Apple has secured a major victory for its redesigned smartwatches as per the latest decision from the US International Trade Commission. The federal agency ruled against reinstating an import ban on Apple Watches, allowing the tech giant to continue selling its devices with a reworked blood-oxygen monitoring technology.

The ITC decided to terminate the case and refer to a preliminary ruling from one of its judges in March that claimed that Apple’s redesigned smartwatches don’t infringe on patents held by Masimo, the medical tech company that has long been embroiled in lawsuits surrounding the Apple Watch. Apple thanked the ITC in a statement, adding that “Masimo has waged a relentless legal campaign against Apple and nearly all of its claims have been rejected.” We reached out to Masimo for comment and will update the story when we hear back.

The latest decision could offer some closure to the longstanding legal feud between Masimo and Apple. The patent battle dates back to 2021 with Masimo’s first filing against Apple that requested an import ban on Apple Watches. The ITC ended up ruling that Apple violated Masimo’s patents, resulting in the previous import ban and the Apple Watch maker redesigning the blood-oxygen reading feature in certain models. However, Masimo wasn’t satisfied with this conclusion and sought another import ban on the updated Apple Watch models. Now that the ITC has ruled against that, Masimo is left with the option to appeal the decision with the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

While Masimo may currently be on the losing side of this legal battle, it’s confronting Apple on multiple fronts. In November, a federal jury sided with Masimo and ruled that Apple has to pay $634 million in a separate patent infringement case.

A judge has granted the makers of the “ICE Sightings – Chicagoland” Facebook group and the Eyes Up app a preliminary injunction to stop the Trump administration from coercing platforms to take these projects down. Judge Jorge L. Alonso of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois found that the plaintiffs, Kassandra Rosado and Kreisau Group, are likely to succeed in their case, which alleges that the government suppressed protected speech under the First Amendment by strong-arming Facebook and Apple into removing ICE monitoring efforts.

Both Eyes Up and ICE Sightings – Chicagoland use publicly available information to keep tabs on ICE activity. But after pressure from Trump officials, they were removed from Apple’s App Store and Facebook, respectively. Similar apps including ICEBlock and Red Dot were also taken down from the App Store and Google Play. The lawsuit cites social media posts by former US Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem that demanded and took credit for the removal of these apps. In a document filed on Friday, Alonso called these posts “thinly veiled threats.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which is defending the plaintiffs, wrote in a post on X that it is “extremely encouraged by this ruling.” It continued, “Even though it’s not the end of the case, it bodes well for the future of our legal fight to ensure that the First Amendment protects the right to discuss, record, and criticize what law enforcement does in public.”

Not everyone had the money for the original Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System when it released in the ’90s, but there’s still a chance to experience it as an adult with disposable income. SNK and Plaion Replai, who is also behind the all-black remake of the Commodore 64, announced a faithful remake of the high-end retro console, called the Neo Geo AES+.

To bring the original console into the modern day, the collaborating companies added HDMI compatibility for resolutions up to 1080p and DIP switches on the bottom of the console to allow for language selection, overclocking and switching display modes. Rounding out the upgrades, SNK and Plaion Replai included a permanent way to retain high scores on a memory card and a low-power usage mode. For the purists out there, the Neo Geo AES+ still works on those chunky CRT displays since it has the original AV output.

Preorders are currently open for two versions of the Neo Geo AES+, including an all-white 35th anniversary edition bundle that includes an Arcade Stick, a limited-edition Metal Slug game cartridge and a memory card, for $349.99. The standard edition in classic black will only come with an arcade stick, but will be available for $249.99. Coinciding with the console release, Replai Plaion will release 10 modernized game cartridges, including Metal Slug, The King of Fighters 2002 and other classics, for $89.99 each. If you think those prices are high, don’t forget the original Neo Geo AES’ release price was $649.99. The Neo Geo AES+ is set to start shipping on November 12.

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition gets a bit wild in the blue and purple categories. If you’re struggling with today’s puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Play ball!

Green group hint: Gridiron roles.

Blue group hint: Like Ted Lasso.

Purple group hint: LA team that came from Brooklyn.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: AL East teams.

Green group: First words of football positions.

Blue group: Premier League managers.

Purple group: Nicknames for the Dodgers franchise, over time.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is AL East teams. The four answers are Blue Jays, Orioles, Rays and Yankees.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is first words of football positions. The four answers are defensive, running, tight and wide.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is Premier League managers. The four answers are Emery, Guardiola, Moyes and Slot.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is nicknames for the Dodgers franchise, over time. The four answers are Bridegrooms, Dodgers, Robins and Superbas.

In short: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warned on the Dwarkesh Podcast that DeepSeek optimising its AI models for Huawei’s Ascend chips instead of American hardware would be “a horrible outcome” for the United States, as the Chinese AI lab prepares to launch its V4 foundation model on Huawei’s Ascend 950PR processor. The migration from Nvidia’s CUDA to Huawei’s CANN framework threatens to break the software-hardware dependency underpinning American AI dominance, even as US lawmakers push to place DeepSeek on the entity list for export control.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on the Dwarkesh Podcast on Wednesday that if DeepSeek optimised its new AI models to run on Huawei chips rather than American hardware, it would be “a horrible outcome” for the United States. The warning frames the emerging partnership between China’s most capable AI lab and its most advanced chipmaker as a direct threat to the technological leverage that has underpinned American AI dominance for the past decade.

