Seventeen Nations Form Cable Pact as US and China Both Sit Out

The Shangri-La Dialogue, Singapore's annual Asia-Pacific defence forum, closed its weekend session with US-China optics at their warmest in several years. US Defence Secretary Hegseth called bilateral ties at a multi-year high; Beijing's delegation softened its public posture in return. Simultaneously, seventeen nations signed a pact to protect undersea cables, the fiber links carrying 95 percent of intercontinental internet traffic, and neither superpower joined. A regional CISO, a chief information security officer, needs to track both because the diplomatic signal and the infrastructure risk picture are diverging.

Charmaine Lo's weekend column tracks this compression: Hong Kong cut its emergency alert activation time from sixty minutes to fifteen, backed by HK$150 million (US$19 million) in new infrastructure, as Beijing ran a 100-ship encirclement exercise.

In AI markets, MiniMax filed for a domestic Chinese listing against DeepSeek, the Hangzhou model company whose January 2025 release shook Western AI valuations. In Washington, Anthropic and OpenAI-aligned super PACs, the political spending vehicles active in the US midterms, are each spending tens of millions to shape AI regulation. Qatar said a temporary Hormuz toll, the shipping fee under discussion for the strait that carries roughly a third of global seaborne oil, remains negotiable. The outcome shapes Asian energy supply lines through the week.