Samm Sacks and Paul Triolo on WAIC 2026, Xi's AI Speech, and Kimi K3

This week on Sinica, a rare treat: an in-person recording from Beijing with two dear friends who happen to be two of the very best in the business on technology and China — Samm Sacks and Paul Triolo, fresh off the exhibition floor of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. We dig into Xi Jinping's first in-person WAIC appearance and his most extensive statement on AI to date, the launch of the World AI Cooperation Organization, Moonshot's release of Kimi K3, the Trump administration's reported push to shut Chinese open-weight models out of the U.S. market, the coming age of agents, the untranslatable problem of ānquán, and what to expect from the first U.S.-China AI dialogue in September.

8:51 – The view from the floor: heat, humidity, robot boxing grandmas, WeChat-gated free water, and the "AI+" vibe — why WAIC 2026 felt less like an AI conference than a sector-by-sector snapshot of China's entire economy being supercharged with AI, with attendance swelling to some 200,000 tickets

16:32 – Why Xi showed up: what the leader's first in-person WAIC appearance and his most extensive AI statement to date signal, and why domestic drivers matter as much as geopolitics

18:01 – Chapter and verse: which phrases from the speech will be put to work in the system — "secure and orderly development" and the governance of agents, and Xi's strikingly extensive language on AI safety after China was frozen out of the Paris process

22:26 – The ānquán problem: one word meaning both "safety" and "security," the three buckets of AI risk, and how China's safety community has moved from bias and deepfakes toward CBRN and loss-of-control concerns — Black Mirror versus Star Trek

28:14 – Shanghai's baby: how WAIC's ownership structure differs from the CAC-run World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Chen Jining's very visible host duties, and whether the center of gravity in AI policy is shifting to the Yangtze River Delta

30:05 – WAICO: what the new World AI Cooperation Organization with its 29 founding members is actually for, Xi's concrete deliverables for the Global South — 5,000 AI training slots, regional cooperation centers, the MAZU early-warning system — and healthy skepticism about follow-through

34:39 – Kimi K3: what's technically significant in Moonshot's big new model, why it's the fourth arguably frontier-class Chinese release in a single month, the two-way traffic in distillation accusations, and what it all says about the state of the frontier gap four years into export controls

40:33 – Washington reacts: the reported menu of options for shutting Chinese open-weight models out of the U.S. — entity listings, a draft executive order, supply-chain security authorities — and why none of the tools actually fit the problem

49:36 – Strange bedfellows: David Sacks versus the "closed lab duopoly," the FUD strategy, why some 80% of Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies reportedly run on Chinese open models, and how gating U.S. frontier models while Chinese weights flow freely supercharges the AI sovereignty argument worldwide

54:55 – The model is infrastructure, the agent is the product: the ByteDance–ZTE agentic phone, the CAC's new initiative on agent trust and interoperability, and why agents fused into operating systems upend both super-app walled gardens and China's data protection regime

1:02:27 – An exegesis of kěkòng: the many meanings of "controllable," the long history of ānquán kěkòng in Chinese tech policy, and the unanswered question of who — CAC, NDRC, or somebody new — actually owns AI safety in either system

1:08:54 – The road to September: what to expect from the first U.S.-China AI dialogue, why Mythos tops the Chinese grievance list, the securitization feedback loop that starves trust-and-safety advocates of resources on both sides, and why recursive self-improvement makes this feel like a last, best chance

Paying It Forward

Paul nominates Tony Peng, whose Substack RecodeChinaAI offers sharp, well-written analysis of the application side of China's AI industry — part of an impressive new generation of independent China tech writers.

Samm gives a shout-out to Professor Zhu Yue of Tongji University Law School, published in Science and doing pioneering work at the intersection of disability law and AI law.

Recommendations

Samm: The Land and Its People by David Sedaris — laugh-out-loud funny, especially the "Enough is Enough" chapter; Transcription by Ben Lerner, a perfect small novel about fathers, sons, memory, and technology as enabler or disabler of connection; and Didion and Babitz, on Joan Didion and Eve Babitz and the 1970s California rock scene.

Paul: The Party's Interests Come First by Joseph Torigian — dense but beautifully written, and essential for understanding the current Chinese leadership.

Kaiser: A fiction-only summer! Stoner by John Williams, a small life told most grandly in some of the most beautiful sentence-level writing anywhere; Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, an epistolary novel dense with distilled wisdom from a dying Iowa minister; and Wang Xiaobo's The Golden Age (黄金时代) in Yan Yan's excellent new translation — bawdy, hilarious, and super Beijing-y despite its Cultural Revolution setting.

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