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

**Kaiser Kuo** (0:01)
Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word.

**Paul Triolo** (0:08)
My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana!

**Samm Sacks** (0:13)
It was a lovely SUV, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it! Tonight, we feast!
An offer you can feast on. Sell your car today on Carvana.

**Kaiser Kuo** (0:28)
Pick up fees may apply.
Welcome to Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we will look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents and cultural trends in China. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I am Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from Beijing. As always, a quick reminder before we begin, Sinica is powered by your subscriptions. If you like the work that I'm doing with this show and with the writers and podcasts in the Sinica Network, the very best way to support my work is to head over to sinicapodcast.com and become a paying subscriber. Subscribers get the complete show transcript, essays and reviews, the full range of offerings from our network, and more importantly, the warm glow of knowing you're keeping independent non-hysterical conversations about China alive. So do it, you will feel great.
So I've been really looking forward to this show. This week I am joined not across 12 time zones, but in person in the actual flesh, sort of around an actual table, actually spread out a little more than that. But right here in Beijing in the same room by two people who are not only among the very best in the business when it comes to technology and China, but whom I'm lucky enough to count as genuinely good friends, Sam Sacks and Paul Triolo. Both have been on the show multiple times, but this is still an absolute treat, and the timing could hardly be better. They have just come up on the, well, on a plane in one case, on the high-speed rail from another, from Shanghai where they attended the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, WAIC. Fresh off the exhibition floor, lanyards barely off, opinions fully formed, but minds, of course, still very much open. Folks, it just doesn't get any better than this, and there is a lot to talk about. The headline out of Shanghai, of course, was that Xi Jinping himself made his first in-person appearance at WAIC and delivered what is by some distance, the most extensive public statement on artificial intelligence from him to date.
A few things jumped out at me. He opened remarkably, I thought, by actually crediting the United States as the birthplace of the field, Dartmouth University, the summer of 1956 That is not nothing given the state of the relationship. He announced that the World AI Cooperation Organization, confusingly also WAICO, I think we're pronouncing it Waiko, I don't know, is now a reality launched in Shanghai with 29 founding member states alongside some concrete offers to the Global South, which I thought were very important as well.
On open source, Xi Jinping said precisely one line that China should encourage open source, which as our good friend Matt Sheehan notes in his excellent annotated read of the speech, I will link to that on the podcast page, restates the status quo rather than staking out anything new. And then there was the closing, which has been rattling around in my head ever since, a classical injunction to adapt as circumstances change, followed by a call to make governance ever more precise and to quote, constantly refine measures to forestall loss of control. We'll be looking more closely at that speech and at that phrase in the conversation that follows. One more piece of news from the week deserves mention. That of course is that Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a big, big, big mixture of experts model with a million-token context, with that by Moonshot's own benchmarks approaches the leading American frontier models on a number of coding and agentic tasks without beating them across the board. And we'll dig into what all that means. Anyway, with full open weights promised by the 27th of this month, around the time you'll be hearing this, I'm gonna leave the gap has closed hyperventilating to other people, because that's what the rest of the damn internet is for. But this is a genuinely notable release. I won't say that much. We will dig into what it does and doesn't tell us, and look a bit at the response that the Trump administration is now weighing the different responses, possibly trying to shut Chinese open weight models out of the US market entirely. Let me introduce my guests properly, though most of you will need no introductions to either of them. Samm Sacks was until recently a Senior Fellow at Yale Law School's Paltside China Center and at New America, and she is now, drum roll please, non-resident Senior Fellow at the ACF, the Center for America, China and the Teacher of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, SICE, with, of course, friend of the pod, Jessica Chen Weiss, who is just my lodestar. Simply one of the sharpest people anywhere on China's cyber, on data, on AI regulatory architecture, on cross-border data flows, and on the politics of what she's called managed interdependence. She is at work on a book about data and trust in an age of strategic rivalry, and she has been a friend of mine and of the pod for many, many, many years.