China has unveiled two new artificial intelligence (AI) models at the 2026 World AI Conference (WAIC) and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance running from July 17 to 20 in Shanghai.
On Friday, an upgraded 2.0 version of the ScienceOne Omni scientific foundation model was unveiled at the WAIC, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
Developed by a joint research and development team led by the CAS, the ScienceOne Omni serves as a dedicated intelligent foundation for scientific tasks. It aims to tear down barriers between general AI and specialized scientific capabilities across various domains, providing more reliable and comprehensive intelligent support for scientific study, said the CAS.
The ScienceOne Omni was first launched in July 2025. The newly unveiled 2.0 version introduces multiple upgrades, enabling this scientific foundation model to perform understanding, reasoning, prediction and generation across different scientific modalities and tasks.
Also unveiled Friday was the Fenghe, an open-source large language model dedicated to meteorological services. Besides, a global open-source initiative for this model was also launched.
An announcement on the launch of the Fenghe was made by the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) at a meteorological sub-forum of the WAIC.
Developed by the CMA, the Fenghe is trained on 50 million tokens of meteorological service data and integrated with authoritative weather datasets to support weather forecasting, risk assessment and meteorological services.
According to the CMA, the Fenghe provides personalized weather information, service recommendations and risk alerts for users in China. Its international version has also been incorporated into the United Nations' Early Warnings for All initiative, offering weather consultation and risk analysis services in Chinese and English.
On Thursday, Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI released its latest model, the Kimi K3, which features 2.8 trillion parameters, making it the largest-parameter open-source AI model globally, the company said.
The Kimi K3 natively supports visual understanding and boasts a context window of one million tokens. It has been optimized for complex tasks including software engineering, knowledge-intensive work, deep research and multimodal understanding, Moonshot AI noted.
The Kimi K3's overall intelligence level is close to that of globally leading closed-source models as revealed by evaluations, according to the company.
China is a global leader in AI development. In 2025, the country's core AI industries were worth over 1.2 trillion yuan (about 176.6 billion U.S. dollars), while the number of AI enterprises nationwide exceeded 6,200.
The country's open-source large AI models have been downloaded more than 10 billion times in total, continuing to create new and broader opportunities for global cooperation in AI innovation.
China launches new AI models at 2026 World AI Conference
