From May 10th to June 6th, 2026, muShanghai will host the "Pop-up City" experiment in Shanghai. Initiated by the international open-source community The Mu and co-organized by the Alibaba Hongqiao Center, the experiment will allow everyone—from coding geeks and research whizzes to disruptors aspiring to make a big impact—to find their place. The organizers hope to co-create a "parallel city" for global geeks with the participants.

This 28-day experiment will bring together developers, researchers, and entrepreneurs from more than 50 countries around the world to explore new possibilities for collaboration between humans and technology in the AI ​​era.

Global scientific and technological innovation forces resonate in Shanghai

“When my foreign friends first came to China, they said, ‘China is not what I imagined. You must hold The Mu here so that the world can see the real China.’” Sun, the founder of muShanghai, recalled.

Since its launch, this experiment has attracted over 2,000 applications from around the world, with more than 800 applicants passing muShanghai's review. These participants are evenly distributed across more than 50 countries, including the United States, Argentina, Canada, Japan, France, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and China. The lineup of participants is truly impressive, ranging from former OpenAI engineers and founders of startups that have raised tens of millions of dollars to OpenClaw core contributors Vincent Koc and Dave Morin—top global technical talent will engage in cross-disciplinary collaboration here.

“Domestic talent going abroad and international talent coming in—letting the world see China, in the final analysis, is to let the world see you,” Sun said. “We have set the stage and are waiting for you to join us in creating this together.”

Four themed weeks to build an immersive innovation ecosystem

This 28-day "Burning Man" event will revolve around four themed weeks, featuring nearly 100 events. As a grand opening, ClawCon 2026 Shanghai will bring together core contributors to OpenClaw worldwide to discuss AI development trends and the construction of the open-source ecosystem.

• AI Week (May 11-15): The Big Model Day will invite guests from Kimi, Zhipu, Ant Financial, and Jieyue Xingchen to share their core insights; the AI ​​Safety session will bring together global security researchers and cryptographers; and the Consumer App session will invite multimodal big models MiniMax, ZPilot, and other Chinese AI consumer product teams to break down the product iteration logic on site.
• Biotechnology Week (May 18-22): From using technology to combat aging, to equipping laboratories with AI brains and robotic arms, and even rewriting the underlying code of the material world, the topics progress in layers. There's also a longevity experiment month led by a Yale PhD, where researchers will use themselves as experimental subjects to explore the boundaries of life sciences.
• Robot Week (May 25-29): A series of events including robot combat competitions, cyber fashion shows, and hardware supply chain pop-ups will take place, bringing a visually stunning technological feast and showcasing the cutting-edge achievements of robotics technology.
• Culture Week (June 1-6): Stepping out of a purely technological perspective, this event explores topics such as future social forms, cyberpunk culture, and independent game creation, allowing technology and humanities to collide and merge.

Notably, a large-scale outdoor "Innovators' Market" will be held every Friday for the first three weeks, followed by a technology and humanities-related exhibition during the final week. All participants can bring their projects to showcase, test, and exchange ideas, facilitating rapid implementation of creative ideas and promoting efficient collaboration. muShanghai will fully integrate the "Build in Public" content mechanism . We have designed a complete system to encourage everyone to publicly share their projects, processes, problems, progress, and interim results, allowing for continued iteration based on real feedback.

The Hongqiao Alibaba Center: Empowering the "First Stop for Entrepreneurs in China"

This event will last for one month and is expected to reach over 100,000 people. As a co-organizer, the Hongqiao Alibaba Center positions itself as an international innovation community and an ecological development hub, leveraging its five-dimensional one-stop capabilities in space, commerce, culture, ecology, and government affairs to provide solid support for overseas talent to settle and develop.

The Mu, the initiator of the "Burning Man" event, is the first international entrepreneur community to be located in the Hongqiao Alibaba Center, and also one of the first international open-source collaboration communities of the Hongcheng OPC community. The park's负责人 stated that Hongcheng OPC is committed to providing global entrepreneurs with a one-stop service for coming to China. This collaboration with the Mu is a key strategic move for the Hongqiao Alibaba Center to build an international science and technology innovation ecosystem.

This event is not only a cutting-edge technology gathering, but also an important window for China's science and technology innovation ecosystem to connect with the world.

The Mu : An open-source community that "builds cities out of thin air" globally.

Behind muShanghai is The Mu community, which has already been successfully implemented in Argentina, San Francisco, and other places.

In Argentina, the Crecimiento project has gathered 2,500 developers, incubated more than 1,200 projects, and raised more than $20 million in funding; in San Francisco, The Mu helped transform the 16-story Frontier Tower into a landmark of innovation and spurred OpenClaw's first offline developer gathering; it is also the only startup community at the 2025 Osaka Expo.

From preparation to project approval, the muShanghai team overcame multiple challenges, including compliant reporting of foreign activities and rebuilding resource networks, over a period of seven months. On the opening day, Kong Fu'an, Party Secretary and Executive Deputy Director of the Shanghai Hongqiao International Central Business District Management Committee, Lou Yongqi, President of Shanghai University of Engineering Science, and Ke Xiaolin and Wang Ximei, Deputy District Heads of Minhang District, attended the event. The muShanghai core team and domestic and international co-creation partners jointly introduced the themes and exciting activities for the next four weeks.

AI may be changing the world, but it cannot replace the infinite possibilities that arise when you and I meet.