An emphasis on open-weight AI models has suited both China’s AI industry and Beijing to date, but limits may now be necessary.
Visitors at the booth for Moonshot's Kimi K3 during the World AI Conference in Shanghai, July 17, 2026. Credit: Ng Han Guan via AP Images
On July 16, Chinese lab Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter open-weight model that within a day had displaced Anthropic’s most advanced offering, Fable 5, atop a widely watched frontend coding leaderboard, a first for a Chinese model. The following day, Chinese President Xi Jinping told attendees at the annual World AI Conference in Shanghai to “seize this rare, historic opportunity to encourage open-source.” Yet in the same speech, he warned that AI is “advancing at a
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