The aftershocks of China’s open-weight surge dominated the past 24 hours: markets repriced the AI race, Shanghai opened the world’s largest AI gathering, and two of the biggest US labs made headlines for very different reasons.
Markets feel a second “DeepSeek shock” after Kimi K3
The release of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 sent ripples through global markets on Friday, echoing the DeepSeek moment of early 2025. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company fell 7% despite reporting a 77% jump in quarterly operating profit the day before, while Chinese AI firms Z.ai and MiniMax dropped roughly 27% and 16% respectively as investors reassessed who wins — and who loses — when frontier-level capability becomes freely downloadable. Fortune has the details.
World AI Conference opens in Shanghai with 300+ global debuts
The 2026 World AI Conference opened Friday in Shanghai under the theme “AI Partnership for a Brighter Future,” with more than 1,100 exhibitors, 3,000 products, and over 300 world premieres spanning AI agents, chips, and humanoid robots. Chinese President Xi Jinping used the opening to call for stepped-up global cooperation on AI, a pointed message as US export curbs continue to squeeze China’s access to advanced computing. Xinhua reports, with NPR covering the governance angle.
Google delays Gemini 3.5 Pro over coding performance
Google has pushed back the launch of Gemini 3.5 Pro, its next flagship model, after internal testing showed it missing targets on coding and complex reasoning. The company reportedly scrapped the original base model and restarted pretraining — a costly setback that comes as rivals ship stronger coding models and several senior Gemini researchers depart for Anthropic. More at 9to5Google.
Anthropic reportedly eyes a near-$1 trillion IPO
Anthropic is reportedly preparing to go public in late 2026 at a valuation approaching $1 trillion, which would rank among the largest tech IPOs in history. The move would make it the first major frontier AI lab to reach public markets, ahead of OpenAI’s now-2027 timeline. Coverage at Briefs.
What to watch: Kimi K3’s open weights land July 27 — independent benchmarks will show whether China’s frontier claims hold up, and whether Friday’s sell-off was overdone.