By Shanghai, July 2026 — China has formally launched the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), a new Shanghai-headquartered intergovernmental body backed by 29 member nations including Pakistan, Russia, and Indonesia. The announcement came as China kicked off its 15th Five-Year Plan and hosted the 2026 World AI Conference (WAIC), an event Beijing has run annually since 2018, four years before ChatGPT’s debut reshaped the global AI conversation.
Xi’s Vision: Open Source, Oversight, and Multilateralism
In his keynote address, President Xi Jinping outlined three priorities expected to guide China’s future AI diplomacy.
Openness and open-source collaboration. Xi called for countries to embrace open-source development, cross-border collaboration, and the sharing of AI models, framing this as key to innovation-driven growth. He argued that AI development should extend into both traditional and emerging industries so that its benefits reach everyone, not just leading economies.
Guardrails against misuse. At the same time, Xi emphasized the need for stronger safety mechanisms, including monitoring systems, early-warning frameworks, and emergency response protocols, to keep AI “secure and controllable” and ensure it remains under human oversight, cautioning against abuse and malicious use of the technology.
A unified global governance framework. Xi also pushed for deeper multilateral coordination, pointing to the United Nations as a central player in shaping global AI rules and standards. He specifically called for support to Global South nations to help them build AI capacity, close the digital divide, and avoid what he described as new forms of historical inequity emerging from the AI race.
What WAICO Actually Is
Per China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency, WAICO is designed to function as an independent intergovernmental organization dedicated to promoting international cooperation and governance around AI with the stated aim of making the technology safe, fair, and broadly beneficial. Its formation builds on several earlier Chinese initiatives: a 2022 UN resolution on AI capacity-building that China backed, the “AI Capacity-Building Action Plan for Good and for All” published in 2024, and the more recently announced “AI Plus International Cooperation Initiative.” WAICO itself was formally signed into existence during this year’s conference.
A Conference Showcasing AI’s Shift From Tool to “Partner”
Beyond the diplomatic announcements, WAIC 2026 held in Shanghai from July 17 to 20 alongside a High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance served as a showcase for China’s AI hardware and applications ecosystem. Exhibitors demonstrated technology positioning AI as an “intelligent partner” rather than a passive tool, including an intelligent robot pharmacy, Ant Group’s AI agent ecosystem, humanoid robots performing sorting tasks, and a full-chain digital intelligence system built for Luckin Coffee’s operations.
Other notable exhibits included a non-invasive brain-computer interface used to play video games, AI-enabled smart glasses with built-in payment functionality, a portable real-time 3D modeling system, iFlytek’s AI-powered smart blackboard, an AI agent-enabled smartphone, and a satellite-based AI box designed to deliver early meteorological warnings to over 30 countries.
Headline exhibits also featured Huawei’s Atlas 950 AI computing super node, MiniMax’s M3 multimodal foundation model, and what organizers billed as the world’s first agentic AI phone. More than 1,000 products were reportedly on display across the conference floor.
Why This Matters
WAICO’s launch positions China as an active shaper of international AI governance at a moment when the U.S., EU, and other blocs are pursuing their own often divergent regulatory approaches. By anchoring the new body in Shanghai and building it around open-source advocacy, Beijing appears to be offering an alternative model to the more restrictive, closed-model approaches favored by some Western AI developers while simultaneously positioning itself as a champion of Global South AI capacity-building.
The initiative also arrives against the backdrop of ongoing friction between China and the U.S. over AI hardware and model access, including export controls on advanced chips and, at various points, restrictions on frontier AI model access. Whether WAICO develops into a substantive governance body with real enforcement mechanisms, or functions primarily as a diplomatic and soft-power vehicle, will likely become clearer as its 29 member states begin to operationalize its mandate.
