Xi Jinping delivered his first keynote at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference on Friday, telling delegates in Shanghai that “AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation”, a line that arrived one day after 29 governments signed the founding agreement of a new China-headquartered body designed to coordinate exactly that.

The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, or WAICO, will sit in Shanghai and, according to Chinese state media, promote global AI governance. Xinhua confirmed Russia, Pakistan and Kazakhstan among the signatories. Western governments weren’t.

That absence is the story. Xi warned against “overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI or placing one country’s security over that of others,” phrasing widely read as aimed at U.S. export controls now squeezing China’s access to advanced chips. The rest of the pitch was infrastructure diplomacy: 5,000 training places for developing countries over the next five years, cooperation with ASEAN, the League of Arab States, the African Union, CELAC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, and access for 30 countries to MAZU, a Chinese AI-powered meteorological warning system. The Chair’s Statement from the high-level governance meeting arrived alongside the commitments, itemised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The four-day event drew more than 1,100 companies and 1,400 guests, per state media. What it didn’t draw was consensus on who governs.

“Europe already has its own AI act and the United States is already defining their regulations,” one analyst told AFP. Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University, put it more directly: it’s “hard to imagine there being a single approach to AI governance globally.”

Shanghai isn’t proposing one. It’s building the alternative bloc that assumes fragmentation is the settled outcome.

Sources