Gavekal Technologies

The 2026 WAIC showcased thousands of competitive AI products targeting consumer, enterprise, and government adoption. Competition is expanding beyond foundational models toward enterprise solutions and next-generation consumer-AI interfaces, including agentic smartphones and humanoid robots. Despite strong investment, policy support, and expanding pilots, commercialization remains constrained by uncertain revenue models, high computing costs, integration barriers, and uncertain legal frameworks.

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.