A few days after the US announced its own plan to promote US domination in a rapidly growing sector that will become a key negotiating tip for trade talks between economic powers, China proposed a global plan of action to manage artificial intelligence.
Chinese Prime Minister Tian has announced China's vision for future AI surveillance at the World AI Conference (WAIC), an annual gathering in Shanghai, of more than 40 high-tech Titans.
“Overall, global AI governance is still fragmented. Countries are particularly different in terms of areas such as regulatory concepts, institutional regulations, and more,” Li said in a speech on Saturday. “Coordination needs to be strengthened to form a global AI governance framework with wide consensus as quickly as possible.”
Li's remarks came days after the Trump administration announced its 28-page AI action plan. It aims to remove the “bureaucratic deficit” and establish US domination in the sector.
Li did not directly refer to the US in his speech, but he hinted at the ongoing trade tensions between the two superpowers. This includes US restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports.
“The key resources and capabilities are concentrated in some countries and some businesses,” Li said in a speech on Saturday. “Engaged in technical monopolies, management and restrictions makes AI an exclusive game for a small number of countries and businesses.”
AI chips have become an important negotiation tool between the US and China in trade negotiations. This continued this week at a meeting in Stockholm. Before the latest talks, the two countries appear to be making concessions, with Washington lifting the ban on selling major Nvidia AI chips to China, and Beijing halted antitrust investigations into American chemical firm DuPont.
Speaking from Scotland on Sunday, Trump said the US was “very close to dealing with China,” but did not provide further details. The current deadline for transactions expires on August 12th.
China is not shy about promoting AI ambitions. With over 5,000 AI companies and a core AI industry valued at 600 billion yuan ($84 billion) in April 2025, the country is fully technologically competitive with the United States.
This surge is driven by enormous government and private sector spending. Between 2013 and 2023, the state's venture capital firms invested an estimated $200 billion in AI-related companies ($5.6 billion) according to public sector spending on AI, according to a survey published by a Massachusetts-based National Economic Research Bureau.
It's part of what the US is spending, with private AI investment in the US reaching $100.1 billion in 2024, reaching about 12 times China's $9.3 billion, but China's commitment to AI racing is otherwise evident. Since 2017, China has published more patents of AI inventions each year than all other countries, according to data from the World Intellectual Property Organization.
All of this investment narrows the gap between the US and China in the AI race.
Earlier this year, the launch of the new AI model R1 from Chinese startup Deepseek a year ago led to chaos on Wall Street, demonstrating China's technical capabilities by quickly surpassing the meta and human models. It is said to have been developed for just $5.6 million. This is part of the cost spent creating other models, such as ChatGPT (over $100 million) and Gemini (nearly $200 million).
More recently, another startup Moonshot Kimi K2 model released earlier this month also sent out the AI community ripples because of its lower costs and capabilities that are better than Google and Openai models.
A study by financial services firm Morgan Stanley shows that the rapid development of China's AI market will be destroyed within the next few years, even predicting a 52% return on investment in 2030.
ASEAN Secretary-General Dr. Kao Kim Hourn called for “robust governance” of artificial intelligence to mitigate potential threats such as misinformation, deepfakes and cybersecurity threats.
“These developments require urgently coordinated actions from the international community so that AI can serve human welfare and social interests,” he said in a speech at the conference, adding that the implementation of AI in ASEAN further expands the region's rapidly growing digital economy, “to increase the region's GDP by 10-18%.”
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has repeatedly called for international cooperation and explicitly called for cooperation between the US and China.
“As the world's largest and most important economic organization, the US and China should work together on these issues,” said WAIC's Schmidt. “We have vested interests to stabilize the world, maintain the world rather than war, keep things peaceful, and have human control over these tools.”
Other speakers include computer scientist Jeffrey Hinton, who is sometimes referred to as the “Godfather of AI.”
The conference, launched by Singapore's think tank, International Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AIII), has been holding in Shanghai since its inception in 2018 and is an important platform for Chinese companies to showcase their technology to the world.
The event, which has been attended by leading figures in the technology industry, including Elon Musk and Jack MA, features a technology exhibition, expert keynotes and discussion panels to further enhance AI research, development and governance.
With over 800 companies in attendance, WAIC 2025 again took control by Chinese tech companies, including Keenon Robotics and Robotics Startup Unitree, backed by Tencent, Alibaba, Softbank, and appeared from several major companies such as Tesla, Alphabet and Amazon.
Visitors investigated innovation across 3,000 exhibits, including the debut of over 100 new products. They include Tencent Holdings' new AI models, Hong Kong-based company Sensetime, Alibaba's first AI-driven smart glasses, Keenon Robotics' new popcorn-based Bipedal Robot model, and Shenzhen Startup ZTE's cute companion “pet” robot.
Other important exhibits at the three-day event include Unitree's G1 boxing robot, which quickly attracted visitors' attention, became a fan favorite on social media, and includes Dancing Robot Dogs developed by China Mobile, and Psibot's Mahjong-Playing Humanoid.
