Artificial intelligence should not be a solo performance by one country, but a symphony of international cooperation.
That was Chinese President Xi Jinping’s framing on July 17, when he opened the 2026 World AI Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in Shanghai, his first appearance at the event in person.
It is a good line, and it captures a real anxiety felt across much of the developing world that the AI revolution could entrench rather than narrow the gap between rich and poor nations.
A day before Xi spoke, representatives from 29 countries, including Kazakhstan, Laos, Pakistan, Russia and Indonesia, signed an agreement establishing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, a new intergovernmental body headquartered in Shanghai.
Xi called its creation a milestone, and Beijing pledged 5,000 AI training and research opportunities for developing countries over the next five years, alongside new cooperation centers aimed at ASEAN, the Arab League, the African Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS members.
This is not China’s first pass at the idea. Beijing floated a global AI cooperation body at last year’s WAIC, but the proposal was vague. This year, it acquired legal form, a headquarters and 29 founding signatories, along with the presence of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at the signing ceremony, which gives the initiative a degree of international legitimacy that a purely Chinese program would lack.
Xi’s appeal to the Global South is genuine and well-timed. Many developing economies have watched the AI race unfold as a contest between a handful of American and Chinese firms with the compute, capital and chips to compete, and have found few avenues to shape the rules rather than simply receive them.
A body that promises training, seminars and application-focused cooperation centers, rather than only investment tied to political conditions, addresses a real gap. Officials in Southeast Asia and the Arab world have reason to take the offer seriously.
But the framing deserves scrutiny alongside the welcome. WAICO arrives explicitly as a counterweight to what Chinese officials and state media describe as Western dominance of AI governance, and it launches amid intensifying competition between Washington and Beijing over the future of the global AI ecosystem.
That does not make the initiative insincere, but it does mean the “symphony” metaphor sits alongside a fairly conventional exercise in great-power technology diplomacy, one in which Beijing is building influence and standard-setting power in exactly the arenas where Washington has historically led.
The notable absence of major US technology firms from the Shanghai summit underscores how far the two governance tracks have already diverged.
There is also a track record to weigh. Last year’s WAIC produced a Global AI Governance Action Plan and a proposal for the same cooperation organization now being formally launched, but independent trackers noted at the time that public details were thin and implementation unclear.
A year on, WAICO has gone from proposal to signed agreement, which is real progress, but the harder test, whether the training slots, cooperation centers and technology transfers materialize at the scale promised, is still ahead.
Member governments and observers will want to see delivery, not just declarations, before crediting Beijing with having solved the access gap it describes.
None of this should obscure what is genuinely new here. The world’s first intergovernmental organization built specifically around AI cooperation is a notable institutional fact, whatever one thinks of its sponsor or its politics.
For countries long accustomed to being AI rule-takers rather than rule-makers, an invitation to help write the rules, even one issued by Beijing and shaped by its interests, is worth engaging with rather than dismissing.
The test now shifts from speeches to delivery. Xi has offered the Global South a seat in the AI conversation.
Whether WAICO becomes a genuine platform for shared benefit, or another venue in which a rising power sets terms that smaller states must accept, will depend on what happens in Shanghai’s cooperation centers over the next five years, not on what was said at the podium this week.
Dr. Bilal Habib Qazi works as a research analyst at the Institute of Regional Studies, Islamabad. The views expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the author’s affiliated institution.
