Wandering through the halls of China’s top artificial intelligence summit this week, I overheard heated debates on some of the thorniest issues facing the sector: How do we solve the problem of interoperability if hundreds of companies are launching their own AI agents? Which large language models are the most developer-friendly to build apps on? Are humanoids tools or companions?
Held on the banks of the Huangpu river in Shanghai, the World AI Conference convened thousands of people — as well as scores of robots — and brought to life all the passions and pitfalls of the current state of AI in China. It also put into stark contrast the chasm between the strategy pushed by Beijing and the one touted by the White House.
It’s the first major gathering since DeepSeek’s breakthrough reasoning model launched earlier this year, driving intense competition at home and proving China can go toe-to-toe with Silicon Valley. With that exuberance came the crowds of challengers, present in so many domestic industries, encouraged by government support and an open-source ecosystem that allows firms to quickly learn from rivals. When one of the so-called Little Dragons, Moonshot, released a massive open-source model that excelled at coding tasks, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. was able to update their own Qwen model within about a week to improve benchmarks at the same skills that sent Kimi-K2 viral.
Beijing likes to say this approach democratizes access to AI by offering the world the ability to freely build atop its tools, and it gives local developers an edge.
China’s current AI frenzy represents the best and worst of classic capitalism: The competition propels innovation at a rapid clip, but not all of the companies will survive over the next five or 10 years. During the summit, state-backed media touted how the country has now released 1,500 large AI models — the biggest share globally — and is home to more than 5,000 AI companies.
Yet the domestic rivalries on display were overshadowed by a broader, geopolitical contest for supremacy. China’s big gathering kicked off just days after President Donald Trump pledged that that the US will “do whatever it takes to lead the world in artificial intelligence.” After unveiling a so-called AI Action Plan, he went on to declare that America is the country that started the AI race, and “is going to win it.”
