Xi Jinping used his first-ever keynote at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Friday to formally launch the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, a 29-nation intergovernmental body headquartered in the city and pointedly situated outside the United Nations system. The founding agreement had been signed the previous day. Premier Li Qiang first floated the idea at the same conference in July 2025, meaning the institution went from trial balloon to signed charter in twelve months.

The founding roster reads like a map of Beijing’s diplomatic accumulation over the past decade: Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia, South Africa, Senegal, Venezuela, Ethiopia, Cameroon. Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev attended in person. Xinhua reports the 29-member figure. More than 1,100 companies and 1,400 guests filled the conference halls, with Huawei showcasing its Atlas 950 SuperPoD, a system for linking large numbers of chips to train frontier models under sanctions conditions.

“The development of artificial intelligence should not be a solo performance by any single country but rather a symphony of global cooperation,” Xi told the room. He warned against “overstretching the national security concept in the field of A.I., or placing one country’s security over that of others.” The subtext isn’t subtle. Washington’s chip export controls are the unnamed antagonist in every paragraph of the speech.

The sweeteners were calibrated for the audience China is actually courting. Xi pledged 5,000 A.I. training opportunities for developing countries over five years and offered 30 nations access to a Chinese-developed meteorological tool for early-warning systems. That’s Belt and Road logic applied to compute: infrastructure diplomacy, now in model weights and training seats. WAICO was pitched not just to states but to ASEAN, the League of Arab States, the African Union, CELAC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and BRICS, the full stack of non-Western multilateral venues Beijing has spent years cultivating.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres attended, lending a patina of legitimacy to a body explicitly designed to route around his institution. One analyst quoted by Al Jazeera put the strategic read plainly: “With Washington rapidly retreating from global cyber and A.I. norms-setting processes and withdrawing its financial backing for cyber diplomacy more broadly, Beijing is stepping into the vacuum.”

The template is familiar. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2016 followed the same choreography: a parallel institution, a Global South membership base, a Western multilateral incumbent left to explain why it wasn’t there first. Governance follows the compute. The compute, increasingly, is being built to Beijing’s specifications.

Sources