Web Summit gives China 16 of its top 20 speaker slots

Web Summit’s own speaker page puts 16 speakers from China in its first 20 slots, and 33 in its first 50.Web Summit 2026 speakers list. The first 20 include an official of the Cyberspace Administration of China. A year earlier, the speakers page archived on 8 November 2025 featured 15 speakers, and none was from a Chinese tech company.Web Summit speakers page, archived 8 November 2025. In 2024 it featured 25, one of them from China: Kuo Zhang of Alibaba.com.Web Summit speakers page, archived 6 November 2024. And all five robots listed as speakers this year, from Agibot, Galbot and UBTech, come from Chinese companies.

The headcount tells a calmer story. Across all 799 speakers on the public list on 10 November, 40 list China as their country, against 310 for the United States and 145 for the United Kingdom. What changed is the billing: the order of the list is the organiser’s own choice, and it now leads with China.

What Cosgrave said on stage

Founder and CEO Paddy Cosgrave made the case himself at Web Summit’s opening night. He told the audience the superstars of the future are “not coming from California, they’re coming from China”.Web Summit Lisbon 2026, Opening Night livestream. He said Chinese companies are building more of the shared future than companies from anywhere else, and called that “just a fact”. He said more than 50 speakers from Chinese AI labs, robotics, car, quantum and energy companies would speak across the event’s 24 stages. Euronews put the opening night audience at up to 12,000.China’s robots, AI agents and Nvidia probe: Web Summit 2026 Opens in Lisbon | Euronews.

The Revolut example

His case rested on products and open models rather than politics, and his main example was a European bank: Revolut. Cosgrave said on stage that the bank had dropped OpenAI and Anthropic entirely and moved its 2,000 engineers to a Chinese open-source model. He repeated figures of 60% shorter coding time and a 90% lower AI coding bill, on a model called GLM.

Revolut’s own account supports much of that. Dealroom News reported that David Abitbol, Revolut’s head of AI operations, said at the AI Engineer conference in New York that GLM is now the default for roughly 2,000 engineers, self-hosted on Revolut’s own US infrastructure.Revolut swaps Claude Code for a Chinese open-weight model, cutting its AI coding bill by 90% | Dealroom News. Revolut says its bill is about a tenth of before. Cybernews reported that Revolut measured about 60% better coding time and 70% better lead time after the switch.Revolut Chinese AI model cuts coding costs by 90% | Cybernews.

Where Cosgrave’s version goes further is in saying the US tools were dropped entirely. Dealroom reported that Claude Code and Codex remain available for Revolut’s hardest work. GLM became the default, and the US tools stayed as the exception. Cybernews also reported that Abitbol acknowledged a stigma around using Chinese open-weight models at an EU-regulated bank. Cosgrave said GLM’s maker and Revolut both speak at Web Summit.

Robots as speakers

Euronews reported that this is the first Web Summit with humanoid robots as official speakers and the largest Chinese delegation the event has had, with delegations from China’s Ministry of Commerce and the Cyberspace Administration.Lisbon Web Summit 2026 opens with humanoid robot speakers and record Chinese delegation | Euronews. On opening night, a host said Agibot’s dance was the company’s biggest robot performance outside China.

The figures came from the stage and from the companies. A host said Omdia ranked Agibot first in humanoid robot shipments last year, with some 20,000 delivered. Agibot’s William Shi predicted annual shipments of 2 million to 10 million within five or six years. Julie Jiao of Galbot said over 1,000 of its robots are deployed and about 200 robot-run Galbot stores operate in over 50 cities. A host said XPeng AeroHT’s modular flying car has more than 7,000 global pre-orders.

Agents that hold a wallet

Manus AI, the agent company founded in China, spoke on the same stage. A host said Meta’s deal to buy Manus was unwound in April and that Manus raised over $500 million in October. Tao Zhang of Manus said Manus 2.0, launched at the end of September a month after the company became independent again, gives each agent its own phone number, email address and a digital wallet. He said the agent can already buy things for the user, with permission.

Matthew Prince of Cloudflare described the traffic those agents add to. He said automated traffic overtook human web traffic in May 2026, earlier than Cloudflare’s forecast of the first half of 2027. He predicted automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic within about five years. He also said agents shopping for people currently favour established incumbents over new entrants, a risk for small businesses.

Richard Socher of Recursive offered the Western counterpoint. He said Recursive had just open-sourced Flint, which he called the best open model for local coding. He predicted more Western open-source models will compete at the frontier.

Lisbon’s stake

Euronews reported that Web Summit’s contract with Portugal and Lisbon is worth 110 million euros and runs to 2028. According to the same report, Web Summit’s founder told the Portuguese newspaper Expresso that he is in talks with most major European cities and will name the future host at the 2027 edition.

Portugal’s minister Gonçalo Matias set out five AI commitments for government, ending with an agentic state, and said Portugal would put AI to work now, “the European way”. Lisbon’s mayor, Carlos Moedas, told attendees they belong in Lisbon whatever their origin, and said difference and diversity drive innovation.