– 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 tickets16:32 – 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 geopolitics18:01 – 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 process22:26 – 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 Trek28:14 – 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 Delta30:05 – 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-through34:39 – 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 controls40:33 – 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 problem49:36 – 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 worldwide54:55 – 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 regime1:02:27 – 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 system1:08:54 – 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 chancePaying It ForwardPaul 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.RecommendationsSamm: 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.