Xi launches 29-nation AI bloc in Shanghai, no Western states join

The geopolitical fault lines in artificial intelligence just got a lot sharper. At the World AI Conference in Shanghai, 29 nations—including Russia, Brazil, South Africa, Pakistan, and Indonesia—formalized the creation of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, or WIKO. Headquartered in Shanghai, the group is Beijing’s most explicit move yet to build a parallel AI governance structure that operates entirely outside Western influence. Not a single Western country signed the founding charter.

President Xi Jinping used the same stage to announce that China will provide 5,000 AI training slots for Global South nations over the next five years. That’s a concrete capacity-building pledge, and it signals that WIKO isn’t just a talking shop. The organization had been first floated in 2025, but the speed of its formalization—and the roster of founding members—tells you China has been working the diplomatic back channels aggressively.

Xi also took an unsubtle rhetorical swipe at Washington. He argued that overly broad national security justifications shouldn’t be used to box countries out of AI development, a direct reference to US export controls on advanced chips and technology. It’s a message calibrated for developing nations worried about being locked out of the next industrial revolution. Meanwhile, Xi disclosed that China’s “Smart Economy”—its umbrella term for AI and adjacent digital sectors—has crossed the one trillion renminbi threshold, roughly $140 billion.

What’s emerging is a two-track global AI order. On one side, the US-led frameworks built around shared chip supply chains and allied research ecosystems. On the other, a Beijing-anchored network that offers training, infrastructure, and a governance philosophy that foregrounds state sovereignty over human rights norms. WIKO’s founding members don’t represent the bulk of global AI research output today, but they do represent a large share of the world’s population—and the future markets where AI adoption will play out.