Twenty-nine countries signed the founding agreement for the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) in Shanghai on July 16, 2026, establishing a China-headquartered int
Twenty-nine countries signed the founding agreement for the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) in Shanghai on July 16, 2026, establishing a China-headquartered intergovernmental body positioned as an alternative to Western-led AI governance frameworks. UN Secretary-General António Guterres attended the signing ceremony; no G7 nation is among the founding members.
The following day, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered his first-ever in-person keynote at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, using the moment to argue that AI development “should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation,” and to pledge 5,000 AI training and seminar opportunities for developing countries over the next five years, according to state media coverage of the keynote.
WAICO’s founding membership skews heavily toward the Global South and China-aligned states: Russia, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, and a cluster of African and Middle Eastern nations including Algeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Oman. The organization will be headquartered in Shanghai and staffed substantially from Chinese government ministries — giving Beijing not just a founding role but a structural home-field advantage in whatever norms the body eventually produces.
China first floated the idea through Premier Li Qiang at WAIC 2025 and spent roughly a year lining up commitments before formalizing it. What changed on July 16 is that the proposal became a signed institution with a legal charter, rather than a talking point. Analysts frame WAICO as three distinct models now competing globally: the EU’s binding, enforcement-backed AI Act; a lighter US federal approach currently fighting over state-law preemption; and WAICO’s cooperation-focused, consensus-based structure built around Global South capacity-building rather than binding penalties.
China’s pitch to developing nations — that WAICO offers equitable access to AI tools without the strings attached to US export controls — lands as a genuine value proposition for countries currently locked out of frontier compute. At the same time, Xi’s framing of AI remaining “under human control” sits uneasily next to China’s own documented use of AI-driven surveillance domestically, a tension Western commentary has been quick to point out. Whether WAICO produces enforceable norms or functions mainly as a diplomatic signal will likely become clearer as the organization’s first working sessions get scheduled.
The timing is also deliberate. WAICO’s formal launch came earlier this year targeted specifically at the moment US officials began applying export controls to specific commercial AI models for the first time, restricting access for foreign nationals even at American AI companies. Beijing’s consistent response to such measures has been to frame them as an overreach that harms global AI development broadly, then offer its own alternative architecture — WAICO is the clearest institutional expression of that strategy to date.
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