Twenty-nine countries signed on this week to create the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), a new Shanghai-based body that its founders say will promote a “people-centered” approach to artificial intelligence. Russia and China lead the effort, joined by ten African nations, twelve Asian countries, and Belarus, Serbia, Cuba, Brazil and Venezuela. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres attended the signing ceremony. No G7 economy — such as the U.S., UK, Germany, France or Japan — has joined.
Grigorenko frames WAICO as a check on Washington
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko cast the new body as a response to American tech dominance, declaring, “We consistently advocate for the establishment of transparent rules governing extraterritorial technologies.” China’s Xinhua news agency says WAICO will work to make AI development safe, fair and beneficial while upholding UN principles.
Chinese President Xi Jinping told the World Artificial Intelligence Conference that AI development “should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation,” and warned against nations “placing one country’s security over that of others.”
Washington’s own initiative asks for the same kind of control it criticizes
Beijing’s pitch is a direct answer to Washington’s “Pax Silica” project, unveiled last year to build what U.S. officials called “the global technology supply chain” for AI. In exchange for access to American AI technology, signatories were asked to hand over resources, manufacturing capacity and logistics support, while shielding “sensitive technologies and critical infrastructure from undue access” — language widely read as targeting China.
Pax Silica’s backers have dismissed the idea of digital sovereignty as “backward and counterproductive.” In other words: both blocs are asking the rest of the world to plug into somebody else’s system, just with different branding.
Beijing’s AI ambitions come with real security baggage
China has built a formidable AI industry — DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM and Kimi have undercut Western competitors on price, and Huawei is set to debut its Atlas 950 supercomputing cluster, built without top-tier Nvidia chips, at the Shanghai conference. But Beijing has also accused Anthropic’s Claude Code tool of containing security backdoors, an allegation Anthropic disputes.
Washington, for its part, isn’t exactly a model of restraint: the Pentagon says a Palantir platform running on Claude and Elon Musk’s Grok helped the U.S. military fire more than 2,000 missiles at Iran in four days. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has separately warned that AI could eventually pose risks up to and including mass job losses and authoritarian abuse — concerns that apply just as easily to Beijing and Moscow as to Washington.
Not everyone is buying the “people-centered” pitch
Not everyone is buying the “people-centered” pitch. India’s former UN ambassador warned in an op-ed that WAICO could end up determining the “new global AI order” and that “India must be vigilant” — a notable warning given that China and Russia, not exactly models of transparency at home, are the ones asking the rest of the world to trust their vision for how AI should be governed.
Beijing markets openness and inclusion, but it’s also the same government that spun a routine anti-abuse safeguard in a U.S. company’s coding tool into a “backdoor” scare, and whose media apparatus has a long track record of shaping the narrative to its advantage. Moscow’s idea of “transparent rules” comes from a government not otherwise known for transparency. Washington’s own approach has plenty to answer for too, but at least it isn’t asking anyone to take an authoritarian state’s word for it that the “cooperation” is what it claims to be.
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