Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) on Friday, highlighting the need for international cooperation in AI development.
Xi voiced China’s readiness to pursue greater openness and practical action in AI development. He stressed the importance of international cooperation, stating that AI development should not be a “solo performance” by a single country, but a “symphony of global collaboration,” the South China Morning Post reported.
Xi mentioned the newly established World AI Cooperation Organization, which comprises 29 countries, including Russia, Pakistan, and Indonesia. He also declared China’s commitment to support AI development in developing countries over the next five years, with plans to offer 5,000 AI research projects, training, seminar programs, and “cooperation centers”.
The Chinese President emphasized the need for responsible AI development, guided by “human wisdom” and international consensus, as AI continues to evolve rapidly.
Moonshot Challenges American AI
Xi’s participation in the WAIC, a key annual AI event in China, underscored the importance of AI in China’s tech and geopolitical strategy. With stringent U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors and limited access to top-tier AI models overseas, Beijing is accelerating its drive for tech autonomy.
This also comes on the heels of Chinese start-up Moonshot AI launching Kimi K3, the world’s largest open-source AI model, late Thursday.
The new open-source AI model with 2.8 trillion parameters claims to outperform leading U.S. models from Anthropic and OpenAI in some capabilities. The company said Kimi K3 achieves “open frontier intelligence” and is the largest open-source model to date, surpassing Chinese rivals such as DeepSeek‘s 1.6 trillion-parameter V4 Pro and Zhipu AI‘s 744 billion-parameter GLM 5 series. Parameters measure an AI model’s complexity, with higher counts generally indicating greater capability.
Meanwhile, despite the political divide in Washington over technology blockades against Beijing, Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) has started shipping its H200 AI chips to China, as the U.S. approves limited exports.
U.S. Commerce official Jeffrey Kessler told lawmakers that exports of Nvidia’s H200 AI chips to China remain extremely limited, with only a handful shipped so far. However, the U.S. has recently approved about 10 Chinese companies to receive advanced AI chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) under strict controls.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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