Liang Wenfeng, the founder of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, is expected to meet with top Chinese politicians, including Chinese leader Xi Jinping, at an upcoming summit, which will also be attended by Alibaba founder Jack Ma.

The summit, potentially taking place as early as next week, may serve as a signal from China’s Communist Party that it intends to take a more supportive approach towards domestic private sector firms. This comes after Chinese authorities prevented Alibaba from going ahead with what would have been the largest public offering in history back in 2020.

Liang, who founded DeepSeek in 2023 as a subsidiary of his quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer, gained significant attention last month. This was after DeepSeek’s publicly available AI models demonstrated strong performance against leading models from OpenAI and other American AI companies. The rapid rise of DeepSeek’s models and services has raised concerns among U.S. officials, who view them as a threat to the U.S.’s dominant position in the AI race.