Towards new AI global order: China’s initiative

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China’s leader urged global community “to seize the historic opportunity” of open-source AI and pledged to help developing states build AI capabilities, warning against the emergence of “new historical injustices” from unequal access to the digital facilities. China presented itself as the champion of a new global AI order, by promoting open-source technologies and challenging the US influence over ‌the rules governing the fast-moving digital sector. 

Background
China-led World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai – July 17-20 – has been arranged at a time when the US and China were preparing for their first government-level AI talks; the two countries’ presidents have laid out competing visions at a recent UN AI dialogue, where the US officials argued excessive regulation could hinder innovation, while China promoted its low-cost, open-source models as a tool for narrowing ⁠global disparities in AI access. Headquartered in Shanghai, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference’s Organisation with its 29-member founding countries include several major Global South nations, such as Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia, South Africa, Senegal, Russia and Pakistan.
However, both the US and China are presently locked in a battle for tech and AI dominance and view each other’s advancements in these areas as deliberate attempts to stymie the other.
As Chinese AI models gain ground globally, the country strives to function as a leader of the new global AI order, challenging the US’s influence in the development and regulation of the fast-evolving digital technology. The event was attended by leading China’s technology companies, including the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, assistant to the President of the Russian Federation Maxim Oreshkin, and high-ranking delegates from more than 100 countries and international organizations, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as well as representatives of the expert and business communities.
More on WAIC in: https://eng.sectsco.org/20260719/2462053.html

The newly announced coalition – the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation (WAICO) created at the recent high-level event, is challenging a rival the US-led organisation: the US has brought together 35 countries behind its AI Opportunity Statement; thus, the US initiative is to be “compared” with the China-led WAICO.
More on the AI Opportunity Statement in: https://www.state.gov/releases/under-secretary-for-economic-affairs/2026/06/joint-statement-on-ai-opportunity-partnership

Some states are taking place in both: thus, Kazakhstan is the only country listed as joining both initiatives, arguing that the limited overlap showed most countries aligned with Washington’s framework had not endorsed Beijing’s competing initiative.

China’s ambition
China intends “to shape the global AI governance”; this initiative is coped with framing its open-source models as a global public good and positioning Beijing as an alternative to Washington. The move has appeared at a pivotal moment in the world-wide race for the digital technological leadership. Comparing AI’s significance to the invention of the steam engine and electricity, China’s President outlined a vision in which China shares AI technology and expertise with countries across the Global South, while leading global efforts to create standards governing the emerging technology. He pitched China’s AI coalition as a rival to ⁠the US-led “Pax Silica”, an international initiative to secure global AI and critical mineral supply chains. “AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation,” Xi said.
Xi also stressed the need for a “people-centred” approach to AI that ensures that “AI is always under human control” using safeguards such as regulations, technological monitoring, early warning and emergency response systems.

Key highlights of WAIC-2026
= Global AI governance: the conference introduced a China-led vision to make AI a “global public good,” proposing the creation of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) to foster equitable technology sharing.
= Next-Generation Models: local AI startups, such as Beijing-based Moonshot AI, unveiled massive open AI models like Kimi K3, continuing rapid gains by Chinese open-weight systems.
= Global digital cooperation: China committed to providing 5,000 AI training opportunities for developing nations over the next five years, along with launching international AI application cooperation centers for ASEAN, the African Union, and BRICS.
= Cutting-edge technologies: the WAIC-26 (specifically through exhibitions) showcased domestic innovations in humanoid robots, autonomous mobility, large language models (LLMs) and smart-city infrastructure.

Recent US digital initiative
In the beginning of July, the US government through the “advanced talks” with AI companies to create voluntary standards for the release of new models, with ‌a quick announcement to follow.
In a preliminary report, the following initiative elements appeared:
= The US Administration has tightened oversight of new model releases to flag risks amid concerns that advanced AI models could be misused by military intelligence in China, Russia or other countries around the world.
= The digital standards would set ⁠benchmarks for advanced models and timelines, while clarifying who can access them in the US and abroad. The White House, Anthropic, and OpenAI did not immediately respond to public quests (e.g. Financial Times and Reuters) requests and verify the initiative. However, it is evident from the US President Donald Trump executive order issues this June directing agencies to work with leading AI developers to test advanced models before release, and to draft standards for them.
= Google has opened new talks with the government ahead of the release of advanced coding models with more sophisticated capabilities, adding that the company was also involved in broader discussions on industry standards.
Sources: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-talks-with-ai-companies-voluntary-model-standards-ft-reports-2026-07-02/

= OpenAI has ⁠also faced constraints: e.g. it delayed a full public launch of GPT-5.6 at the US government’s request, limiting access to a small group of ⁠vetted partners, whose details were shared with the authorities. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing for IPOs. The ‌decision underscores growing concern in the government over the national security risks posed by powerful AI systems, with policymakers pressing companies to put guardrails around them.
The ⁠US Commerce Department, however, lifted export controls on Anthropic’s most advanced Fable and Mythos models, less than three weeks after ordering their suspension over national security concerns.
Reference to: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/openai-defers-public-rollout-gpt56-us-seeks-early-access-frontier-ai-models-2026-06-26/

In May 2026, the US senators from both parties unveiled a bill aimed at countering Chinese sales of AI tools overseas; the draft legislation, ‌sponsored by Democrat Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Republican Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, would create an office within the State Department to subsidize purchases by allied governments of US digital technology and streamline the procurement process. If passed, a fund worth $500 million would be created to help finance the program.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-lawmakers-seek-undercut-chinese-ai-tech-sales-abroad-2026-05-19/

