currently available in China. Baidu has more than 7,000 published AI patent applications in China, the highest in the country. The AI open platform Baidu Brain has made available more than 250 core AI capabilities to over 1.9 million developers, while PaddlePaddle, the largest open-source deep learning platform in China, services 84,000 enterprises. Industries throughout China are using the PaddlePaddle platform to create specialized applications for their sectors, from the automotive industry's acceleration of autonomous vehicles to the health-care industry's applications for fighting COVID-19. In April 2022, Baidu announced they gained permits from China in order to provide the first driverless taxis. The company aim to provide driverless ride-hailing services to the public and have 10 autonomous cars set to begin offering rides to passengers within a 23-square-mile area in suburban begin beginning the 28th of April 2022. In July 2022, Baidu unveiled the Apollo RT6, a driverless vehicle that is planned to join Baidu's driverless fleet in 2023. Censorship According to the China Digital Times, Baidu has a long history of being the most active and restrictive online censor in the search arena. Documents leaked in April 2009 from an employee in Baidu's internal monitoring and censorship department show a long list of blocked websites and censored topics on Baidu search. In May 2011, activists sued Baidu in the United States for violating the U.S. Constitution by the censorship it conducts in accord with the demand of the Chinese government. A U.S. judge has ruled that the Chinese search engine Baidu has the right to block pro-democracy works from its query results under freedom of speech rights, dismissing a lawsuit that sought to punish the company for Internet censorship. In 2017, Baidu began coordinating with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security as well as 372 Internet police departments to detect information related to "anti-government rumors" and then flooding "Baidu-linked web sites, news sites and devices with alerts dispelling the so-called misinformation." This was done using natural language processing, big data and artificial intelligence. As part of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese regulators instructed Baidu, along with other Internet companies, to "conduct special supervision" on news and information related to the disease. In November 2022, Sustainalytics downgraded Baidu to "non-compliant" with the United Nations Global Compact principles due to complicity with censorship. Controversies Death of Wei Zexi In 2016, Baidu's P4P search results reportedly contributed to the death of a student