Twenty-nine countries just signed a different rulebook
Xavier Vallée, Founder, Sapionic
Something quietly significant happened in Shanghai this month.
Twenty-nine countries signed an agreement to create the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization. A new intergovernmental body, headquartered in China, with China’s foreign minister signing on behalf of Beijing and the UN Secretary-General in the room to lend it weight.
Look at who signed. Russia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Laos, Belarus, and a long list of nations across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Then look at who did not.
No United States. No United Kingdom. No Germany, France or Japan. The world’s largest AI powers, and the democracies that host them, stayed home.
This is not really a story about technology. It is a story about who gets to write the rules.
For three years, AI governance has been shaped largely from the West. The G7’s Hiroshima Process, the EU’s AI Act, a run of safety summits from Bletchley onward.
The unspoken assumption was that the rest of the world would eventually align to those norms. WAICO is the first serious institutional signal that a large part of the world has no intention of doing so.
Beijing’s framing is deliberate and, to its intended audience, persuasive. It speaks to a Global South that watched the AI race happen without them and was handed rules they had no part in writing. An organization that offers access, infrastructure and a seat at the table is an easy invitation to accept.
The Western reaction has been wary. French officials reportedly see it as an effort to undercut the Hiroshima Process and to normalize a more state-centric model of AI governance. That concern is real. But it also underlines the deeper shift. We are moving from a contest over who builds the best models to a contest over whose rulebook the world adopts.
Two frameworks. Two value systems. A widening set of countries choosing a side.
The 20th century split the world along ideological and economic lines. Will the 21st split it along algorithmic ones? If so, Shanghai just drew the first clear border.