TIME 2026 Best Inventions: Ant Afu and Alipay AI Payment among the picks
TIME has published its 2026 Best Inventions list, covering 300 inventions plus 100 special mentions. Ant Group's health AI app Ant Afu is described as the only Chinese AI application on this year's list, with figures cited by media putting it at 150 million users, nearly 20 million health consultations a day, and connections to 5,000 hospitals and 300,000 human doctors; Alipay AI Payment is the only payment service listed, reported at over 100 million users and 300 million cumulative transactions. TIME framed Alipay AI Payment with "When AI Goes Shopping," saying AI is moving from information exchange to consumer transactions, while other entries include Unitree GD01, Honor Robot Phone, Apple iPhone Duo, Anthropic Claude Code, Google SynthID, Meta Omnilingual ASR and 1X Neo.
The list illustrates how AI has become an underlying capability across consumer hardware, health, payments and robotics rather than a standalone category, with Chinese products appearing across several tracks.