Gavekal Technologies

The US tech world spent much of the past 10 days freaking out over the latest high-performance Chinese AI model release, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3. This once again conjured the specter of cheap open-weight Chinese models blowing up the revenue engines for their more costly American competitors. Shortly afterwards, Chinese open models went from villain to hero, as the US-based developer community Hugging Face used a Chinese model to fend off a rogue cyber attack by an OpenAI model.

The WAIC 2026 showcased China’s commercial and geopolitical AI ambitions, with President Xi Jinping’s first attendance, demonstrations of Chinese AI supernodes, and the launch of a new international cooperation body signaling Beijing’s push to build an alternative to the US-led AI ecosystem. At the same time, the conference shows the constraints on these ambitions, including fierce competition, limited monetization, and a persistent shortage of advanced compute.