Chinese President Xi Jinping used the opening of the 2026 World AI Conference in Shanghai to pitch open-source AI as a national strategy, telling delegates the world should 'encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing.' In the same speech he announced the launch of a new China-led body, the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), to be headquartered in Shanghai. The event landed the same day a Chinese open model rattled US chip stocks -- a coincidence of timing that made the 'US closes, China opens' contrast impossible to ignore.
Key facts
- The speech, titled 'Joining Hands to Build a Just and Equitable System For Global AI Governance,' was delivered July 17, 2026 in Shanghai; the full official English text was published by state broadcaster CGTN.
- Xi announced WAICO, a new intergovernmental AI body headquartered in Shanghai, calling it 'a major move by China to answer the call of the Global South.'
- China pledged 5,000 AI training opportunities for developing countries over five years and access to a weather-warning AI called MAZU for 30 countries.
- Coverage: Fortune.
Xi framed AI as the next general-purpose technology in a line that runs from the steam engine to electricity to the internet. 'Each of these technological revolutions has profoundly reshaped our way of work and life,' he said, before laying out four principles. The first and most quoted was openness: 'we should adhere to the principle of openness and win-win... We should seize this rare, historic opportunity to encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing.'
The second principle carried a coded critique of the United States. Xi called for AI to be 'secure and controllable' and 'always under human control,' then added that countries should 'jointly oppose overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI and placing one country's security over that of others.' That is as close as the speech comes to naming US export controls, which restrict Chinese access to advanced chips on national-security grounds. The remaining two principles stressed civilizational diversity and multilateralism, with a specific appeal to the Global South to 'bridge the AI and digital divides.'
Beyond rhetoric, the concrete deliverables are what make this a news event rather than a set of talking points. WAICO 'has come into being in Shanghai,' Xi said, describing it as the realization of a vision floated a year earlier. China will build AI cooperation centers with ASEAN, the African Union, the Arab League, BRICS and other blocs. And it will hand 30 countries a working AI system -- the MAZU meteorological-warning tool -- 'to safeguard homes around the world.' The closing line supplied the headline that spread across social media: 'China is ready to be more open, take more practical actions, and assume a more visionary perspective.'
Why it matters comes down to who sets the terms of the AI era. For a decade the default assumption was that the frontier would be owned by a handful of American labs charging for access. Xi's speech is a bid to make 'AI as a shared public good, provided in the open' the alternative organizing principle -- and to put China at the center of the institution that coordinates it. OpenAI's head of strategic futures, Dean Ball, read the stakes bluntly, calling an open-weight-dominant world a path toward AI as 'a public good... provided by the state as a kind of digital public infrastructure.'
The honest caveat is that this is a speech and a stated position, not enacted law. WAICO's launch and the 5,000-training and 30-country figures are specific commitments that can be checked later. But 'encourage open source' is strategy and rhetoric, not a binding rule that changes what Chinese labs must do. It is best read as a pitch -- one delivered, pointedly, on the same day that Moonshot's Kimi K3 gave the pitch a live demonstration by knocking a few hundred billion dollars off US chip valuations. The rhetoric and the market move are two halves of the same argument: that the cheapest path to capable AI now runs through open models, and increasingly through China.
Originally published on Ground Truth, where every claim is checked against the primary source.
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