Xi Jinping is General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and President of the People's Republic of China. His statements set the authoritative frame for Chinese AI policy, and his July 2026 keynote at the World AI Conference is the primary text most frequently cited for China's positions on open-weight models, export controls, and international AI governance.
Positions and statements
World AI Conference keynote, July 17, 2026. Xi delivered the opening address at the 2026 World AI Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in Shanghai, the first such address by a Chinese head of state at the event (Joining Hands to Build a Just and Equitable System For Global AI Governance (Xi Jinping, WAIC keynote, July 2026)). It sets out four principles:
- Openness. AI "is moving from the digital world into the physical world," and states should "seize this rare, historic opportunity to encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing."
- Security and controllability. States should build laws, regulations, technological monitoring, and early-warning and emergency-response systems to "ensure that AI is always under human control" — while jointly opposing "overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI and placing one country's security over that of others."
- Civilizational inclusiveness. AI "should not erode or undermine the diversity of world civilizations," and its values should be shaped by "humanity's common values."
- Multilateralism. "True multilateralism" recognizing "the important role of the United Nations," with alignment on development strategies, governance rules, and technical standards toward "a consensus-based global governance framework."
The address confirmed that WAICO had "come into being in Shanghai" and announced 5,000 AI training opportunities for developing countries over five years, regional AI application cooperation centers with ASEAN, the League of Arab States, the African Union, CELAC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and BRICS, and access for 30 countries to the MAZU meteorological warning system.
Global AI Governance Initiative. Xi proposed the initiative that China cites as the origin of its subsequent AI diplomacy, including the UN General Assembly resolution on international cooperation for AI capacity building, the AI Capacity Building Action Plan for Good and for All, the AI Plus International Cooperation Initiative, and the WAICO proposal.
Defense applications. At a Politburo study session on the afternoon of July 30, 2026, Xi called for expanded defense applications of autonomous and artificial-intelligence technologies, according to Xinhua. The source's body was behind a paywall with only the lede retrievable, so the session's specific directives are not recorded here (Source: bloomberg.com). See Autonomous Weapons and US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics.
BRICS summit, September 13, 2026. In a statement released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the BRICS summit in New Delhi, Xi said China will pioneer the establishment of a BRICS AI open-source community, support cooperation on developing and applying large language models, and hold AI seminars and training courses. He also proposed a BRICS digital ecosystem cloud platform, an engineer cultivation alliance, and a youth exchange programme for scientific and technological innovation (Xi Jinping, statement at Session II of the 18th BRICS Summit (New Delhi, September 2026); Source: cnbc.com). The statement carries a second, separate AI passage in its global-governance section, calling on Global South countries to "develop AI for the positive and for good, and work faster to evolve a consensus-based global AI governance framework." The open-source commitment names no funding, institution, timetable or compute, and the statement is a Chinese national statement at Session II rather than an agreed BRICS instrument.
The proposals extend the openness and capacity-building principles of the July keynote to a specific bloc, and follow the WAIC announcement of regional cooperation centres that already named BRICS among their partners. Xi did not address the frontier-safety debate then under way in the United States, where Dario Amodei's pacing essay had appeared the previous day; China's response to that came the following day from a foreign ministry spokesperson and from state media rather than from Xi.
Nuclear weapons decisions. In November 2024 Xi and then-President Joe Biden endorsed the principle that humans should retain control over decisions to use nuclear weapons. Participants in the Brookings–Tsinghua Track II dialogue proposed in September 2026 extending that principle to AI-enabled cyberattacks on nuclear command systems, ahead of Xi's September 24, 2026 summit with Donald Trump in Washington (Advancing human control of military AI (Sisson and Jiang, Brookings, September 2026); Source: reuters.com). In a letter dated September 16, 2026 to Alibaba's leadership, Rep. Ro Khanna called for leaders to negotiate "an enforceable U.S.-PRC AI Treaty" including verifiable frontier-pacing standards, and wrote that the discussions "should commence at the meeting between President Trump and General Secretary Xi next week" (Khanna letter to Alibaba on pacing the frontier (September 16, 2026)). See US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics.
White House talks with Trump, September 24, 2026. During his state visit to the United States, Xi held talks with Donald Trump at the White House on the morning of September 24. China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs readout, published September 25, records Xi as saying that the two countries "may have competition, but they may cooperate even more," that "the right thing to do is to draw on each other's strengths, not guard against each other," and that they "can continue their dialogue on AI, exchange views on its risks and benefits, and jointly prevent the misuse and abuse of AI. AI must be kept under human control." The same paragraph calls for "a people-centered approach" and AI "developed for the positive and for good." The readout attributes to Trump the statements that "AI concerns the future of humanity" and that the two countries "should maintain dialogue and strengthen cooperation on AI." It reports a new economic and trade "joint arrangement," records Xi's position on Taiwan, and describes no specific AI agreement or incident-notification mechanism (Chinese MFA readout: President Xi Jinping Holds Talks with U.S. President Donald J. Trump (September 24, 2026); Source: fmprc.gov.cn). The "under human control" and "for the positive and for good" formulations repeat his July keynote and September BRICS statement. See US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics.
Reception and interpretation
Ben Thompson reads the open-source language as strategic rather than ideological — "The strategy for China is obvious: commoditize your complements" — emphasizing Xi's explicit link to the physical world, where China's lead in robotics benefits from widely available models (Who's Afraid of Chinese Models? (Ben Thompson, Stratechery, July 2026)). The same speech's objection to "overstretching the national security concept" is read in Western policy commentary as directed at US export controls. See Export Controls (AI), Open-Weight Frontier Models.
Relationships
- supports: Joining Hands to Build a Just and Equitable System For Global AI Governance (Xi Jinping, WAIC keynote, July 2026) — author of the keynote
- related: Chinese MFA readout: President Xi Jinping Holds Talks with U.S. President Donald J. Trump (September 24, 2026) — Chinese readout of his September 24, 2026 talks with Trump
- related: Chinese AI Policy — sets the authoritative frame
- related: World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics, Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC)