Alibaba Group Holding BABA research arm, Damo Academy, has won a key endorsement from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered cancer detection tool.

The FDA granted the “breakthrough device” designation to the research group’s Damo Panda model, SCMP cited Alibaba last Thursday.

Alibaba revealed that Damo Panda would identify pancreatic cancer in November 2023 in a paper published in  Nature Medicine.

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Alibaba has already deployed Damo Panda in trials across China. It has screened 40,000 people at a hospital in Ningbo city.

Alibaba established Damo Academy in 2017, focusing on AI and the open-source chip architecture RISC-V. Damo Academy will promote the AI model by partnering with firms such as Ankon Medical Technologies.

Former Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL chief executive Eric Schmidt highlighted that Beijing’s sudden surge in AI spending (building on the success of DeepSeek) could help it outperform the U.S. unless Washington redoubles its efforts.

Former Meta Platforms Inc META Facebook exec and famous investor Chamath Palihapitiya accused Nvidia of undermining the U.S.’ best interests by allegedly bypassing export controls. His views coincided with reports claiming Chinese tech giants Tencent Holdings TCEHY, Alibaba, and ByteDance are ramping up their orders for Nvidia’s H20 AI chips driven by the popularity of DeepSeek’s affordable AI models.

Prior reports indicated Alibaba’s Quark AI app surpassed ByteDance’s Doubao, reaching 150 million monthly users in March.

Price Action: BABA stock is up 0.25% at $109.14 premarket at the last check on Monday.

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