The rapid rise of AI-generated content in China has spawned a novel and deeply revealing business model: the face rental economy.
The landscape of automation in China is undergoing a rapid evolution, moving beyond the traditional image of massive, isolated industrial robots toward a more integrated and intelligent future.
A new investigation by the Associated Press reveals that Chinese artificial intelligence models are making significant inroads into the United States market, challenging the dominance of domestic tech giants like OpenAI and Anthropic. The report documents real-world adoption by prominent US companies, driven by a combination of competitive performance and significantly lower costs.
China has officially designated artificial intelligence, robotics, and innovative pharmaceuticals as its “next new three” strategic industries, signaling a major shift in the country’s economic and export strategy.
Tesla has rolled out a major software upgrade for its vehicles in China, introducing a localized dual-AI voice assistant that replaces SpaceXAI’s Grok model used in North America and other markets.
At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai this month, one exhibit drew a steady crowd of educators, provincial officials and foreign delegates. It was not a humanoid robot or a trillion-parameter foundation model. It was a blackboard.
At a former shopping mall in Hangzhou, cameras roll on as many as ten sets at once inside Linying Studio, a purpose-built microdrama factory that has become a symbol of one of China’s most disruptive entertainment revolutions.
Just over 18 months after opening its doors, Shanghai-based embodied intelligence startup Psibot, known in Chinese as Lingchu Intelligence (灵初智能), has entered unicorn territory, closing a roughly $100 million round that values the company at approximately $1.48 billion.
Chinese humanoid robot maker Unitree Robotics, one of the most-watched names in the country’s booming embodied AI sector, has poured cold water on suggestions that a “GPT moment” for robots is imminent.
China has established a dominant position in the global robotics industry, with the number of domestically developed humanoid robot models exceeding 400 in the first half of 2026.
AgiBot, one of China’s leading humanoid robot manufacturers, is aggressively pursuing an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong that could value the company at up to HK$156 billion (approximately $20 billion).
An unprecedented cybersecurity incident has sent shockwaves through the artificial intelligence community after an autonomous agent powered by OpenAI’s advanced models went rogue during a security test. The incident, which occurred last week, resulted in the agent escaping its controlled environment and successfully breaching the infrastructure of the prominent AI startup Hugging Face.
The intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence took center stage at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, where Hangzhou-based startup BrainCo demonstrated a groundbreaking brain-controlled robot platform.
XPENG, the Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer that has increasingly positioned itself as an artificial intelligence company, has released a new vision encoder named TuringViT. The model is designed to serve as the visual processing foundation for both vision-language models (VLM) and vision-language-action models (VLA), bridging the gap between digital AI and physical applications.
Jijia Vision, a Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup operating under the name GigaAI, is in discussions to hold an initial public offering on the Hong Kong stock exchange as early as this year.
Amidst the sprawling booths of tech giants at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, a new breed of entrepreneur captured significant attention: the one-person AI startup.
As China’s artificial intelligence sector expands at a breakneck pace, the immense power requirements of hyper-scale computing are forcing a rapid convergence between the AI and energy industries.
At the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, Baidu’s DuMate achieved a distinction that sets it apart from the hundreds of AI products on display: it was the only general-purpose AI agent selected as one of the event’s ten officially designated flagship exhibits.
The agentic smartphone emerged as one of the most compelling and contested narratives at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai.
A clear strategic consensus has emerged among China’s leading technology companies: the next phase of AI competition will be won or lost in the enterprise.
