# Xi Demands No AI Monopoly While China Builds Its Own > Source: > Published: 2026-07-17 11:37:45+00:00 Chinese President Xi Jinping stood in Shanghai on Friday and told the world no single country should monopolize artificial intelligence—then spent the rest of the day building a China-led monopoly of 29 nations to do exactly that. The stake for ordinary Americans is simple: Beijing wants to strip the United States of its hard-won technological edge and hand the rulebook for the next century's most powerful technology to a club of authoritarian states. Xi's pitch to the developing world is that Washington is hoarding AI. The truth is China is racing to catch up and wants to tie America's hands before it finishes the job. Xi told the World Artificial Intelligence Conference that AI "should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation," according to the official Xinhua readout. He warned against "overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI or placing one country's security over that of others"—a direct swipe at American export controls that have blocked Chinese access to the most advanced chips for two years. What Xi left out speaks louder than what he said. China is the world's worst serial intellectual property thief, having built entire industries on stolen Western know-how. Now that Beijing has narrowed the AI gap with American labs faster than Washington expected, according to TNW, Xi shows up in person—the first Chinese president to address the summit—to argue from something close to parity that nobody should be allowed to pull ahead. The cooperation pitch came with hardware. A day before Xi's speech, foreign minister Wang Yi and representatives from 29 countries—including Russia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, and Laos—signed an agreement establishing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, headquartered in Shanghai. Breitbart reported the body aims to promote "consultation and collaboration" for the "healthy and orderly" development of AI. Benzinga noted Xi pledged 5,000 AI research projects, training programs, and "cooperation centers" for developing countries over the next five years—an offer that undercuts the G7's more guarded posture and buys influence across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the BRICS bloc. UN Secretary-General António Guterres attended the launch, lending multilateral cover to what is functionally a Chinese infrastructure project. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, relying on AP, framed the speech as a call for global effort and buried the strategic rivalry. Reuters kept its report even thinner, noting Xi's "people-centred" language and equity pitch without mentioning the 29-nation bloc or the Moonshot AI model launch that coincided with the summit. Meanwhile, the conference floor told the real story. Huawei unveiled its Atlas 950 SuperPoD, a computing cluster built to run without Nvidia's top chips—a direct answer to U.S. export controls. Beijing-based startup Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, which Benzinga described as the world's largest open-source AI model, reportedly rivaling top American offerings. Major U.S. technology firms were largely absent from the halls. China has also been weighing its own curbs on who abroad can access its leading models, a detail TNW reported and most outlets skipped. So the "symphony" Xi envisions has one conductor—and it sits in Beijing. Xi called for laws and regulations to keep AI "always under human control" and warned that leaving poorer nations behind risked hardening the technology gap into "new historical injustices." The question no one at the summit answered: who writes those laws, and whose hands are on the controls when the music stops?