Facing the “AI Iron Curtain”
Chinese state media has increasingly portrayed the new country’s global AI strategy as a response to what it calls a US-led attempt to erect an “AI Iron Curtain”. It was said in a commentary in Yuyuan Tantian, a prominent social media account affiliated with state broadcaster CCTV, that China was seeking to build “another order” by “pooling the strength of all humanity and all countries to build an open-source, all-factor AI ecosystem.”
The WAIC conference underlined the shifting AI landscape, with Chinese open-weight AI models making rapid gains against proprietary systems from the US companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic; the AI conferences have been held in Shanghai since 2018.
Beijing-based startup Moonshot AI unveiled recently Kimi K3 (a $2.8 trillion-parameter model), which it described as the world’s largest open AI model by parameter count, i.e. a month after the US government abruptly pulled Anthropic’s frontier-class AI models due to security concerns.
This AI system delivers performance approaching US giant Anthropic’s ‌frontier Fable model.
The Kimi K3 launch underscores how quickly China’s open AI ecosystem is narrowing the gap with the most advanced US digital systems.
General source and more on Kimi K3 in: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-moonshot-unveils-worlds-largest-open-ai-model-closing-us-rivals-2026-07-17/

Companies including Moonshot, Z.ai and MiniMax are releasing increasingly powerful models at sharply lower cost, challenging long-held assumptions in the West that Chinese developers trail their American peers by months. Thus, Moonshot said that Kimi K3 was the first open-weight model to approach the 3 trillion-parameter mark and was designed for advanced reasoning, long-horizon coding and knowledge work. The model features a 1 million-token context window, allowing it to ⁠process and retain substantially more information than earlier generations in a single prompt. New open-weight models allow users to download, run and customise the underlying systems, unlike proprietary closed-source models.

More on Kimi K3
Kimi K3 “performed competitively with Fable 5 (with fallback) and substantially outperformed Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, GPT 5.6 Sol and GPT 5.5” in terms of GPU kernel optimisation. The term refers to techniques that maximise AI hardware utilisation and minimise latency. The model has also posted strong results in third-party evaluations.
More on Kimi in: https://platform.kimi.ai/

Arena.ai ranked Kimi K3 first in a benchmark assessing web interface-building capabilities, while Vals AI placed it second overall behind Fable 5 and ahead of GPT-5.6 Sol. Artificial Analysis said the model delivered performance comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8, particularly on tests measuring complex, multi-step tasks.
Note. Artificial Analysis is an independent website founded in 2023 that provides benchmarking and comparative analysis of AI models, including large language models (LLMs), and API providers, focusing on metrics such as intelligence, price, output speed, latency, and context window. Backed by prominent figures including Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and Andrew Ng, it serves as a key resource for engineers and companies evaluating AI technologies through transparent and comprehensive methodologies applicable to both proprietary and open-source models.
Reference to: https://grokipedia.com/page/artificial-analysis

The Moonshot news drove shares of domestic AI competitors Zhipu (2513.HK), opens new tab and Minimax (0100.HK), opens new tab down sharply in Hong Kong; just before market close, they were down 27.7% and 16.5%, respectively.
More on the “digital market” in: https://www.reuters.com/markets/companies/2513.HK/

Chinese AI firms are accelerating their model release cycles as the global AI race intensifies. The shift follows the debut of ‌Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, ⁠which stunned industry observers by scoring near top U.S. closed-source models on benchmark tests, undermining a consensus among Western analysts that Chinese AI models were at least six months behind. Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, said Chinese models were gaining traction because they could be deployed far more cheaply than leading US systems. “They can be run at a fraction of the cost that OpenAI charges its clients,” he said, but cautioned that Kimi K3’s scale didn’t “doesn’t necessarily mean you have the best performance by default.”
Kimi K3’s size also means few users are likely to host ⁠it themselves despite its open-weight release. Some also argue that running a $2.8 trillion-parameter model locally would require hundreds of thousands of dollars of computing equipment.

Bottom-line
The AI’s direction is an important pillar of China’s industrial policy: the country has invested massively in building a self-sustained domestic digital system, from chip production to consumer use. That has spurred a so-called “chip war” with the US as trying both to control the production of chip-based technology like advanced military weapons and AI-powered systems. While China still lags behind the US in access to the most cutting-edge semiconductors, it currently holds the edge in powering huge data centers needed to train and run AI models. China also dominates the production of critical rare earth minerals required to build chips.
An abundant supply of cheap electricity has given China the advantage of meeting AI’s colossal energy demands. Beijing already generates more than twice as much electricity as the US, a lead that is expected to widen amid an aggressive state-led investment in the country’s energy grid.
More on the issue in: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/5/28/chinas-secret-weapon-in-ai-race-with-us-lots-of-cheap-energy

However, China currently faces technology import restrictions from the US, with Washington citing national security concerns; China, though, sees the US’s actions as an attempt to restrict its efforts on AI. In the already mentioned US Department of Commerce restrictions (May 2026) on shipments of critical semiconductors to subsidiaries of Chinese companies that are headquartered, or have a parent company in China. Beijing has retaliated by barring exports of dual-use technology and critical minerals to US firms.
Both states have so far struggled to match AI regulation with their rapid growth: e.g. concerns over AI’s use in areas such as military sectors are prompting some of the most intense governance debates.
More on China-US controversies in: https://www.integrin.dk/2026/07/24/eu-china-digital-controversies-book-review/