Published on Sep. 6, 2026

Hangzhou-based aircraft maker CoolFly has unveiled Urban, a single-seat electric aircraft it calls the world’s first “standing-posture manned flying vehicle.” There is also a seated version named Dream. Both come with a self-developed NA80 flight-control system, reported the Chinese tech portal Kuai Keji on August 14, 2026 (in Chinese).

This looks like something of a crossover between a small eVTOL (where most reports place it) and a manned drone. The pilot stands on a flat, flower-shaped platform roughly 3.5 meters across. Four ducted fans are built into petal-shaped sections around that standing area. There is a honeycomb safety grille. The platform supports pilots up to 1.9 meters tall and weighing up to 90 kilograms.

“The pilot simply nudges a control stick to move forward or backward and presses a button to take off. The upright stance delivers an unobstructed 360-degree view,” CoolFly CEO Li Wei was quoted as saying at the launch event in mid-August.

The hardest technical problem for this new standing flight mode was the constantly shifting center of gravity. CoolFly’s answer is an AI-powered gravity-sensing system. Sensors follow every weight shift of pilot and machine and then redistribute thrust across the rotors in real time. As a result, flying the vehicle feels similar to riding a self-balancing scooter, company spokespersons told reporters.

For both the standing and seated versions, CoolFly developed the “NA80 flight-control system.” It has two independent computing units which cross-check each other. Should the primary unit fail, the backup one takes over within milliseconds. For safety, there is also an airbag flight suit, a parachute for the whole vehicle and lidar-based obstacle detection.

One fact that will help to find customers for the new flying machines is that Urban and Dream have found their first insurer. China Pacific Insurance’s Shenzhen branch underwrote what it described as the world’s first comprehensive policy for standing manned flying vehicles. The coverage includes hull damage, third-party liability and injuries to the person on board.

CoolFly says it is moving toward mass production this year. In China, the company is targeting customers in the rapidly growing low-altitude tourism industry. That means scenic parks and flight camps, starting from a first test site at Hangzhou’s “Grand Canal Steelworks Park.” Abroad, it plans to market its vehicles as recreational aircraft for private buyers.

China’s low-altitude economy reached 480.7 billion yuan (US$71.3 billion) in 2024 and is projected to exceed 3.5 trillion yuan (roughly US$520 billion) by 2035, according to figures released by iiMedia Research.

While it remains an open question whether commuters will ever be allowed to fly such “air skateboards” to work, it is progress for the industry that such a vehicle can now be insured, sold and legally flown in China.

There are still many obstacles for the young low-altitude economy in China, including the need for better flight control systems. Expect licenses to be granted step by step, starting from relatively isolated test and tourist sites. However, the necessary infrastructure with insurance policies and dealer networks is already growing, as this example demonstrates.

Since July 1, 2026, a revised Civil Aviation Law has also anchored the low-altitude economy in a national legislative framework for the first time.

The new joint venture Creativity (Changzhou) Robotics is training robots of the type AgiBot G2 in workshops with CNC machines. They are humanoids with two arms, but move on wheels. The idea is to train the robots in real production environments.

The company has only recently started to operate in Changzhou, an industrial hotspot on the Yangtze river, a litte upriver from Shanghai. At the same time, the world's first embodied-intelligence model designed for machine-tool applications has entered a pilot and validation stage, the Jiangsu provincial news portal Zhongguo Jiangsu Wang reported on August 19, 2026 (in Chinese).

Machine tools are a demanding workplace for robots. To load and unload a CNC machine, a robot must place each workpiece precisely. It also has to work hand in hand with clamping fixtures and keep pace with the machining cycle, all in real time. It is far more difficult than any repetitive task on an assembly line.

Mao Yufeng, president of the China Machine Tool & Tool Builders’ Association, said that integrating machine tools with artificial intelligence is an important direction for upgrading the manufacturing industry.

Machine-tool tending has resisted full automation because workpieces, fixtures and cycles vary from job to job. This is exactly the kind of variability that embodied-intelligence models can handle, Creativity (Changzhou) Robotics suggests with this pilot.

If this pilot succeeds, one of the last labor-intensive links in precision machining becomes automatable. The project is worth watching closely for Europe’s machine-tool industry.

For several days in late August, an anonymous model named Ox Alpha topped the charts of the AI marketplaces OpenRouter and OpenCode. It drew a record 50 trillion tokens of cumulative traffic. People were speculating about who the developer was.

On August 26, 2026, Beijing-based Zhipu announced that the mystery model was its newly released GLM-5.3-Flash, reported the financial news portal Huaerjie Jianwen on August 27, 2026 (in Chinese).

While this could be dismissed as a successful marketing stunt, one detail made international headlines. All of that traffic ran on a cluster of more than 100,000 AI accelerators produced domestically in China, Zhipu disclosed in its technical documentation.

The Chinese AI company added that “hardware efficiency and cost per token have reached levels comparable with mainstream Nvidia GPUs.” Zhipu did not name its suppliers. The chips may have come from Huawei, Moore Threads and Hygon, reported the Chinese tech publication LatePost.

GLM-5.3-Flash carries 320 billion parameters. Of these, 18 billion are active. Its weights are open. Zhipu prices the model at US$0.15 per million input tokens and US$0.50 per million output tokens, in the same low-cost bracket as DeepSeek.

“What GLM-5.3-Flash confirms is a pattern that is no longer surprising — Chinese labs shipping near-frontier open models at a fraction of the Western price,” said Dermot McGrath, founder of the Shanghai-based consultancy ZenGen Labs, according to Bloomberg.

Zhipu’s claim that only domestically produced AI chips were used cannot be verified independently at this point. Its documentation does not name the processors.

If the claims hold, however, a hit AI model has for the first time been served at scale entirely without American hardware. It could be exported at very competitive prices. Nvidia’s moat then faces another test, commented the semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis.

iFlytek Healthcare, often described in China as the country’s first listed medical LLM company, reported first-half revenue of 446 million yuan (roughly US$66 million). This was an increase of 49.4 percent year on year and constituted the fastest first-half growth since comparable records began five years ago, wrote the Chinese industry portal Weike Wang (Ofweek) on August 28, 2026 (in Chinese).

The gross margin also rose, to an admirable 52.9 percent. The company’s shares jumped more than 22 percent at one point after these figures were released.

The revenue increase was possible because iFlytek Healthcare increased its reach across hospitals all over China. Its AI-assisted diagnosis system now covers more than 77,000 primary-care institutions across all 31 provincial-level regions. Its market share exceeds 80 percent.

At more than 700 big hospitals, including Peking Union Medical College Hospital, the adoption rate for AI-generated medical records has reached 91 percent, the report said.

Policy support by the central government also played a role. China’s National Healthcare Security Administration added 12 AI-assisted diagnostic services to the nationally unified medical insurance catalog earlier this year. This was a worldwide first, at least at this scale, reported the financial portal Gelonghui on August 21, 2026 (in Chinese).

“The commercialization of healthcare AI is shifting from a ‘technology story’ to proof through financial performance,” the financial portal wrote. The market is expanding rapidly. Changjiang Securities expects China’s healthcare AI market to exceed 40 billion yuan (roughly US$5.9 billion) this year and sees 200 billion yuan (roughly US$30 billion) as possible by 2030.

Healthcare AI products around the world are currently struggling to find paying customers. China has now designated its national medical insurance system as a payer. iFlytek Healthcare’s recent results are the first hard evidence that this arrangement produces real revenue.

If Changjiang Securities is right, this nascent healthcare AI market will be five times its current size by 2030.