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WAICO adds nine members in a month as Washington drafts a letter telling 35 countries to pick one
China's AI grouping went from 29 signatories to 38 while the State Department prepared a warning against "duplicative initiatives". Stack choices are becoming jurisdictional.
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What happened
- China's World AI Cooperation Organisation has added nine members in the month since it was founded, taking it from 29 signatories to 38, according to the South China Morning Post.
- The State Department had drafted a letter to the 35 signatories of its AI Opportunity Statement warning them off "duplicative initiatives", with the line "to be part of everything is to be part of nothing".
- WAICO was signed into existence in Shanghai on 16 July by 29 countries, a year after Premier Li Qiang first proposed it at the World AI Conference.
- Nine additions from a base of 29 signatories is approximately 31 percent growth in one month.
- Xi Jinping used the accompanying summit to argue that no single country should monopolise the technology, calling AI development "a symphony of international cooperation" rather than "a solo performance by a single country".
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Why it matters
China's World AI Cooperation Organisation has gone from 29 signatories to 38 in the month since it was founded, according to the South China Morning Post [1]. In the same window the US State Department drafted a letter to the 35 signatories of its AI Opportunity Statement warning them off "duplicative initiatives", with the line "to be part of everything is to be part of nothing" [2]. The practical effect, if that letter is ever sent, is that picking a model family or a cloud region stops being an engineering call and becomes a compliance one.
WAICO was signed into existence in Shanghai on 16 July by 29 countries, a year after Premier Li Qiang first proposed it at the World AI Conference [3]. Nine additions in a month is 31 percent growth off that base [4]. Xi Jinping used the accompanying summit to argue that no single country should monopolise the technology, calling AI development "a symphony of international cooperation" rather than "a solo performance by a single country" [5].
The doctrine is now written down. China's Position Paper on Global Cyber Governance in the Digital Intelligent Age, released on 23 July, is organised around "respecting digital sovereignty and promoting development for all" [6], and says countries "should respect each other's digital sovereignty" and have the right to independently choose their own technology development paths [7]. It went to the first meeting of the UN Global Mechanism on information and communications technologies in international security, held in New York from 20 to 24 July [8]. The language itself is not new: the Global AI Governance Initiative, launched at the Belt and Road Forum in October 2023, already asked states to "respect other countries' national sovereignty" when supplying AI products and services abroad [9]. What is new is an institution behind the phrase, with a secretariat in Shanghai [10].
Two caveats travel with the American draft and are easy to lose. It is undated and, as of last week, unsent, and it names neither China nor WAICO anywhere in the text [11]. Pax Silica, the grouping the letter is meant to protect, launched in December 2025 with seven founders: the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia and Israel [12]. Its declaration now carries 25 signatories [13], against WAICO's 38 [1], and the two lists are not mutually exclusive, which is the overlap the draft exists to end [14].
Distribution numbers matter more here than membership counts. Alibaba's Qwen family passed three billion downloads in six months with more than 300,000 derivative models [15], against 418 million for Google's Gemma and 227 million for Meta's Llama across 2026, per Hugging Face [16]. Measured over those different windows, Qwen is running at roughly 4.6 times the two American open families combined [17]. Open weights are hard for export controls to reach, which is part of why the argument has moved to who is permitted to sign what. Li Yong of the China Society for WTO Studies told Global Times that "Washington wants a divided AI world by drawing a digital curtain to split the global market in two" [18].
One Chinese figure should carry a warning label: a commitment of 5,000 AI training places for developing countries, reported by state media and not independently confirmed [19].
Watch three things. Whether the State Department letter is sent at all, given that it remains undated and unsent [11]. Whether any government currently on both lists actually withdraws from one [14]. And whether the neutral venue established in August 2025, an independent UN scientific panel on AI plus a global dialogue that first met in Geneva in July, attracts governments that would rather not choose [20].