"Xi Jinping has encouraged open source without conditions," the reporting of the Shanghai founding event said, a line that both announced an aspiration and left a question hanging: how open will China’s open models actually be?
WAICO’s founding in Shanghai on 16 July
On 16 July the UN secretary-general attended as 29 countries in Shanghai signed the founding agreement of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), which will be headquartered in the city. The founding documents offer little detail; the delivery list does. WAICO arrives with a political sponsor, a headquarters, and a membership pledge that — together — create an institutional vehicle for carrying Chinese AI abroad.
The largest collection of open-weight AI models, and the labs that produce them
What China brought to the Shanghai meeting was described as "the largest collection of open-weight AI models in the world." Those models are the product of rapidly iterating Chinese labs named in the record: DeepSeek, Alibaba, Zhipu, MiniMax and Moonshot. The reporting highlights two tendencies driving these models: pace — models from those labs ship into the open every few months, with each generation folding in prior learnings — and diffusion — their weights are already embedded in the infrastructure of other countries.
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See what we buildHow Chinese open weights are seeding foreign models: Rakuten AI 3.0, Abeja, and Sea-Lion
The source provides concrete examples of that diffusion. Rakuten AI 3.0, launched in March as Japan’s largest model and funded in part by Geniac (the government’s national AI programme), was found in configuration files to be built on DeepSeek V3. Another Geniac-funded model, created by the lab Abeja, is built on Alibaba’s Qwen. Singapore’s flagship model, Sea-Lion, is also built on Qwen. These instances show countries without indigenous frontier-model labs building on Chinese open-weight foundations.
Policy signals: Xi’s speech, the NDRC action plan, and Xinhua’s delivery list
Xi Jinping’s keynote at WAICO cast China as a provider of "international public goods in AI" and explicitly encouraged "open source" and "openness." The National Development and Reform Commission issued an action plan the same day with eight priority areas; its third priority is "open-source ecosystem sharing," which includes joint development of open-source compliance systems and security norms and a promise to support localised innovation abroad built on open models. The conference chair’s statement called for "open and inclusive international open-source communities" while also attaching three conditions: ecosystems should be built responsibly, with respect for corporate autonomy and on the premise that intellectual property is protected. State media Xinhua spelled out a delivery sequence that places capacity building for developing countries first, followed by a platform to match countries that have AI technology with countries that want it, and encouragement of jointly built open-source ecosystems.
Standards and guardrails: the cybersecurity standards committee and a national standard
At the governance end, an AI safety governance framework issued in September 2025 by China’s national cybersecurity standards committee urges open-source model providers and communities to refine their release rules and to spell out prohibited uses of downloaded models. A national standard on open-source model security is now in preparation and, according to the reporting, will cover stages including development, release, re-release, community operation and deployment. Those drafting efforts make clear that treating openness as strategy requires choices about permit and restrict — and that Beijing is already engaged in that choice exercise.
What this means for technologists, policymakers, and developing countries
- Technologists and security teams: the national framework from September 2025 explicitly urges providers and communities to refine release rules and list prohibited uses of downloaded models — concrete steps technical teams will need to follow if they work with these models.
- Policymakers and regulators: the NDRC action plan’s emphasis on open-source ecosystem sharing, plus WAICO’s matching platform and cooperation centres, creates levers for supporting localised innovation built on Chinese weights and for setting the conditions under which that innovation proceeds.
- Developing countries and national model-builders: WAICO’s delivery list prioritises capacity building — 5,000 training places over five years and cooperation centres aimed at ASEAN, the Arab League, the African Union, Latin America, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS — and offers a mechanism to receive both training and technology that is already being packaged for export without an export licence.
On paper WAICO has no open-source mandate. In practice, the reporting shows China has both the models and an organisation to carry them abroad. Under "US export controls and company-blacklisting measures designed to slow China down," the open-weight route has already functioned as a bypass: it generates domestic innovation, lets Chinese models travel without an export licence, and supplies a foundation on which other countries are building. China’s open models grew out of commercial choices. They now have a government minding them and an organisation to carry them abroad. That sponsorship could make them more stable or more conditional, and it is too early to say which.
