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Xi Jinping Makes First WAIC Appearance, Championing Low-Cost Open AI and Global Cooperation

July 17, 2026 at 01:06 EDT

Policy & Regulation
Open Source
Foundation Models

China's President Xi Jinping used his first-ever appearance at Shanghai's World Artificial Intelligence Conference to praise the country's progress in low-cost, open-source AI and to call for a more open, cooperative global technological order. Speaking on July 17, 2026, at the opening ceremony of WAIC and the accompanying High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance, Xi framed artificial intelligence as "a symphony of international cooperation, not a solo performance by any single country," warning explicitly against dominance by any one nation.

July 17, 2026 · World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Shanghai

Xi Pitches China's Cheap, Open AI as a Global Public Good

In his first WAIC appearance, Xi Jinping called AI "a symphony of international cooperation, not a solo performance by any single country" — betting that open weights and low prices, not proprietary Western systems, will broaden China's global influence.

11.5×

Cheaper on input vs GPT-5.5

34×

Cheaper on output vs GPT-5.5

~$294K

Reported model training cost

The economics of the pitch

Cost per 1M output tokens — columns drawn to scale (each block ≈ $10)

~$30

GPT-5.5
(est. output)

$0.87

DeepSeek
V4 Pro

$0.28

DeepSeek
V4 Flash

DeepSeek's downloadable, open-weight models undercut Western closed systems by an order of magnitude — with MMLU and HumanEval benchmarks approaching leading rivals.

The case for openness

Open weights allow local deployment & data sovereignty
Enterprises like Siemens cite cost, performance, easy customization
Low prices pitched as narrowing the global AI divide

The "dependency trap"

National-security concerns over reliance on Chinese systems
Questions about Chinese data residency
Narrow but real gaps remain on some benchmarks

Two bets, one governance contest

The West: regulation-first, proprietary

Beijing: open access + price

Whether Xi's "public-good" framing wins durable global adoption — or hardens into a security debate over Chinese-built AI — will shape the next phase of the contest.

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