Twenty-nine countries signed the founding charter of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization in Shanghai on Friday, establishing a Beijing-anchored intergovernmental body whose roster contains no G7 members, no E.U. states, and no country that would normally be described as a Western democracy. The signatories include Russia, Belarus, Serbia, Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Laos, Pakistan and Indonesia, alongside 10 African and 12 Asian states. Until the ceremony, according to Reuters, not a single country had publicly committed to joining.

President Xi Jinping announced WAICO in his keynote at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, his first appearance at the annual Shanghai event. “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation,” he said, framing the organization, per the Xinhua transcript, as a response “to the call of the Global South.” Premier Li Qiang, who first floated the proposal at last year’s conference, presided over the signing alongside Foreign Minister Wang Yi. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres attended. Few major American technology companies did.

The offer to prospective members is concrete: 5,000 A.I. training slots for developing countries over five years, cooperation channels with ASEAN, the Arab League, the African Union, CELAC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, and deployment of the Chinese weather-forecasting system Mazu across 30 nations. Presidents and prime ministers showed up in person. Kazakhstan’s Kassym-Jomart Tokayev proposed hosting a WAICO regional office in Central Asia. Cambodia’s Hun Manet and Thailand’s Anutin Charnvirakul signed.

WAICO’s arrival lands one week after a U.N. dialogue at which Washington argued heavy regulation would stifle breakthroughs and Beijing framed its low-cost, open-source models as a public good, positions Reuters described as incompatible. Analysts quoted by the wire cast the new body as an explicit alternative to the E.U. A.I. Act and the parallel G7 governance track, an infrastructure play for countries the current architecture treats as recipients rather than drafters.

The commercial subtext matters. Bloomberg reports that Chinese models already account for close to 60 percent of A.I. usage by American firms on the OpenRouter marketplace. Beijing is exporting weights the West’s regulators haven’t decided how to classify, at prices Western labs can’t match, to a coalition of governments whose own rulebooks it now proposes to help write. “China has been making inroads with Southeast Asian countries in terms of A.I. capacity-building,” one Asian diplomat told Reuters, adding that Beijing “portrays itself as speaking up for developing countries who are being left behind in the A.I. race.”

That framing is the entire point. President Donald Trump’s Washington built the compute stack; Xi’s Shanghai is building the standards body around it.

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