Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for greater defense use of autonomous and artificial intelligence technologies, according to Chinese state media reports relayed by Bloomberg's Josh Xiao and carried on Techmeme.
The push is part of Xi's broader effort to build what the reports describe as an advanced fighting force. A separate account of the same remarks, published by The Star under a Beijing dateline on July 31, 2026, framed it the same way: Xi is urging the military to step up its use of unmanned and AI systems.
The sourcing here is thin by design — both items trace back to Chinese state media summaries of Xi's remarks rather than to a detailed policy document. Neither report, as summarized, specifies which weapons programs, budgets, or timelines are involved, or which branches of the People's Liberation Army are expected to move first. What is clear is the direction of travel: autonomy and AI are being named explicitly, at the top, as priorities for Chinese defense modernization.
That matters because public statements from Xi function less as news and more as instruction. When the head of the Central Military Commission names a technology category, procurement, research funding, and institutional attention tend to follow. It is also a signal read closely abroad, where the United States and its allies are pursuing their own drone-swarm and AI-targeting programs, and where the pace of Chinese military AI adoption feeds directly into defense budgets, export controls on advanced chips, and the stalled international debate over rules for autonomous weapons.
Why it matters: when the leader of the world's largest standing military publicly puts AI and unmanned systems at the center of his modernization plans, it raises the stakes in an arms race that is already reshaping how militaries — and the companies that supply them — spend their money.