Xi pitches China as leader of a new global AI order

TL;DR:

• Xi Jinping told the World AI Conference in Shanghai that countries should seize the opportunity of open-source AI, pledging to help developing nations build their own capability.
• A day earlier, 29 countries including Russia, Brazil and Cuba signed the agreement founding the World AI Cooperation Organisation (WAICO), headquartered in Shanghai.
• The UK is not a signatory, leaving it between two rival governance poles: a China-anchored body and the US-led “Pax Silica” initiative.

Xi Jinping used the opening of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) to make his clearest case yet that China, rather than the United States, should shape the rules governing AI. Comparing the technology to the steam engine and electricity, he presented China’s open-source models as a public good for the Global South and warned that unequal access risked creating “new historical injustices”.

The speech came with institutional backing. Twenty-nine countries — including Russia, Belarus, Serbia, Cuba, Brazil and Venezuela, alongside ten African and twelve Asian states — signed the agreement establishing WAICO on Thursday, giving Beijing’s governance ambitions a formal body based in Shanghai. China proposed the organisation a year ago; until this week, no country had formally joined.

Xi also made his most extended remarks to date on AI safety, calling for systems to remain under human control and for early-warning and emergency-response mechanisms to guard against scenarios where autonomous systems evade oversight.

Two governance poles, and the UK in neither

George Chen of The Asia Group read the speech as a declaration that China intends to lead on both technology and standards, and a warning that it will not be told what to do with AI. The timing reinforced the message: Beijing-based Moonshot unveiled Kimi K3, the largest open-weight model yet released, on the same morning.

For UK readers, the question is one of positioning. The Chancellor put AI sovereignty at the centre of the UK’s growth plan this week, while Demis Hassabis has argued for a US-led body to police frontier models. Britain now faces a governance map splitting into a China-anchored bloc and a US-led one, with no obvious seat in either.

Looking forward

Washington and Beijing are preparing their first government-level AI talks under the Trump administration, and WAIC runs until 20 July. How many further countries join WAICO — and whether any US allies break ranks to do so — will show whether Xi’s pitch converts into durable influence over global AI rules.