The 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance opened in Shanghai on July 17 with Chinese leader Xi Jinping attending, more than 1,100 companies exhibiting 3,000 products across 100,000-plus square meters, and 300 new products making their global debut. It is the largest WAIC in the event's nine-year history and the moment China is using to reset the global conversation on AI cooperation.
Record Scale, Humanoid-Heavy Show Floor
WAIC 2026 spans three venues across Shanghai and runs July 17 through July 20 under the theme "Intelligent Partners, Co-Create the Future." The show floor is anchored by an embodied AI zone with more than 200 companies where visitors watch humanoid robots run factory tasks, dexterous hands manipulate everyday objects and shape-shifting platforms such as Swancor's Quester1 switch between bipedal and quadrupedal morphology on stage. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has publicly forecast 100,000 humanoid units of national output for 2026, and WAIC is where much of that industrial base is putting itself on display.
Xi Jinping Takes the Stage
Xi is attending WAIC in person for the first time and is expected to endorse a China-led framework for international AI cooperation, positioning Beijing as the alternative center of gravity to Washington on AI governance. On the eve of the conference, 29 countries signed the founding agreement of the new World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), a Beijing-backed body meant to coordinate AI safety norms, sovereign compute build-out and open-model interoperability across the Global South.
Product Debuts and Model Drops Line Up
The 300+ product debuts skew heavily toward embodied AI and dexterous manipulation, alongside a fresh wave of open-source foundation models. Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 open-weight MoE lands during the show, Huawei is trailing a new Ascend rack-scale system, and BeingBeyond and LinkerBot's dexterous foundation-model partnership — announced on the WAIC show floor — is the flagship demonstration of China's push to unify humanoid hardware around shared learning stacks.
Context: The AI Cold War Backdrop
WAIC 2026 opens the same day Google DeepMind ships Gemini 3.5 Pro and just after Japan's NVIDIA-anchored Vera Rubin AI factory launch. Combined with US export controls on advanced accelerators, that puts a sharper edge on the "AI cooperation" branding than in prior years. Chinese officials say WAIC 2026 is not about decoupling but about defining a multilateral rulebook — one that includes, notably, the countries whose humanoid and industrial-robotics markets Beijing wants to dominate through 2030.
Reporting based on coverage from Xinhua, Global Times, People's Daily Online, Shanghai Municipal Government, SCMP and Yicai Global.