“If future AI models are optimised in a very different way than the American tech stack,” Huang said, and as “AI diffuses out into the rest of the world” with Chinese standards and technology, China “will become superior to” the US. The statement is notable because it comes from the CEO of the company that has benefited most from the current arrangement, in which virtually every frontier AI model in the world is trained on Nvidia GPUs using Nvidia’s CUDA software framework.

What DeepSeek is building

DeepSeek is preparing to launch V4, a multimodal foundation model expected later this month. The Information reported earlier in April that V4 would run on Huawei’s latest Ascend 950PR processor, while a separate Reuters report suggested the model had been trained on Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, which would constitute a violation of US export controls. The two claims are not necessarily contradictory: a model can be trained on one set of hardware and deployed for inference on another.

What makes the Huawei integration significant is the software migration behind it. DeepSeek has spent months rewriting its core code to work with Huawei’s CANN framework, moving away from the CUDA ecosystem that Nvidia has spent two decades building into the foundation of AI development. CUDA’s dominance has functioned as a second layer of American control over AI, beyond the chips themselves. Export restrictions can limit which Nvidia hardware reaches China, but as long as Chinese labs wrote their software for CUDA, they remained dependent on the Nvidia ecosystem even when using alternative processors. DeepSeek’s move to CANN breaks that dependency.

DeepSeek’s V3 model, launched in late 2024, was trained on 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs, a chip tailor-made for the Chinese market that was itself banned from sale to China in 2023. The company has already demonstrated that it can produce frontier-competitive models with fewer resources than its American rivals. Its R1 reasoning model matched or exceeded the performance of models that cost orders of magnitude more to train. V4 would extend that approach by proving the company can do it without American hardware at all.

The hardware gap and why it may not matter

On raw performance, Huawei’s chips are not competitive with Nvidia’s best. The Ascend 910C, the predecessor to the 950PR, delivers roughly 60% of the inference performance of Nvidia’s H100, a chip that is itself two generations behind Nvidia’s current best. American chips are approximately five times more powerful than their Chinese equivalents today, and that gap is projected to widen to 17 times by 2027. Huawei is targeting 750,000 AI chip shipments in 2026, but its total production represents only 3 to 5% of Nvidia’s aggregate computing power.

But Huang’s concern is not about the current performance gap. He said on the podcast that even if China had inferior chips, it could still catch up with the US in AI development given its “abundant energy” and “large pool of AI researchers.” The implication is that raw hardware performance is only one variable, and that software optimisation, researcher talent, and energy availability can compensate for silicon disadvantages. If V4 performs well on Ascend chips, it validates an alternative path for AI development that does not depend on Nvidia at any point in the supply chain.

The export control paradox

The situation exposes a tension at the centre of American chip export policy. Nvidia restarted production of the H200, a more powerful chip, for sale in China, as Huang confirmed in March. But China has been blocking H200 imports to protect Huawei’s domestic chip business, and Nvidia’s CFO has said the company has recorded no revenue from China H200 sales. The controls designed to limit China’s AI capabilities are instead accelerating the development of a Chinese alternative.

DeepSeek’s experience with its R2 model illustrates both the promise and the limits of the Huawei path. R2 was repeatedly delayed because of training failures on Huawei hardware. Chinese authorities had urged DeepSeek to train on domestic chips, but the company encountered stability issues that forced it to revert to Nvidia GPUs for training while using Huawei chips only for inference. The distinction matters: training is the most compute-intensive phase of AI development, and the fact that Huawei chips could not handle it reliably suggests the hardware gap is real. But inference, the phase where models serve users, is where commercial value is generated, and Huawei’s chips appear adequate for that purpose.

Meanwhile, US lawmakers are pushing to tighten restrictions further. On Thursday, lawmakers and experts accused China of buying “what they can” and stealing “what they cannot” in the AI industry, and called for the government to evaluate placing DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax on the entity list for export control.

What Huang is really warning about

Huang’s warning is ultimately about software-hardware co-design. Nvidia’s dominance rests not just on making the fastest chips but on CUDA’s position as the default development environment for AI. When researchers write code, they write it for CUDA. When startups build products, they build them on CUDA. When governments invest in AI infrastructure, they buy Nvidia GPUs because that is what the software requires. DeepSeek’s migration to CANN threatens to create a parallel ecosystem in which none of that applies.

The scale of Nvidia’s business makes the stakes concrete. The company’s market capitalisation exceeds $3 trillion. Its data centre revenue grew 93% year over year in its most recent quarter. Its chips power the training runs for virtually every major AI model outside China. If the most capable Chinese AI lab demonstrates that competitive models can be built without Nvidia, the argument for maintaining export controls weakens, the argument for buying Nvidia weakens, and the geopolitical assumptions that have shaped AI policy for the past three years come under pressure.

None of this means Huawei is about to overtake Nvidia. The performance gap is large and growing. The R2 training failures demonstrate that Chinese hardware is not yet ready for the most demanding AI workloads. But Huang is not warning about today. He is warning about a trajectory in which DeepSeek proves the concept, other labs follow, and the CUDA moat that has made Nvidia the most valuable company in the AI supply chain begins to erode.

The fact that the CEO of Nvidia is the one making this argument publicly suggests he believes the risk is no longer theoretical. DeepSeek’s V4 will be the first major test. If a multimodal foundation model runs competitively on Huawei silicon, the warning Huang issued on Wednesday will look less like corporate lobbying and more like the most consequential forecast in the AI chip war so far.