Chinese President Xi Jinping called for global cooperation on artificial intelligence Friday at a conference in Shanghai, while warning against countries placing their own national security interests above those of others. The pitch came from the top of a state that has spent years tightening its own grip on technology, even as American-led restrictions have blocked China from accessing some of the world’s most advanced technologies and pushed Beijing to build its own know-how.
Who Gets to Set the Rules
Xi told the opening of China’s annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference that AI should not be dominated by any single nation. “The development of artificial intelligence should not be a solo performance by any single country but rather a symphony of global cooperation,” he said. The line sounds generous enough. The setting was not. It was a conference in Shanghai, with more than 1,100 companies and 1,400 guests, and with the world’s biggest power blocs all trying to write the rules for a technology that will shape who gets access, who gets shut out, and who gets watched.
“We should together oppose the practice of overstretching the concept of national security in the field of artificial intelligence, and of placing one’s own security above that of other countries,” Xi said, repeating a longstanding Chinese complaint. That complaint lands in a world where states and corporations alike treat AI as strategic property, not a shared tool. The result is rivalry dressed up as governance.
The Bottom Rung Pays First
American-led restrictions have blocked China from accessing some of the world’s most advanced technologies, intensifying the rivalry between the world’s two biggest economies. China’s answer has been to accelerate its own industrial machine. State media said Huawei is showcasing its Atlas 950 SuperPoD at the conference, while Chinese AI startup Moonshot released Kimi K3, which it said has 2.8 trillion parameters and will make it the world’s largest open-source model. Last month, another Chinese AI company Zhipu, or Z.ai, rolled out its flagship GLM-5.2 open-source model.
The people farthest from the boardrooms are the ones who live with the fallout. China’s five-year plan until 2030 has prioritized progress in frontiers of science and technology including AI, and Xi promised to provide access for 30 countries to a Chinese-developed AI meteorological tool that provides early warning systems. Over the next five years, he said China will provide 5,000 AI training opportunities to developing countries. That’s the language of partnership. It’s also the language of influence, with training, tools, and access flowing through state channels.
Global South, Global Competition
Ahead of the conference, 29 countries including Pakistan, Russia and Kazakhstan signed an agreement with China to establish a World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization. State media described it as an intergovernmental organization headquartered in Shanghai promoting global AI governance. George Chen, partner and chair of digital practice at Washington-headquartered consultancy The Asia Group, said the new organization can be viewed as China’s answer to the U.S.-led Pax Silica initiative.
The Pax Silica framework, launched late last year, focuses on strengthening collaboration with U.S. allies and partners on AI-related supply chains. Signatories include Japan, the U.K., Australia, the Philippines, Israel and India. Different flags. Same game. Each bloc is building its own apparatus, each claiming order while locking down supply chains, access, and leverage.
Chen, who was at the conference in Shanghai, said Xi’s speech can be seen as a signal that China can be a reliable partner to the developing world, or “Global South” countries. “China will not let America be the monopoly of AI technology,” he said. That line captures the rivalry cleanly: not liberation, just a fight over who gets to monopolize the machine.
What They Call Governance
Others attending included the leaders of Kazakhstan, Cambodia and Thailand and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. China will expand AI cooperation with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the League of Arab States, the African Union, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS countries, Xi said. The list is long. The hierarchy is longer.
China and the United States also agreed after U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing to meet with Xi in mid-May to conduct a dialogue on AI development and governance. U.S. politicians and several major U.S. AI companies including Anthropic have accused Chinese AI models of illicit “distillation” of their models to extract their technologies, a claim that Beijing says is “groundless.” U.S. policymakers have also raised concerns over Chinese AI posing an economic threat to the United States.
Meanwhile, China’s open-source AI models, like DeepSeek, are seen, especially across the developing world, as appealing and often more affordable than U.S. AI models, which are largely closed-source. That affordability matters. So does who controls the code, the chips, the supply chains, and the terms of access. At the conference in Shanghai, the bosses of the AI age were all there, talking about cooperation while the competition for control kept grinding on.