Online Reporter
President Xi Jinping used the rise of China’s artificial intelligence (AI) models to stake his claim on shaping the technology’s global rules, even as their growing power stirs security alarms in Washington and Beijing alike.
Emphasising safety and equality, President Xi made a sweeping call for international cooperation in his debut at the World AI Conference in Shanghai on Friday, an event that previously attracted Elon Musk and Jack Ma.
He addressed scores of tech and government leaders as Chinese models win over companies worldwide, with their share of United States firms’ AI usage nearing a record 60 percent on the popular marketplace OpenRouter.
“We must carry out extensive international cooperation and help Global South countries in capacity building to bridge the AI and digital divides,” he said, calling for efforts to avoid creating “historical injustice in AI.”
His remarks echoed a drumbeat of state media articles framing China’s openness as the antidote to a world of walls. The Communist Party’s flagship mouthpiece, People’s Daily, earlier last week warned against an “AI Iron Curtain,” contrasting an “oil mindset” that hoards data and computing power with a “water” approach that treats AI as a public good for all, without naming any country.
Beijing is now looking to jostle with the US — the leading AI power — for influence through a new group of nearly 30 countries called the World AI Cooperation Organisation.
President Xi used his keynote to champion the bloc, proposed last year and established on Thursday, pledging to align global AI rules and technical standards “to make this frontier technology better benefit humanity.” The organisation would hand China a platform to sway global rule — and standard-setting for AI, an ambition researchers at home have been candid about.
“China is not only the world’s largest open-source application market but also a major source of contributions; however, its voice in international rule-making does not yet match its strength,” said Gu Lingyu, an AI researcher at Peking University.
“By effectively telling the story of China’s open-source practices, we can enhance our capacity to shape global open-source governance,” Gu said at a roundtable published by an official journal of the Supreme People’s Court.
Behind the public-good rhetoric, however, Beijing faces the same dilemma as Washington: how to square mass adoption with national security as models grow more capable.
Chinese officials recently discussed with companies including Alibaba Group Holding — developer of the popular Qwen models — how to mitigate the security risks posed by their increasingly powerful models, people familiar with the matter said. The talks are early, with no enforcement planned, but restricting foreign access to top models was among the options raised, the people said. Reuters previously reported that Beijing was weighing curbs on overseas access. Alibaba and the Commerce Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
In his speech, President Xi highlighted the need to contain safety risks posed by the rapidly advancing technology, while warning against overstretching the concept of national security.
That caution mirrors Washington’s. The US briefly barred foreign access to Anthropic PBC’s Mythos and Fable models last month on national security grounds, as systems of that class can exploit well-hidden software flaws, at times without human supervision. —Bloomberg
