China to host 2026 World AI Conference focused on global governance

By pairing the World Artificial Intelligence Conference with a “High‑Level Meeting on Global AI Governance,” Beijing is signaling that it wants to be seen not just as an AI manufacturing powerhouse, but as a rule‑setter. The scale—over a thousand companies and hundreds of new solutions—underscores how rapidly China’s AI ecosystem is maturing even under U.S. export controls. WAIC Academic, with its Turing Award‑level speakers and 284 accepted papers, is also a deliberate play to position Shanghai as a serious research convening hub.

For the race to AGI, conferences like this function as both marketplace and message. On one side, they accelerate diffusion of embodied AI, intelligent computing, and open‑weight models that could narrow gaps with U.S. labs. On the other, they give China a stage to promote its narrative of “inclusive, open and secure” AI development—often contrasted implicitly with U.S. security‑driven controls. If Beijing can turn WAIC into the default venue where emerging markets, European delegations, and global companies come to talk AI governance, it will gain soft power over standards, safety norms, and expectations about model access. That matters because whoever shapes those norms will have outsized influence on how quickly—and on whose terms—near‑AGI capabilities are deployed.