined the subsidy campaign.

In this context, in May and July 2025, the State Administration for Market Regulation and other departments held two rounds of talks with Ele.me, Meituan, and JD.com. In September, the State Administration for Market Regulation organized the drafting of the Basic Requirements for the Management of Food Delivery Platform Services (Draft for Public Comment), which was implemented as a recommended national standard in December, setting out provisions on merchant management, fees and promotional practices, labor management, and dispute resolution.

Claude Code blocks access from third-party compatible tools

On January 9, Anthropic confirmed that it had deployed technical measures to prevent third-party applications—represented by popular terminal-based AI coding tools such as OpenCode—from masquerading as its official tool Claude Code to access its models, in an effort to crack down on behavior that circumvents commercial API fees.

In response, Anthropic explained that unauthorized third-party access had caused hard-to-diagnose technical failures, leading to reduced platform stability. In addition, some xAI employees were found to be using the Cursor IDE to call Claude at scale to assist in developing their own models, violating the exclusivity clause in Claude’s terms of service that prohibits using the service to build competing products.

However, community discussions generally believe that economic considerations are the primary motivation behind this ban. The Claude Max subscription plan is priced at USD 200 and offers a generous usage allowance. By comparison, achieving a similar level of compute through pay-as-you-go API calls would easily push monthly costs beyond USD 1,000.

In response to the blockade, OpenCode quickly launched a USD 200-per-month OpenCode Black plan, switching to access Claude via enterprise-grade APIs.

Well-known open-source framework Tailwind CSS lays off a large number of employees due to the impact of AI

This week, Tailwind Labs, the company behind the well-known open-source CSS framework Tailwind CSS, confirmed that it has been forced to lay off three out of four members of its development team—75% of the entire team—due to what it described as the “brutal impact” of AI. CEO Adam Wathan revealed that although usage of Tailwind CSS is growing at a record pace, the company’s revenue has plunged by nearly 80%. Without restructuring, its funds are expected to run out within six months.

Wathan pointed out that the widespread adoption of AI coding tools has changed developers’ working habits, leading to a 40% drop in visits to the official documentation site over the past two years. Tailwind Labs’ main business model is selling “lifetime license” Tailwind UI component libraries and templates to developers who visit the documentation. Now that developers can obtain code directly from AI, they no longer need to visit the website or purchase paid component libraries, making this business model difficult to sustain.

Released in 2019, Tailwind CSS is one of the most popular CSS frameworks. Many AI models are particularly good at writing Tailwind code and tend to use the framework by default.

Wathan disclosed the situation during a recent controversy in the GitHub community. Previously, some contributors proposed optimizing the documentation format to make it easier for large language models to crawl and learn from, but Wathan rejected the idea. He explained that making it easier for AI to access the content for free would make the business “even more unsustainable” and could eventually turn the project into “abandonware” due to a lack of maintainers, citing the background described above.

The layoffs sparked widespread discussion in the tech community and reignited criticism of industry giants that use open-source projects and train AI models on open-source code without giving back. Vercel and Google AI Studio later announced that they would become sponsors of Tailwind CSS.

Large-scale internet outage hits Iran

According to Xinhua News Agency, around 8:00 p.m. local time on January 8, internet services in Iran’s capital, Tehran, were disrupted. NetBlocks, an international NGO that monitors global internet connectivity, said Iran is implementing nationwide network controls related to ongoing protests in multiple regions. Cloudflare’s routing data shows that Iran’s IPv4 connections dropped sharply between the 8th and 9th before partially recovering, while IPv6 connections fell to zero. (Technically, IPv6 traffic is harder to censor than IPv4.)

The Guardian, citing expert analysis, reported that this shutdown set new records in both scale and technical measures, causing about 90% of the country’s internet traffic to vanish almost instantly. A whitelist mechanism was used during the blackout—for example, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was still able to post on X.

In addition to the internet shutdown, international long-distance calls within Iran were blocked, mobile communications services were completely paralyzed, and most regions entered a digital vacuum with no signal and no service. The Starlink satellite internet system, which had helped maintain connectivity during the 2022 protests, was also subjected to targeted signal interference this time.

Cloudflare fined by Italy, threatens to stop providing network security services for the Winter Olympics

Recently, Italy’s communications regulator AGCOM fined Cloudflare €14 million (about RMB 114 million) for failing to cooperate with the country’s “Piracy Shield” system in blocking pirated content. In response, Cloudflare threatened to stop providing cybersecurity services for the upcoming 2026 Milan–Cortina Winter Olympics and is considering a complete withdrawal from the Italian market.

