{"slug": "xi-jinping-praises-chinas-low-cost-ai-breakthroughs-pushes-for-open-tech-order", "title": "Xi Jinping praises China’s low-cost AI breakthroughs, pushes for open tech order at Shanghai summit", "summary": "Chinese President Xi Jinping made his first appearance at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, praising China's low-cost AI breakthroughs and calling for an open international tech order. Xi positioned Chinese open-source AI models as global public goods, challenging Western tech dominance and signaling strong political backing for AI firms. The development could reshape crypto and blockchain markets by lowering AI costs and influencing decentralized computing networks.", "body_md": "# Xi Jinping praises China’s low-cost AI breakthroughs, pushes for open tech order at Shanghai summit\n\nChina's president used his first-ever appearance at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference to position Chinese AI models as global public goods, a direct challenge to Western tech dominance with ripple effects across crypto and digital asset markets.\n\nXi Jinping showed up in person at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 17, his first appearance at the event since it launched in 2018. The message was clear: China wants the world to know it can build cutting-edge AI for a fraction of what Silicon Valley spends, and it wants everyone else to use it.\n\nIn a keynote speech at the conference, themed “Intelligent Partners, Co-create the Future,” Xi praised China’s progress in developing low-cost AI technology and called for a more open international technological order. He positioned Chinese open-source AI models not as proprietary weapons but as global public assets, a framing that carries significant implications for how AI infrastructure, and by extension blockchain and crypto markets, could develop over the next several years.\n\n## The DeepSeek effect and the cost question\n\nThe poster child for this narrative is DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab whose R1 model in 2025 demonstrated that you could match top-tier performance benchmarks while spending dramatically less than Western competitors typically burn through.\n\nChina has been pursuing open-source AI strategies since at least 2025, releasing model weights and code to lower barriers for developers worldwide. The WAIC, running July 17-20, included discussions around an “Action Plan on Cooperation in AI Development” focused on shared computing power and open ecosystems. That’s a deliberate contrast to what Beijing characterizes as a more restrictive Western approach, where export controls and chip restrictions have been the dominant policy tools.\n\n## Why crypto markets should pay attention\n\nAI and blockchain infrastructure are converging rapidly. Decentralized computing networks, AI-powered trading protocols, and tokenized AI model marketplaces all sit at the intersection of these two technologies. When the cost of training and deploying AI models drops significantly, it changes the economics of every project built on top of that capability.\n\nLower-cost AI models make it cheaper to build sophisticated DeFi analytics, automate smart contract auditing, and power the kind of AI agents that have become a major narrative in crypto. If Chinese open-source models become the default backbone for these applications, the competitive dynamics shift in ways that matter for token valuations, developer ecosystems, and where capital flows.\n\n## Investment implications and competitive landscape\n\nThe immediate market read is that Chinese tech stocks, particularly AI-focused firms, could see renewed investor interest. Xi’s personal endorsement at WAIC sends a strong signal that these companies have top-level political backing.\n\nThe crypto-AI token sector specifically faces an interesting crossroads. Projects built around decentralized AI computing, like render networks and inference marketplaces, could benefit from cheaper underlying models that drive adoption. But projects whose value proposition depends on the scarcity or high cost of AI capabilities might find their theses undermined.\n\nEmerging markets represent another vector to watch. Xi’s framing of Chinese AI as accessible and affordable is designed to win adoption across the Global South, the same regions where crypto adoption has grown fastest due to similar accessibility arguments. If Chinese AI infrastructure becomes the default in these markets, it could shape which blockchain ecosystems and protocols gain traction alongside it.\n\n**Disclosure:** This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our\n\n[Editorial Policy](https://cryptobriefing.com/editorial-policy/).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/xi-jinping-praises-chinas-low-cost-ai-breakthroughs-pushes-for-open-tech-order", "canonical_source": "https://cryptobriefing.com/xi-jinping-china-low-cost-ai-open-tech/", "published_at": "2026-07-17 05:08:45+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-17 05:35:49.327430+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-policy", "ai-products", "ai-infrastructure", "ai-startups"], "entities": ["Xi Jinping", "DeepSeek", "World Artificial Intelligence Conference", "Shanghai", "China"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/xi-jinping-praises-chinas-low-cost-ai-breakthroughs-pushes-for-open-tech-order", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/xi-jinping-praises-chinas-low-cost-ai-breakthroughs-pushes-for-open-tech-order.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/xi-jinping-praises-chinas-low-cost-ai-breakthroughs-pushes-for-open-tech-order.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/xi-jinping-praises-chinas-low-cost-ai-breakthroughs-pushes-for-open-tech-order.jsonld"}}