China’s Xi Jinping warns Shanghai summit against single-country dominance in AI

On Thursday, Foreign Minister Wang Yi and representatives from 29 countries including Russia, Pakistan and Indonesia signed an agreement establishing an intergovernmental AI cooperation group.

The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, headquartered in Shanghai, aims to promote consultation and collaboration between members to ensure the “healthy and orderly” development of AI, state media reported.

Leaders, including UN chief Antonio Guterres, Cambodia’s Hun Manet and Thailand’s Anutin Charnvirakul are attending WAIC, which lays out the cutting edge of Chinese tech.

Early on Friday, the Beijing-based startup Moonshot AI released a powerful new flagship model, Kimi K3, whose performance could reportedly rival some of the best, if not top, US offerings.

Mega AI consumption

Other highlights at this year’s WAIC are MiniMax’s M3 model, the first mass-produced phone equipped with an autonomous AI agent, and Huawei’s Atlas 950 “supernode”, an AI architecture for learning and reasoning.

“The main theme will be the transition from AI models to systems that can be deployed at scale” in everyday life, said Hello China Tech’s Zhao.

AI agents — tools capable of conversing with users, managing software or performing complex tasks — are also taking centre stage.

AI has become a strategic pillar of China’s industrial policy, driven by state investment aimed at building a domestic ecosystem, from chip production to consumer use.

Daily consumption in China of “tokens” — the industry unit of AI usage — has increased a thousandfold over the past two years, according to state media citing officials.

The Chinese market was valued at $177 billion, and is expected to grow more than 30 percent this year, according to official data.

China has more patent filings for generative AI than any other country, according to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), which recorded more than 43,000 such filings between 2024–25.

A growing number of companies abroad — like Siemens this year — are adopting Chinese open-source AI models, attracted by their performance, lower cost and ability to customise, in contrast to the closed systems of US giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic.