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Greetings from above,
Why did the US miss the most important AI meeting of the year? It was busy banning Anthropic's models and had not yet decided who should be in charge of not doing that again.
I want to be straight with you right from the start. This newsletter is about geopolitics. Real, documented, happened-last-week geopolitics. Every fact below is sourced and verified. I am not adding drama to this story because I do not need to. The actual sequence of events is dramatic enough on its own.
Today we will talk about:
What WAICO actually is, when it was signed, and who signed it
The list of countries that showed up — and the much shorter list of the ones that did not
What Demis Hassabis said five days before the signing and why the timing matters so much
Let's get into it.
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What Happened On July 16 In Shanghai
On July 16, 2026, 29 countries signed the founding agreement for the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization in Shanghai, one day before the annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference opened its doors.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi signed the agreement on behalf of the Chinese government. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres attended the signing ceremony.
The organization is headquartered in Shanghai and is designed as an independent intergovernmental organization oriented toward development and the Global South.
Speaking at the conference for the first time in the summit's nine-year history, President Xi Jinping called WAICO "an important milestone in the history of AI development" and pledged to provide 5,000 AI training opportunities to developing nations.
So just to be clear about what this actually is. The world now has a permanent intergovernmental organization — the same structural category as the United Nations or the World Trade Organization — specifically for AI governance. It has a signed founding charter. It has a permanent headquarters. It has 29 member governments. And it is based in Shanghai.
This is not a conference. It is not a declaration. It is not a framework. It is an institution.
HOW THIS AFFECTS YOU WHETHER YOU FOLLOW GEOPOLITICS OR NOT:
The rules that govern how AI gets built, shared, and restricted globally are now being written in two incompatible places at once — and which framework wins will directly affect which models are available in which countries and on what terms
If you build products that use AI or sell to customers in countries that join WAICO, the compliance map for your business just got more complicated than it was a week ago
The fact that the world's biggest AI companies are all based in countries that did not join tells you something important about the gap between where AI is built and where it is being governed
The Guest List Tells You Almost Everything
Here is the part of this story that matters most and gets buried in most coverage.
The founding roster includes Russia, Belarus, Serbia, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Laos, along with roughly ten African and twelve Asian countries.
Notably absent are the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and many European Union countries, leaving WAICO's initial membership concentrated among countries that have generally maintained closer diplomatic or economic ties with China.
India, which holds the BRICS presidency this year, was not listed among the signatories. The world's most populous country is itself highly active in the AI field — in February 2026, New Delhi hosted the AI Impact Summit, the first major global forum of its kind held in a Global South country.
So the picture is more complicated than a simple US-versus-China split. India, the largest democracy in the world and a significant AI player, did not sign. Several BRICS members did not sign. The membership is real and substantial — 29 governments is not nothing — but it is also not universal even within the coalition China was trying to build.
Given the thinly veiled anti-Western edge, it is hardly surprising that no Western or strongly Western-aligned country showed up among the founding nations, nor are they expected to.
What Xi Said Out Loud — And What He Was Actually Saying
At the conference opening, Xi called on countries to embrace the "historic opportunity" provided by open-source AI. He said China has played a role in ensuring equitable access to AI capacity-building for developing countries to prevent the creation of "new historical injustices."
Xi called for joint efforts to build a just and equitable system for global AI governance, saying "All countries should take a people-centered approach and develop AI for the positive and for good."
That language sounds reasonable in isolation. But read it in context and the message is pretty specific. Xi warned that countries should "jointly oppose overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI or placing one country's security over that of others."
That is a direct reference to US export controls on AI chips and models. The kind of export controls that banned Fable 5 three days after it launched. The kind that have been restricting advanced AI hardware from reaching China for years. Xi is not making an abstract philosophical argument about fairness. He is making a geopolitical argument about who gets to use what tools and who decides.
China frames WAICO as a response to the Global South's needs, arguing that AI governance must prioritize development, capacity-building, and narrowing the digital divide rather than just safety and human rights concerns that dominate Western frameworks. This framing is designed to attract developing nations that feel excluded from US-led AI diplomacy.
That is actually a smart and coherent pitch. A lot of countries genuinely do feel excluded from the conversations happening in Brussels, Washington and the G7. WAICO gives them a seat at a table — even if that table is in Shanghai.
⚙️ Here Is The Full Breakdown Of Everything You Need To Know
How this actually started — it was not improvised
WAICO was not invented at this conference. Premier Li Qiang proposed the organization at WAIC 2025, and China spent a year securing commitments. What changed on July 16 was that the proposal became a signed institution. China put in a full year of diplomatic groundwork before anyone signed anything. This was deliberate and organised from the start.
