Xi Jinping will give the keynote at China’s flagship AI summit for the first time
Xi Jinping will give the keynote at China’s flagship AI summit for the first time

Xi Jinping will attend the opening ceremony of the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai and deliver a keynote speech, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson announced on Monday. It is the first time China’s leader has appeared at …

Zhipu’s founder says frontier AI should stay open to everyone. His own government may disagree.
Zhipu’s founder says frontier AI should stay open to everyone. His own government may disagree.

The founder of China’s most prominent AI lab has made an unambiguous case for openness. Frontier AI should stay broadly accessible rather than controlled by a select few, Zhipu’s Tang Jie wrote in an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg. His argument in…

Chinese developers are climbing the firewall to pay more for GPT-5.6, and doing the maths on why
Chinese developers are climbing the firewall to pay more for GPT-5.6, and doing the maths on why

OpenAI’s new GPT-5.6 models are winning praise from an unlikely group. Users in mainland China, where the service is blocked and reachable only by VPN or third-party proxy, told the South China Morning Post the models are worth the extra cost. That is …

Australia’s 7 best-selling EVs are now all Chinese — even Tesla’s
Australia’s 7 best-selling EVs are now all Chinese — even Tesla’s

Australia just posted its biggest month ever for electric car sales, and for the first time seven different EVs each cleared 1,000 units in a single month.
Every one of them is either Chinese-owned or Chinese-built — and that includes the Tesla Model Y…

MiniMax’s CEO won’t take a salary until AGI. His company just raised $2bn after an 80% crash
MiniMax’s CEO won’t take a salary until AGI. His company just raised $2bn after an 80% crash

The letter reads like a founder’s article of faith. The share sale underneath it tells a harder story. The founder of MiniMax has told staff he will take no salary until the Chinese AI company builds artificial general intelligence. On the same day, Mi…

China just caught a rocket in a net, and SpaceX should be watching
China just caught a rocket in a net, and SpaceX should be watching

SpaceX lands its rockets on legs. Blue Origin uses a platform. China just caught one in a giant net. China has recovered the first stage of an orbital rocket for the first time. The milestone pulls it into a club with only two other members. On Friday,…

The Singapore side door: OpenAI and Google are selling frontier AI to blacklisted Chinese giants
The Singapore side door: OpenAI and Google are selling frontier AI to blacklisted Chinese giants

Three Chinese tech giants are on a US military blacklist. All three can still buy America’s best AI, as long as they buy it in the right country. Three of China’s biggest technology companies sit on a US military blacklist. All three can still reach so…

Humanoid robots just removed organs from live animals for the first time
Humanoid robots just removed organs from live animals for the first time

Two robots that look roughly like people just reached inside a live animal and removed an organ. No film studio staged the scene. It happened in a lab in California, and it is a first for medicine. Surgeons at the University of California San Diego use…

Tencent in talks to become Manus’ largest shareholder
Tencent in talks to become Manus’ largest shareholder

Manus was, briefly, one of the most valuable exits in Chinese AI. Meta agreed to buy the agentic AI startup for more than $2bn late last year, then watched Beijing block the deal on national-security grounds. Now the company is being bought back by the…

China’s giant Gobi solar plant runs after dark on salt, not batteries
China’s giant Gobi solar plant runs after dark on salt, not batteries

China Three Gorges Corporation (CTG) has put the world’s largest solar PV-plus-concentrated-solar hybrid into commercial trial operation in the Gobi Desert — and its headline trick is delivering power after sunset without a single lithium battery.
The …