Under Italy’s Piracy Shield legislation, internet service providers are required to unconditionally block IP addresses and domain names suspected of infringement within 30 minutes of receiving a report from copyright holders. Since its launch in 2024, the system has been highly controversial in the tech community. Critics point out that its automated blocking mechanism lacks transparency and forces DNS resolvers to implement blocks within extremely short timeframes, making it prone to mistakenly affecting legitimate websites. For example, it previously caused large-scale internet disruptions after accidentally blocking lawful services such as Google Drive.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince sharply criticized the mechanism on X, calling it a “censorship program without judicial oversight,” and accusing it of attempting to force Cloudflare’s public DNS service (1.1.1.1) to enforce blocks globally rather than only within Italy. Prince said the company will firmly appeal the decision and plans to travel to Washington and Lausanne next week to discuss the matter with the U.S. government and the International Olympic Committee (IOC), respectively.

As countermeasures, Prince listed four potential actions: terminating millions of dollars’ worth of pro bono cybersecurity support for the Winter Olympics, stopping the provision of free services to all users in Italy, removing all servers located in the country, and canceling plans to invest in setting up local offices. With the Winter Olympics set to open on February 6, a Cloudflare withdrawal at this point could expose the event to serious risks of cyberattacks.

iOS 26 adoption rate lower than previous versions at the same point in time

According to data released by web traffic analytics firm StatCounter, as of January 2026 only about 15% to 16% of active iPhones worldwide are running iOS 26, while more than 60% of devices are still on iOS 18.

Based on these figures, the adoption rate of iOS 26 appears to be less than one quarter of that of several previous versions over the same period. For example, StatCounter’s data from January 2025 showed that about 63% of iPhones were running some version of iOS 18 roughly four months after its release. In January 2024, iOS 17 reached about 54% adoption over a similar timeframe, while iOS 16 had already surpassed 60% by January 2023.

StatCounter’s estimates are derived from web traffic analysis, tracking operating system versions through page views across participating websites worldwide. Different methodologies, however, produce different results. For instance, TelemetryDeck reports iOS 26 at 60% adoption, with iOS 18 still at 37%.

Well-known Apple news site MacRumors noted that in the first week of January last year, 89.3% of its visitors were using iOS 18. During the same period this year, only 25.7% of its readers were on iOS 26. As Apple has yet to release official figures, the true penetration rate of iOS 26 remains unclear, but these data suggest that user hesitation toward iOS 26 is unprecedented in recent years.

Rumors You Can Just Glance At

According to social media posts, the chairman of China’s domestic Linux distribution UnionTech UOS reportedly fired a kernel engineer over his attire. The company recently issued a last-minute notice requiring employees to wear suits to the annual party. When a key engineer responsible for Linux kernel development asked in a group chat, “What if I don’t have a suit?”, the chairman allegedly dismissed him on the spot.
According to what some users were recently told by China Merchants Bank customer service, Visa credit cards issued by the bank can be added to Apple Pay starting January 15. Previously in mainland China, Apple Pay only supported UnionPay debit and credit cards. Apple has also updated the wording on its Apple Pay supported card list from “UnionPay credit and debit cards” to “bank cards.”
Wccftech claims that based on data from several Czech e-commerce websites, the 512 GB version of the Steam Machine is priced at about 19,826 Czech koruna (around RMB 6,622), while the 2 TB version is about 22,305 koruna (around RMB 7,450). However, retail prices for electronics in Europe usually include around 20% value-added tax, and third-party retailers often add extra channel markups.
On January 11, the team behind the recently discussed solo-living safety app “Dead Yet?” responded regarding the app’s name and the decision to start charging fees. They said they appreciate the positive suggestions from users about a new name and will carefully study and consider them. In order to keep the project healthy and sustainable, and to cover the growing costs of SMS messages, servers, and other expenses, they will introduce a paid plan priced at RMB 8. The team also welcomes interest and contact from investors, and will choose partners—institutions or individuals—who can best support the project’s growth. Finally, they called on more people to pay attention to those living alone and to offer them more care and understanding. In the “Dead Yet?” app, users must set emergency contacts and check in regularly; if they fail to check in for several consecutive days, the system will automatically send an email to the emergency contact the next day.

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