China Launches WAICO as Xi Makes His First Appearance at World AI Conference
- David Borish
- Jul 22
- 6 min read
Twenty-nine countries signed the founding agreement for the World AI Cooperation Organization in Shanghai on July 16, establishing a new intergovernmental body headquartered in the city, one day before Xi Jinping delivered his first in-person keynote at the World AI Conference. Founding members include Russia, Belarus, Serbia, Cuba, Brazil, and Venezuela, along with ten African countries and twelve Asian countries. The organization joins a growing field of AI governance institutions, but it is the first one built specifically outside the frameworks that the United States, the European Union, and the OECD have used to define "responsible AI" for the past several years.
WHAT WAS SIGNED
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi signed the founding agreement on behalf of the Chinese government, and representatives from the 29 founding member states signed alongside him. The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization will operate as an independent intergovernmental international organization headquartered in Shanghai. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres attended the ceremony, a detail Chinese state media has repeatedly emphasized as evidence of international legitimacy for the new body.
According to the agreement text, the organization will uphold the purposes of the UN Charter and commit to extensive consultation and joint contribution for shared benefit, while adhering to a people-centered approach in its stated mission to promote beneficial, safe, and fair AI. That language echoes the UN's own AI governance efforts, and it is a deliberate choice. China has spent the past several years positioning its domestic AI initiatives as contributions to international standard-setting, and WAICO is the institutional endpoint of that positioning.
The founding member list, compiled from Reuters and Xinhua reporting, spans a wide geographic range. Beyond Russia, Belarus, Serbia, Cuba, Brazil, and Venezuela, the signatories include ten African countries and twelve Asian countries, with Kazakhstan, Laos, Pakistan, and Indonesia named specifically in Xinhua's own account. No Western European government, and no G7 member, appears among the founders.
XI'S FIRST APPEARANCE AT WAIC
The timing matters. WAIC has run since 2018, and until this year Xi had never attended in person, sending a congratulatory letter for the inaugural conference while Premier Li Qiang handled the opening ceremonies in 2024 and 2025. That changed on July 17, when Xi delivered the keynote address at the conference's opening ceremony under the title "Joining Hands to Build a Just and Equitable System for Global AI Governance."
In the speech, Xi pointed to WAICO's formation as a major move by China to answer the call of the Global South and unite the international community around AI development and governance. He also used the platform to needle Washington without naming it directly. Xi argued that AI should not be dominated by any single nation and repeated China's objections to what he called the overstretching of national security concerns in how other countries have restricted technology access. The remark lands against a backdrop of American export controls that have limited China's access to advanced chips and pushed Beijing toward faster development of domestic alternatives, intensifying a rivalry both governments now treat as central to their broader competition.
Xi paired the institutional announcement with concrete commitments. He said China will establish AI training programs and cooperation centers with members of BRICS, ASEAN, and countries across Latin America and the African Union, extending Beijing's AI partnerships well beyond the 29 founding WAICO members. George Chen, chair of digital practice at the consultancy The Asia Group, told Reuters that the message was unambiguous: Xi intends for China to lead the world in both AI technology and international standards, rather than follow other countries.
WHAT WAICO IS ACTUALLY OFFERING
The pitch to potential members is development, not ideology. China's public framing draws a contrast between its own approach and what it describes as a Western model built around compliance and restriction. A recent academic mapping of the AI governance landscape, published on arXiv, makes the comparison explicit. The UN has created scientific and dialogue mechanisms for AI governance, but these are designed for assessment and coordination rather than sustained project delivery. The OECD-integrated Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence covers 44 countries, but membership is anchored in trustworthy, secure, and democratic-value-oriented AI principles, while the Council of Europe's framework convention places human rights and rule of law at the center of its legal architecture. WAICO, by contrast, asks only that a country be sovereign.
The same paper's authors coded fifteen existing AI governance bodies against a development-priority scale and found a gap WAICO is built to fill. Among eight Western and like-minded institutions in their sample, none placed development at the center of its agenda, and most scored zero on that measure. That gap is the market WAICO is targeting: countries with limited compute access and limited negotiating leverage in existing forums, looking for a seat at a table that asks less of them upfront.
Whether that makes WAICO a genuine alternative or a parallel structure that competes with the UN for the same countries' attention is still an open question among researchers. The arXiv paper lays out three possible readings of the organization: a direct competitor to Western governance clubs, a complement to UN mechanisms, or a coordination layer that lets Global South countries build a common position before carrying it into larger forums. The evidence in the paper's own assessment favors the third reading most strongly, since WAICO's closest institutional neighbors are Chinese and Global South instruments oriented toward capacity building and access rather than rule enforcement. The distinction matters for how seriously Western governments should treat WAICO as a rival rulebook versus a bloc-building exercise that may or may not produce binding standards.
WHO SIGNED, WHO DIDN'T, AND WHY IT'S BEING WATCHED
The absence of Western signatories is the story analysts are focused on, more than the presence of the 29 who did sign. As of the signing date, no major Western economy had joined, and while the agreement's open-membership structure means any country could theoretically sign later, near-term uptake from US or EU allies is considered unlikely. One industry analysis went further, noting that the notable absence of major US technology firms at the Shanghai summit highlights a widening rift in global AI governance, and that the emergence of WAICO points toward a future where digital standards and AI-related financial tools may diverge between Western-aligned markets and countries adopting Beijing's model.
That divergence is already showing up in how the two governments talk past each other on regulation itself. At a UN AI dialogue the week before the WAICO signing, Washington argued that heavy regulation would stifle breakthroughs, while Beijing framed its low-cost, open-source models as a public good capable of narrowing global AI inequality. The two framings are not reconcilable in the short term, and WAICO gives Beijing an institutional vehicle to press its version with a standing membership behind it rather than making the case country by country.
It is worth noting who is asking the questions here. George Chen, quoted across multiple outlets characterizing WAICO's significance, is a paid consultant whose firm advises corporate clients on China market access, not an independent academic voice. That does not make his read wrong. It does mean his framing of WAICO as a standards competition, rather than a symbolic gesture, should be weighed alongside the arXiv paper's more cautious "coordination layer" reading before drawing firm conclusions about how much practical authority the organization will carry.
WHAT TO WATCH NEXT
WAICO has a headquarters, a founding membership list, and a mission statement. What it does not yet have, based on the public agreement text, is a demonstrated project pipeline, a funding mechanism, or evidence that member states will defer to its standards over their own domestic rules. The four-day World AI Conference running through July 20 is expected to fill in some of those details, particularly around the training programs and cooperation centers Xi announced alongside the BRICS, ASEAN, and African Union partnerships.
The near-term signal to track is not membership growth. It is whether WAICO produces anything member states actually use, a shared compute-access program, a joint standards document, a funded capacity-building initiative, within its first year. Institutions built for geopolitical signaling can take years to develop operational substance, or they can stall as symbolic gestures. Which path WAICO takes will say more about the durability of a bifurcated AI governance landscape than the signing ceremony did.
