Xi Jinping stood in Shanghai on Friday to unveil the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, a new intergovernmental body whose founding agreement was signed the previous day by 29 countries and whose roster contains no major Western democracy. The keynote, titled “Joining Hands to Build a Just and Equitable System for Global AI Governance,” did the political work the venue implied: it reframed AI rulemaking as something Beijing convenes and the Global South ratifies.
WAICO’s headquarters sits in Shanghai. Its founding members include Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia, South Africa, Senegal, Russia and Pakistan, per Al Jazeera. Premier Li Qiang first floated the organization in July 2025; a year later, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev of Kazakhstan, Cambodia’s Hun Manet, Thailand’s Anutin Charnvirakul and UN Secretary-General António Guterres all spoke at the opening ceremony, according to Xinhua. Guterres’s presence is the diplomatic hinge. It gives a China-headquartered bloc a UN-legible imprimatur at exactly the moment, as Carnegie’s Arindrajit Basu put it, that “With Washington rapidly retreating from global cyber and AI norms-setting processes and withdrawing its financial backing for cyber diplomacy more broadly, Beijing is keen to demonstrate its global leadership.”
The offerings are targeted and material. China pledged 5,000 AI training and seminar slots for developing countries over the next five years, joint AI application centers with ASEAN, the League of Arab States, the African Union, CELAC, the SCO and BRICS, and deployment of the MAZU meteorological warning system to 30 countries. That’s a development-aid package in the shape of an AI standards body. For governments choosing between Western frameworks that come attached to export controls and a Chinese framework that comes attached to compute access and training slots, the choice is meant to feel obvious.
Xi described WAICO as “a major move by China to answer the call of the Global South” and “an important milestone in the history of AI development,” per the Foreign Ministry readout. He also urged countries to oppose “overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI, or placing one country’s security over that of others,” a direct read of the US export-control regime that has throttled Chinese access to advanced semiconductors. Huawei used the same stage to show off its Atlas 950 SuperPoD, a chip-linking supernode built for large-model training on domestic silicon.
The underlying numbers are the point. Xinhua puts China’s 2025 core AI industry at more than 1.2 trillion yuan, roughly $176.6 billion, with over 6,200 AI enterprises and more than 10 billion cumulative downloads of Chinese open-source models. Sanctions were supposed to isolate that stack. Instead they’ve supplied the political grievance around which a 29-nation bloc has now organized itself.
Institutions built during moments of exclusion tend to outlast the exclusion that produced them.
Sources
- https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/17/x-china-ai-summit-risks-security.html
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/17/chinas-xi-jinping-launches-new-ai-alliance-what-is-it
- https://www.npr.org/2026/07/17/nx-s1-5897285/chinas-xi-calls-for-step-up-of-global-effort-in-ai-as-us-curbs-squeeze-chinas-tech-access
- https://english.news.cn/20260717/128a3c67ccdd44e0b80b5b10b9c01475/c.html
- https://www.mfa.gov.cn/eng/xw/zyjh/202607/t20260717_11984910.html