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SenseTime, a Chinese artificial intelligence company, has filed to go public in Hong Kong. The move comes as China continues to tighten regulation on the country’s technology giants.

Pavlo Gonchar | SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images

Shares of SenseTime fell as much as 9.7% on Tuesday after U.S. short seller Grizzly Research alleged the Chinese artificial intelligence firm inflated its revenue.

SenseTime shares pared some of those losses in Hong Kong and closed 4.86% lower in the afternoon.

Grizzly Research alleged in a report on Tuesday that SenseTime engaged in a so-called “revenue round-tripping” program.

“SenseTime either directly or through intermediaries provides funds to customers that in turn are used to purchase goods from SenseTime that might never have been delivered,” Grizzly Research alleged. The short seller said it got this information via two court cases in China that described the scheme.

SenseTime responds

SenseTime said in a Hong Kong Stock Exchange filing that it is “reviewing the allegations and considering the appropriate course of action to take to safeguard the interests of all shareholders.”

The Chinese firm said it believes Grizzly Research’s report is “without merit and contains unfounded allegations and misleading conclusions and interpretations.”

SenseTime added that the report “shows a lack of understanding of the Company’s business model and financial reporting structure, and a lack of thorough reading of the Company’s public filings.”

Grizzly Research did not contact SenseTime to verify the information, SenseTime said in its statement.

SenseTime issues grow

SenseTime was once viewed as one of China’s most exciting artificial intelligence companies and is best-known for computer vision technology that can power facial recognition software.

However, the company has been a target of U.S. government sanctions. In 2019, Washington put SenseTime on the so-called Entity List, which restricts American firms from doing business with it. The U.S. alleged that SenseTime is linked to human rights violations in China’s Xinjiang region.

At the time, SenseTime said that it does “not have any business in, nor are we aware of our technology being used in the Xinjiang region.”

SenseTime proposed an initial public offering in Hong Kong in mid-2021 but postponed the listing later that year after the U.S. government added it to a list of “Chinese military-industrial complex companies.”

The company ended up doing its listing at the end of December, pricing shares at 3.85 Hong Kong dollars ($0.49). Shares closed at 1.37 Hong Kong dollars on Tuesday, 64% below their IPO price.

Due to SenseTime’s U.S. government blacklisting, the company “has a severely limited target market and therefore no outlook for any real improvement,” Grizzly Research said in its report.

The short seller also took aim at SenseTime’s technology, claiming it has “no competitive moat in AI.”

“We believe SenseTime is operating a fundamentally dead-ended facial recognition software business, plus some additional AI R&D projects with almost no chance of scalable future profits,” Grizzly Research said.

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Why Jim Cramer wants to load up on more shares of this DuPont spinoff

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Palantir tops estimates, boosts fourth-quarter guidance on AI adoption

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Palantir tops estimates, boosts fourth-quarter guidance on AI adoption

Alex Karp, chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies Inc., speaks during the AIPCon conference in Palo Alto, California, US, on March 13, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Palantir reported quarterly results that topped analysts’ estimates and issued better-than-expected guidance for the fourth quarter, attributing much of its strength to artificial intelligence. The stock rose about 1% in extended trading.

Here’s how the company did compared to LSEG estimates:

Earnings per share: 21 cents adjusted vs. 17 cents expected

Revenues: $1.18 billion vs. $1.09 billion expected

Palantir, which builds analytics tools for large companies and government agencies, said it expects revenue of about $1.33 billion for the current period, exceeding the $1.19 billion expected by analysts, according to LSEG.

The optimistic guidance comes even as the government shutdown stretches into its second calendar month, and potentially threatens some key contracts. Revenue in Palantir’s U.S. government business grew 52% in the quarter from a year ago to $486 million.

Government sales, particularly from military agencies, have been central to Palantir’s ongoing ascent. Over the years, Palantir has steadily beat out major legacy government contractors, and recently landed a deal worth up to $10 billion contract with the U.S. Army.

Palantir has also faced criticism over how its tools are being used by government agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Total revenue in the quarter jumped 63% from $725.5 million a year ago, exceeding $1 billion for the second straight quarter. Net income more than tripled to $475.6 million, or 18 cents per share, from $143.5 million, or 6 cents per share, a year earlier.

For the full year, Palantir now expects about $4.4 billion in sales, topping the $4.17 billion forecast by Wall Street. The company also bumped up its full-year free cash flow outlook to between $1.9 billion and $2.1 billion.

Palantir’s U.S. commercial business more than doubled to $397 million. Total contract value for U.S. commercial deals closed more than quadrupled to $1.31 billion. Over the last few weeks, the company has announced new partnerships with Snowflake, Lumen and Nvidia.

Retail investors have helped drive Palantir’s skyrocketing stock price to new heights. The shares have surged more than 170% this year, lifting the company’s market cap past $490 billion and cementing the company among the most valuable technology names in the world.

Analysts have raised concerns about the stock, which trades at an extreme multiple relative to technology behemoths with far more revenue. In a letter to shareholders, CEO Alex Karp called out the “detractors” who have been “left in a kind of deranged and self-destructive befuddlement.”

“The reality is that Palantir has made it possible for retail investors to achieve rates of return previously limited to the most successful venture capitalists in Palo Alto,” he wrote. “And we have done so through authentic and substantive growth.”

In an interview with CNBC’s Morgan Brennan on Monday, Karp acknowledged that there’s excess in the AI market today and that some companies are eventually going to feel the pain.

“The strong companies are going to get much stronger, and the people pretending they’re doing stuff are going to disappear very quickly,” Karp said.

WATCH: D.A. Davidson’s Luria on Palantir

Palantir is the best software company and it's not even close, says D.A. Davidson's Gil Luria

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Ether falls 7% following a multimillion dollar hack of a decentralized finance protocol

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Ether falls 7% following a multimillion dollar hack of a decentralized finance protocol

Representation of Ethereum, with its native cryptocurrency ether.

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Ether fell as much as 9% on Monday, slipping below its critical $3,600 support level, shortly after a multimillion dollar hack affected a protocol on the token’s native network. 

The cryptocurrency, which is issued on Ethereum, was last down 6.6% at around $3,600, CoinMetrics data shows. That’s roughly 25% off its high of $4,885 hit on August 22

The coin’s tumble came after Ethereum-based decentralized finance protocol Balancer on Monday lost possibly more than $100 million in a hack. The exploit marks the latest in a series of bearish events that have put digital assets investors on tenterhooks over the past few weeks.

In mid-October, U.S. President Donald Trump announced “massive” tariffs on China over its restriction of rare earth exports, kicking off investors’ flight from crypto to risk-off assets such as gold. And although the president later walked back that threat, his comments sparked a sell-off that triggered cascading liquidations of highly leveraged digital asset positions

Last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell cautioned investors about expecting future rate cuts, adding to existing bearish market sentiment.     

“These events have put investors on uneasy footing as we roll into November,” Juan Leon, senior investment strategist at Bitwise, told CNBC. “Macro volatility notwithstanding, this October’s drawdown appears to have been a healthy, albeit sharp, de-leveraging event that flushed speculative excess from the market.”

Some stocks linked to digital assets are also coming under pressure. Coinbase shares were down nearly 4%, while Bitcoin treasury firm Strategy edged down more than 1%.   

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