On July 16, 2026, 29 countries formally signed an agreement in Shanghai to establish the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, known as WAICO. The founding members include Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, Belarus, Cuba, Venezuela, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Senegal, and a number of African and Southeast Asian states. Not one Western democracy signed on.
The organization has been in the works since July 2025, when China's Premier first floated the idea at the same annual conference. Xi Jinping himself reiterated the proposal at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in October 2025. The speed from proposal to signed treaty, just 12 months, signals how seriously Beijing prioritized this.
The membership list tells you exactly what this is. Six of the 29 founding countries are full BRICS members, and another five are BRICS partner nations. This is not a random collection of countries. It is a coordinated grouping of nations that have felt shut out of Western-led technology forums like the OECD and G7 AI processes, which China itself does not participate in.
Beijing's pitch to these countries is practical, not just political. China offers open-source AI models, such as DeepSeek, that are widely seen as more affordable than US alternatives. It offers training: Xi announced 5,000 AI training opportunities for developing countries over five years. It also offered 30 countries access to a Chinese-built AI weather forecasting tool. These are real benefits that Western AI governance bodies have not matched.
The governance split this creates is the part that matters for business operators. Countries inside WAICO will write AI rules that do not need to align with the EU's AI Act, the OECD's AI Principles, or the G7's Hiroshima Process guidelines. For any company operating in multiple countries, this means two separate compliance tracks could soon emerge, one for Western-aligned markets, one for WAICO-aligned markets.
The founding agreement does not yet spell out voting rules, budgets, enforcement powers, or accession requirements. Those gaps matter: they determine whether WAICO becomes a real regulatory body or stays a diplomatic talking shop. But the institutional address exists now, and international organizations, once created, tend to persist and accumulate power.
The UN Secretary-General attended the signing ceremony. He did not join WAICO, but his presence gave the occasion a layer of legitimacy that Beijing wanted. Analysts expect China to use WAICO's bloc of member votes to shape how AI policy is framed inside the United Nations itself.
Xi's speech the following day made the geopolitical intent explicit without naming anyone directly. He said AI should not be dominated by any single nation, and called for countries to oppose the overuse of national security arguments in AI policy, a direct reference to US export controls that block China from accessing advanced chips. Washington has been tightening those controls since 2019.
For business operators, the immediate question is: which of your markets, suppliers, or partners sit inside WAICO's orbit? Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, South Africa, Kazakhstan, and Senegal are all founding members. These are not small or marginal economies. If you source from, sell to, or operate in any of them, the AI rules they adopt going forward may look quite different from what the EU or US require.