What WAICO is actually designed to do
Its stated goals are to promote international cooperation and develop AI regulation across countries that ensure the technology is beneficial and safe for humans. The open-membership clause means any country could theoretically sign later. The US, EU, and G7 members view WAICO as a Chinese-led vehicle for setting AI standards that may conflict with their own regulatory models and security interests. The key uncertainty is whether middle-power allies like South Korea, Singapore, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia might eventually join, which would significantly boost WAICO's legitimacy.
The Huawei hardware announcement that landed the same week
On the exhibition floor at WAIC, Huawei demonstrated its Atlas 950 SuperPoD, claiming 6.7 times the compute of Nvidia's NVL144. That claim has not been independently verified. But the timing of it — demonstrated at the same event where China launched a new AI governance body — is not accidental. China is trying to show it has both the institutional architecture and the hardware to run a parallel AI system independent of US technology.
What Demis Hassabis said five days before the signing
The signing ceremony to create WAICO came just days after Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, called on the US to take a lead in global AI regulation, calling for a new Standards Body modelled on a federally overseen public-private partnership. His comments came after sources told CNBC that Hassabis, alongside Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, called for a US-led coalition to shape rules and standards around AI at a G7 meeting with tech leaders and heads of state that included President Donald Trump.
Hassabis is calling for a US-led AI watchdog with the power to screen the world's most advanced models and coordinate an industry-wide slowdown if dangers mount.
So the sequence goes like this. On July 11, the CEOs of Google DeepMind and Anthropic are in a room with Trump asking for a US-led AI governance body. On July 16, China signs 29 nations into a governance body that already exists, is already headquartered in Shanghai, and already has a permanent structure. The US is still debating whether to build something. China already built it.
The two governance orders that now exist simultaneously
For any enterprise deploying AI across multiple jurisdictions, the compliance map changed this week. The world now has two competing institutional frameworks for AI governance — one anchored in Brussels, Washington and the G7, and another being assembled in Shanghai. Neither side has made joining the other a condition of technological access. The question of which framework shapes AI norms for the majority of the world's countries — most of whom have not joined either — opened in earnest.
What this means for AI models and access going forward
WAICO's emergence as an alternative governance architecture makes coordinated containment harder, not easier, to achieve. China will likely use WAICO to expand and consolidate its network of AI cooperation centers, including the China-BRICS AI Development and Cooperation Centre headquartered in Shanghai.
The practical implication for anyone building AI products is that the regulatory environment you are building into is no longer moving in one direction. It is moving in two directions simultaneously and the gap between those directions is widening.
The Bank of England weighed in and that is not something you see every day
Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey called for international cooperation on frontier AI, warning that the US cannot achieve its security aims alone. When a central bank governor is commenting on AI governance at a Shanghai conference, you know this has moved well past being a technology story.
WAICO FULL BREAKDOWN — SUMMARY
WAICO was first proposed in China in July 2025, reiterated at APEC in October 2025, and formally signed by 29 countries on July 16, 2026 — which means China spent a full year building this before it became an institution, and the West spent that same year not building a competing one
No major Western democracy joined as a founding member — not the US, not the UK, not the EU, not Japan, not Canada — and the founding roster leans heavily toward countries in China's existing diplomatic and trade networks, though India notably also stayed out despite being a significant AI player
The timing relative to Hassabis's call for a US-led AI watchdog is the single most important detail in this entire story — China launched an institution five days after the West's most prominent AI executives were still asking their government to consider building one
WRAP UP
What you learned today:
WAICO is a real, signed, permanently headquartered intergovernmental organization for AI governance — 29 founding member governments, UN Secretary-General in the room, Chinese Foreign Minister signing on behalf of Beijing, launched July 16 in Shanghai. This is not a proposal or a framework. It is already an institution.
Demis Hassabis and Dario Amodei were calling for a US-led AI governance body at a G7 meeting with Trump on July 11 — five days before China signed 29 nations into an institution that already had a headquarters, a charter, and a year of diplomatic groundwork behind it. The contrast in readiness is the story.
The world now has two competing institutional frameworks for AI governance — and which one ends up shaping norms for the majority of the world's countries will depend almost entirely on what happens in the next twelve to eighteen months, before positions harden and the fence-sitting nations have to decide which system they are building their AI infrastructure around
The US has the most powerful AI models on earth. It also has no permanent international institution for AI governance. China has a governance institution signed and headquartered and operational. The models it produces are getting closer to the US frontier every month.
You do not have to pick a side on this. But you do have to understand which world you are building your business in. Because the answer to that question just got more complicated than it was last week.
And as always, thanks for being a part of my lovely community,
Keep learning,
🔑 Robert from God of Prompt
