Xi Makes His AI Debut With a Pitch to the Global South

On July 17, at the opening of the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Xi Jinping delivered his first keynote at the event since it began in 2018. His message was aimed less at the AI labs seated in the hall than at the governments watching from beyond China's borders. The development of artificial intelligence, he said, "should not be a solo performance by any single country but rather a symphony of global cooperation."

The speech came with specifics. Xi said China would offer developing nations 5,000 training opportunities over the next five years, and would open cooperation on AI with regional blocs including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the African Union, the League of Arab States, and partners across Latin America. He also promised 30 countries access to a Chinese-built AI system for early weather warnings. The pitch cast Beijing as the ready partner for the parts of the world that the current AI boom has largely passed by.

Xi confirmed that the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, signed into being by 29 nations earlier this week, will be headquartered in Shanghai. He framed it as an answer to what he called the call of the Global South, and as proof that governance of the technology need not run only through Washington or Brussels.

A message aimed at Washington

The sharpest line in the address was about security. "We should together oppose the practice of overstretching the concept of national security in the field of artificial intelligence," Xi said. He did not name the United States, but the target was not hard to read. American export controls have kept China's firms from buying the most advanced chips, and Beijing has spent two years building around those limits. Even the first legal shipments of Nvidia H200 chips reached the country only after a long licensing fight.

Xi paired the complaint with an offer. He said AI should be "secure and controllable," and that no country should be shut out of the technology on security grounds. It is a familiar move: cast the rules others impose as protectionism, then present openness as the alternative.

The open-source card

Openness was the through-line. Xi called on the field to seize a "rare historic opportunity" by encouraging open source and shared research, so that, in his words, all sectors and businesses can benefit. The framing plays to China's current strength. Its labs have leaned hard into open-weight releases, from Moonshot's 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 to a wave of smaller models that American companies have quietly adopted for their lower cost.

Whether the training programs and the new cooperation body become durable institutions or diplomatic staging is the open question. For now Xi has planted a flag. The next test is whether the countries he courted show up in Shanghai with more than signatures.