Xi Jinping to Give First-Ever Keynote at China's Flagship AI Summit
Xi will open the 2026 World AI Conference in Shanghai on July 17, his first in-person appearance at the event since it launched in 2018, as China pushes a rival global AI governance body.
Xi Jinping will attend and deliver the keynote at the opening ceremony of the 2026 World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai on July 17 — his first in-person appearance at the summit since it launched in 2018. China’s Foreign Ministry confirmed the appearance Monday, framing it as a moment for Xi to “systemically elaborate on China’s policies, position, visions and propositions on AI development and governance.”
The conference runs July 17-20 under the theme “Intelligent Partners, Co-create the Future,” and will draw government officials, researchers, and industry figures from around the world, alongside heads of international organizations. It runs alongside a High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance — the venue where China has been building the case for a World AI Cooperation Organization, a proposed body it wants headquartered in Shanghai as a counterweight to Western-led AI governance frameworks.
The timing isn’t subtle. Xi’s debut keynote lands three days before Google’s expected Gemini 3.5 Pro launch and amid a broader narrative shift: Chinese labs are no longer just fast-following on text models — ByteDance’s Seedream and a wave of open-weight Alibaba tools have pulled even with US labs in image and video generation, one of the few frontier categories where “best in class ships from San Francisco” no longer holds by default. Goldman Sachs began formally recommending Chinese models to Wall Street clients the same week.
For a Chinese president who has historically delegated tech-conference appearances to ministers, showing up in person signals that Beijing sees AI governance as a great-power issue, not just an industrial policy. Expect the keynote to double as a pitch: an alternative rulebook for AI development that positions China as a stabilizing, multilateral counterpoint to US export controls and unilateral model restrictions.
Nothing here is a product announcement — no model, no benchmark, no API. But for anyone building on both US and Chinese model ecosystems, WAIC is where the next 12 months of Chinese AI policy gets set, including the ground rules that will shape open-weight releases, compute access, and cross-border data flows for labs like DeepSeek, Alibaba, and ByteDance.