SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: Xi Jinping just hijacked the rules of AI for the entire planet.

https://x.com/Ric_RTP/status/2078253414081851802

Ricardo

Xi Jinping just hijacked the rules of AI for the entire planet.

Today, Xi walked onto the stage at the World AI Conference in Shanghai. 

It was his FIRST time attending the event in person since it launched in 2018. Heads of state do not fly in personally for a product expo.

The day before he spoke, 29 governments signed a founding charter. 

It created a brand new international body called the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, with its permanent headquarters in Shanghai. China had spent a full year lining up the signatures.

UN Secretary General sat in the audience. So did the leaders of Kazakhstan, Cambodia, and Thailand, alongside representatives from more than 100 countries.

While the robots and the chips got the headlines, those 29 signatures were what really mattered.

Here's why:

Whoever writes the rules of a technology decides who gets to win with it. 

The US is leaning on export controls and voluntary safety pledges. Europe is enforcing its own AI Act. 

China just built the institution that wants to set the standards for everyone else, and it put the headquarters on its own soil.

And look at who signed...

The founding members include Russia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, and Laos. Together, the countries in this new bloc represent a population that dwarfs the entire G7. These are the nations that felt shut out of the AI order the West built, and Beijing just offered them a seat at a table it controls.

And Xi framed all of it as a gift to humanity. He pledged 5,000 AI training slots for developing countries. 

He called on the world to "encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing" and warned against any nation placing its own security above everyone else's, which is basically a shot at American chip controls.

It was a generous call for openness from the country that just created the rule-setting body and kept the headquarters for itself.

On the conference itself, more than 1,100 companies showed off over 3,000 products, including Huawei's Atlas 950, an 8,192-chip supercomputer built to go straight at Nvidia, and what China is billing as the world's first AI agent phone.

So while much of the West is still arguing about whether AI is a bubble, China spent this week doing something more lasting:

It started writing the rulebook, and got 29 countries to sign.

What happens to America's lead if the rest of the world ends up playing by China's rules?