China formally established the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization in Shanghai on Thursday, enlisting 29 founding members including Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia, South Africa, Senegal, Russia and Pakistan, and installing the group’s headquarters in the same city that now hosts its annual conference. The launch is the most legible response yet to Pax Silica, the 35-country coalition led by the United States and rounded out by the European Union, Britain, Japan, India and the Philippines. Only Kazakhstan appears on both rosters.

The next morning, President Xi Jinping delivered the keynote at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, an address titled “Joining Hands to Build a Just and Equitable System for Global AI Governance.” He called the moment “a milestone in the history of world AI development,” described open-source A.I. as a “historic opportunity,” and warned that unequal access to the technology risked producing “new historical injustices.” He also urged that A.I. systems be kept “anchored” to human control, borrowing safety language typically associated with OpenAI and Anthropic and repurposing it as a governance appeal to the Global South.

The pitch had props. Beijing pledged 5,000 training places in A.I. programs for developing countries, and the Beijing-based start-up Moonshot AI used the conference to release Kimi K3, which it described as the world’s largest open-weight model. The hall filled with delegations from ASEAN, the African Union, the League of Arab States and BRICS. UN Secretary-General António Guterres appeared. So did Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul.

“You’ve got the leader of the second most powerful country in the world, a country that’s still posting real technological gains despite everything going on with the U.S., standing up and laying out China’s view on AI,” said Alfredo Montufar-Helu, managing director at Ankura China Advisors.

The subtext is harder to miss than the text. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Beijing is weighing restrictions on overseas access to some of its leading A.I. models, which sits uneasily beside a keynote celebrating open weights and equitable access. A person familiar with the U.S. position told the same outlet that most countries in the American coalition had declined to endorse Beijing’s framework.

WAICO borrows the choreography of the 1955 Bandung Conference: a Chinese-hosted assembly of the non-aligned, framed as moral correction of a Western-dominated order. What’s new is the object. Governance regimes for general-purpose technologies tend to harden around whoever writes the first credible rulebook, and Xi has now written one.

Sources