Xi Jinping to Headline China's World AI Conference for First Time
Chinese President Xi Jinping will personally address the 2026 World AI Conference in Shanghai on July 17-20, his first appearance at the event since it began in 2018.
Read more →AI in China
China is one of the two centers of the global AI race, home to labs and companies such as Alibaba, DeepSeek, ByteDance, and Zhipu AI, many of which release competitive open-weight models at low cost. It also has some of the world’s strictest AI regulations. This hub follows China’s models, chips, companies, and AI policy.
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What Is DeepSeek? The Chinese AI Lab That Rattled Silicon Valley
DeepSeek is the Chinese AI lab whose cheaply trained, open-weight models triggered Nvidia's biggest one-day stock drop and reshaped how the industry talks about AI costs.
Read more →DeepSeek in Talks for New Funding at $71 Billion Valuation
DeepSeek has opened talks for a new funding round valuing the Chinese AI lab at $71 billion, just weeks after its first outside round closed near $50 billion, the Financial Times reports.
Read more →What Is the Pentagon's 1260H List — and What Does It Actually Block?
The Pentagon's 1260H list flags Chinese firms tied to the military, but it only bars U.S. defense purchases — it doesn't stop American AI companies from selling to them abroad.
Read more →OpenAI, Google Supplied AI to Pentagon-Blacklisted Chinese Firms
OpenAI and Google confirmed to the Financial Times that they supply AI services to Singapore units of Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, all listed by the Pentagon as Chinese military-linked companies.
Read more →MiniMax Raises $2B, CEO Forgoes Salary Until AGI Is Achieved
Chinese AI startup MiniMax closed a $2 billion share-and-bond sale after its stock plunged on an IPO lockup expiry, with founder Yan Junjie vowing to forgo salary until AGI is achieved.
Read more →Chinese AI Models Capture Up to 46% of US Firms' Tokens
OpenRouter data shows Chinese AI models now handle over 30% of tokens run by US firms every week since February, peaking at 46%, as companies chase costs up to 90% lower than Anthropic or OpenAI.
Read more →What Is GLM? Zhipu AI's Open-Weight Model Family, Explained
GLM is the open-weight AI model family from Chinese lab Zhipu AI (Z.ai) — free to download and self-host, and competitive with top US models at a fraction of the API cost.
Read more →China's GLM-5.2 Rivals US Frontier AI at One-Sixth the Cost
Z.ai has released GLM-5.2, a 744-billion-parameter open-weight model that matches GPT-5.5 on key benchmarks and trails Claude Opus 4.8 narrowly — trained entirely on Huawei silicon with no Nvidia hardware.
Read more →What Is an AI Companion — and Why Are Governments Regulating Them?
AI companions are chatbots built for emotional connection, not task completion. As apps like Replika and Character.AI reach tens of millions of users, governments in China, the US, and Europe are introducing rules to protect vulnerable users.
Read more →China's AI Companion Rules Force ByteDance and Alibaba Shutdowns
China's new regulations targeting AI services that simulate human relationships take effect July 15, forcing ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen to disable personalized companion agent features used by hundreds of millions of people.
Read more →Meituan Reveals LongCat-2.0: The Stealth AI That Secretly Led Global Charts
Chinese tech company Meituan has disclosed that "Owl Alpha," an anonymous model that topped OpenRouter rankings for two months, was its 1.6-trillion-parameter LongCat-2.0 — trained entirely on domestic chips and now free under an MIT license.
Read more →Unitree Robotics Wins Final Approval for $620M Shanghai IPO
China's top humanoid robot maker received China Securities Regulatory Commission clearance on July 2 to list on Shanghai's STAR Market, aiming to raise 4.2 billion yuan to fund AI model development and new products.
Read more →Meituan Open-Sources LongCat-2.0, a Frontier-Class Coding Model Built on Chinese Chips
Chinese technology company Meituan has released LongCat-2.0, a 1.6-trillion-parameter coding model trained entirely on domestic Chinese chips, under the MIT License — the first frontier-class open-source model built without Western semiconductors.
Read more →Zhipu AI's GLM-5.2 Beats GPT-5.5 on Coding at a Sixth of the Price
Chinese lab Zhipu AI has open-sourced GLM-5.2, a 753-billion-parameter model that outperforms GPT-5.5 on software engineering benchmarks while costing roughly one-sixth as much.
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