On Friday, China’s top leader outlined the country’s strategy to influence artificial intelligence, positioning China as a proponent of openness and a partner to developing nations in AI advancement.
Xi Jinping’s address underscored the pivotal role AI plays in China’s political agenda. While he did not name the United States, the implication was evident: Beijing intends to rival the United States as a leading AI superpower.
Addressing an AI conference in Shanghai, Xi emphasized that AI development must be a collaborative global symphony rather than a solitary national performance.
He framed open‑source AI — where software can be freely shared and modified — as a unique, historic chance to disseminate AI benefits worldwide. He warned that withholding it from developing nations could create new forms of injustice.
Xi’s strategy also serves China’s self‑interest. Although the nation is often viewed as lagging behind the United States in AI, it is rapidly closing the gap, especially through open‑source initiatives from domestic firms such as DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Zhipu.
These Chinese AI systems are narrowing the performance gap with leading U.S. models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini.
On Friday, Moonshot unveiled a new model — Kimi K3 — that it asserted matched the capabilities of top American counterparts from Anthropic and OpenAI, sparking turbulence in financial markets.
U.S. firms, having invested billions in frontier AI models, are reluctant to share their technology openly and accuse Chinese entities of intellectual property theft. Meanwhile, China still trails in cutting‑edge AI chips, a domain dominated by Nvidia.
Xi’s remarks, delivered at the opening of the Shanghai AI conference, coincided with China’s efforts to promote its World AI Cooperation Organization — established a year earlier to amplify the voice of developing nations in AI governance.
He announced plans to provide AI technology and training to friendly developing countries, stressing the need for openness and mutually beneficial cooperation.
China’s global outreach aims to bolster its domestic AI ambitions. Xi has urged the nation to seize the “commanding heights” of technological leadership, with AI at the core.
However, the accelerating evolution of AI presents a dilemma for the Communist Party. How should it navigate a technology that could become so disruptive as to jeopardize its core interests and control over power?
Regulation of AI in China has fluctuated in intensity, reflecting the nation’s assessments of its strengths and weaknesses.
In 2022, when Beijing feared falling behind the United States after ChatGPT’s emergence, it adopted a more permissive stance, inadvertently fostering the growth of ventures such as DeepSeek.
Simultaneously, researchers have documented Chinese government attempts to monitor and influence public opinion in Hong Kong and Taiwan through AI‑savvy firms.
The Philippines on Friday condemned as racist an AI‑generated video posted by a Chinese state‑run news outlet that portrayed the country as a karaoke‑singing monkey taking orders from the United States and Japan.
