China Launches WAICO In Shanghai As West Sits Out AI Governance

The creation of a "Chinese track" for AI governance has intentionally omitted Western-aligned countries.

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I’ve been following the formation, fragmentation, and sometimes complete reinvention of technology standards organizations for over four decades. Typically, these organizations are created slowly, through working papers and memoranda of understanding that only become public months or even years after they’re drafted, by which point few people outside of trade journalism even notice what’s happened. This week’s announcement in Shanghai at the World AI Conference, represents an exception to that rule. It was sudden, public and completely devoid of any representatives from any Western democracy.

China’s AI Governance Strategy

Twenty-nine countries agreed to the foundational documents creating the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), to be headquartered in Shanghai. The idea emerged at last year’s World AI Conference, but no countries were willing to formally commit. Twelve months later, the balance of power had clearly shifted. Russia, Belarus, Serbia, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Pakistan, and at least twenty-two other nations signed the charter. Notably absent were the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and most of the countries leading frontier AI development.

This is not an accident of timing. It's a deliberate statement.

As I have said for years, AI governance would follow the same path that telecom standards, 5G infrastructure, semiconductor supply chains, and other tech sectors followed—a Western track and a Chinese track, with all the different rules, preferred vendors and geopolitics associated with each.

The creation of WAICO represents the institutional framework for the Chinese track. Xi Jinping’s description of AI development as a symphony, rather than a solo performance, sounds suspiciously like soft-power language, recasting Beijing as the inclusive convenor of countries that Western institutions have often neglected. Committing to invest in thousands of projects in AI research and training initiatives in ASEAN, the African Union, the Arab League, and Latin America is exactly the sort of long-term capacity building that pays off in geopolitics decades down the road.

What Enterprise Executives Should Watch

What should enterprise technology executives take from this news? They should watch for standards to diverge. As WAICO develops its own rules for model safety, data governance, and cross-border AI deployment, multinational corporations will confront a familiar challenge from the era of data localization: how to operate under competing regimes on both sides, now applied to the AI stack itself, from data sourcing to model certification. This is not an immediate threat, but these shifts often move quietly until they suddenly become difficult to ignore.

The absence of the United States and Western Europe from the list of signatories is no minor omission; it is a gap in global governance, and gaps in global governance rarely remain open for long.