On the evening of October 15, Beijing time, TIME magazine unveiled its 2026 list of the "Best Inventions," with "Ant Afu," a health AI application under Ant Group, and Alipay AI Payment both selected. Among them, Ant Afu is the only Chinese AI application selected this year; last year's honoree was DeepSeek.
Image: Ant Afu selected for TIME's Best Inventions of the Year
TIME's Best Inventions list was founded in 2000 and is hailed by the industry as a barometer of global technology innovation. Each year it selects breakthrough inventions and innovations worldwide, evaluated on multiple key factors including originality, effectiveness, and impact, covering fields such as artificial intelligence and healthcare. This year, products such as Apple's iPhone Duo and Anthropic's Claude Code were also named among the year's benchmarks. Last year, Chinese benchmark companies such as DeepSeek and Unitree were selected, with DeepSeek R1 described by TIME as comparable to "a gunshot" in the global AI field.
This year, two AI-native products from Ant Group were both selected, marking that in the fields of health and payments, Chinese companies have once again forged a globally leading innovation path in the AI era.
Alipay AI Payment is the first AI-native payment service launched in China by Alipay. TIME commented on the significance of its selection with "When AI Goes Shopping": AI is moving from information interaction to consumer transactions, and a new commercial era is opening.
As for Ant Afu, TIME believes it "makes professional healthcare services more accessible." Public data shows that the Ant Afu App has reached 150 million users, with nearly 20 million health consultations per day, making it the world's largest health AI App by user scale, connected to 5,000 hospitals and 300,000 human doctors.
Currently, healthcare is becoming a key global AI track. Ant Afu has connected medical visit processes and smart hardware, becoming the AI application with the most complete service forms and the most systematic ecosystem collaboration. By comparison, ChatGPT Health, launched by OpenAI in January 2026, also focused on health services this year, but it remains at the level of health Q&A and device connectivity, and has not yet connected to real medical visit processes.
Ma Defu, Deputy Director of the School of Public Health at Peking University, believes that as China is building a balanced, accessible, high-quality and efficient "Healthy China," the development of health AI like Ant Afu helps residents build health management and disease prevention capabilities, driving sustained and steady improvement in major health indicators. The connection and collaboration between AI and medical services also helps improve the capability and efficiency of medical services.