What Xi proposed
Chinese President Xi Jinping told the BRICS summit in New Delhi that China would lead the creation of a BRICS community for open-source artificial intelligence, Bloomberg reported. The initiative would “support the cooperation in developing and applying large language models”, and China would hold AI seminars and training courses for members of the bloc of major emerging economies.
The AI community was the first item in a five-point plan, according to the Press Trust of India. The other four were a BRICS special economic zone partnership; a BRICS digital ecosystem cloud platform, with digital skills training; help for member countries to build smart factories and develop standards; and a BRICS engineer cultivation alliance with mutual recognition of competency standards.
The day before, Xi had invited BRICS countries to join the World AI Cooperation Organization, a Beijing-led body of nearly 30 countries, Bloomberg reported.
The declaration did not sign up
The bloc’s joint declaration, issued on Saturday, did not endorse Xi’s proposal. It called instead for “international cooperation in enhancing accessibility of AI resources while ensuring its safety, security, inclusiveness and reliability”, according to Bloomberg.
That is language every member can accept, and it commits no one to a Chinese-led structure. Bloomberg reported that it remained unclear whether India, the summit’s host, or the United Arab Emirates supported Xi’s pitch.
Open source as strategy
The proposal fits a pattern. The leading American developers, including OpenAI and Anthropic, keep their most capable models closed, and Beijing has promoted open Chinese models as lower-cost alternatives to US technology, Bloomberg noted. China’s State Security Minister Chen Yixin has argued that blacklists, closed-source systems and technology restrictions imposed by some countries are fragmenting global AI supply chains, Investing.com reported.
China’s own openness has limits. Restricting access to the most powerful capabilities of AI models remains official policy, according to Bloomberg, which means a Beijing-led open-source community would not necessarily extend to China’s best systems.
Why the summit matters to Beijing
Xi has sought to turn the annual BRICS summit into another platform for China’s vision of artificial intelligence as it competes with the United States for global influence over the technology, Bloomberg reported. Seminars, training courses and shared cloud platforms are modest commitments on their own. Their value to Beijing is in making Chinese models and Chinese standards the default starting point for governments that are building AI capacity now.
What to watch
Three things will show whether the proposal becomes more than a speech. The first is whether any BRICS government signs up to the open-source community by name. The second is whether China attaches models, computing capacity or money to it, rather than seminars and training alone. The third is the membership of the World AI Cooperation Organization: a Beijing-led body of nearly 30 countries would gain weight quickly if India or the UAE joined.
