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Dancing robots from the company Aigibot opened the Web Summit 2026 technology conference in Lisbon on Monday, putting China’s artificial intelligence technology firmly on stage.
“The superstars of the future are not coming from California; they’re coming from China,” Web Summit CEO and founder Paddy Cosgrave told an audience of up to 12,000 people.
“Chinese companies are building more of our shared future than anyone else,” he added, referring to the open source technology.
The United States and China are in an artificial intelligence race to build out the technology, as Washington has tried to restrict exports of the most high-powered chips to China.
The US and China are locked in an escalating tech race, with artificial intelligence at the forefront, and Washington has sought to restrict exports of the most high-powered chips to the country.
Meanwhile, US chip giant Nvidia US tech giant Nvidia is opening a probe into its CEO, Jensen Huang, after reports that Huang was the “target of a foreign intelligence effort” in his relationship with an alleged Chinese spy.
Asked about the news of Huang, Cloudflare’s cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince said on stage, “it’s very salacious” but that in the long term it remains to be seen if he would be “a hero or villain,” referring to the impact on the industry, adding that “Jensen did a lot to cement the AI ecosystem.”
AI agents were also featured on the Web Summit stage. The technology is designed to take autonomous actions to assist humans and does not require a human to tell it what to do.
Manus AI, originally founded in China, showed off an impressive 30-second AI-generated video with its new 2.0 video technology that required just a 13-word prompt.
Tao Zhang, co-founder and CPO of Manus, said AI was changing how he hires his own team of engineers.
“We found the people we are looking for; it’s not just a good attitude. We don’t need more people; we need people who can work with AI,” he said.
Web Summit expects to receive close to 70,000 attendees, including 900 speakers, and more than two thousand startups.
Cosgrave said it was the most international edition of Web Summit Lisbon with every European country present.