President Xi Jinping spoke on Friday at the opening of the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), China’s largest annual event for the AI industry.
Xi’s personal attendance elevated the conference’s profile, and signalled AI development has become both a technological imperative and a cornerstone of China’s geopolitical strategy.
As Washington maintains strict export controls on advanced semiconductors and restricts overseas access to top AI models, Beijing has accelerated its drive for tech self-reliance.
To further support AI development, Xi says, in the next five years, China will provide developing countries – including members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Arab League, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the African Union, Latin American countries and the Brics bloc – with 5,000 research projects in AI, as well as training, seminar programmes and “cooperation centres”.
China has made artificial intelligence a national strategic priority, investing across models, chips and computing infrastructure as it seeks greater technological self-reliance under US export controls.
Domestic developers have also increasingly embraced open-source models as a route to wider global adoption. The latest example came on Thursday, when Beijing-based Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model with native visual understanding and a one-million-token context window, designed for coding, knowledge work and deep reasoning.
Xi says 2026, the inaugural year of China’s 15th five-year plan, maps out an “immense opportunity” for the international community.
“As a responsible major country, China is always committed to providing international public goods relating to AI.”
He adds the size of China’s “core smart economy industries” has exceeded 1 trillion yuan (US$148 billion).
“With AI advancing at a staggering speed, we must ensure its development is positive, for the good and for humanity,” Xi says, adding AI must be guided with human wisdom and international consensus.
Author: Saikat Bhattacharya
