Beijing (CNN) — As US President Donald Trump accused Beijing of exploiting US election data in a televised speech in Washington, halfway across the world in China, Xi Jinping was delivering a very different message.
Beijing is a responsible global leader bent on shaping the future of technology for good, Xi intoned to hundreds of tech executives, researchers and industry figures gathering in Shanghai Friday for the opening of China’s flagship artificial intelligence summit.
“With AI advancing at a staggering speed, we must ensure its development is for positive, for good, and for humanity,” Xi said in an opening address to the conference. “We must make its oversight and governance precise and effective and constantly refine measures to forestall loss of control.”
Xi spoke minutes after Trump laid out a litany of claims against the Chinese government, including that it had illicitly acquired 220 million American voter files amid broader efforts to influence US elections. China has denied the allegations.
The juxtaposition of the two messages illuminates the deepening faultlines and anxieties within the technological competition between the US and China, which the rapid rise of AI is only deepening.
Xi’s message – a clear bid for China to helm the setting of global rules around AI – comes at a moment of fierce US-China competition over the technology, as well as intense concern about its national security implications, including AI’s ability to exploit software and database vulnerabilities.
In his address, Xi hit back against “overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI” or “placing one country’s security over that of others” – veiled allusions to how Beijing sees the American approach to the technology.
Instead, China has looked to push forward a message that the technology should be a “global public good” – and that it is willing to work with countries to develop it together.
On the eve of the conference, China launched its World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), a new grouping of 29 countries, including Russia, Indonesia and Pakistan, friendly to China and its aims.
“Xi sees AI as an opportunity to get more allies to compete with the US, not just in AI technology, but also in international relations – (this is) AI diplomacy,” said George Chen, the Hong Kong-based chair of digital practice at The Asia Group consultancy.
China feels it missed the chance to set the rules on the global development of the world wide web over recent decades, he added, but the arrival of AI finds it in a much stronger position.
“Thirty or forty years ago, China was a very poor country … but everybody knows today is different, and if AI is the new internet, China doesn’t want to miss the opportunity again.”
Heated race
US companies are widely seen to be racing to the frontier of the technology as their core strategy to win the competition. Their models still largely hold the lead in capabilities, as well as the hardware used to train and advance them.
But that gap is narrowing. And when it comes to winning the AI race, Beijing is banking on a different tack: applying and scaling up AI technology in robotics and automation – as well as large-scale adoption globally, experts say.
Chinese artificial intelligence firms like DeepSeek and Zhipu have made major leaps toward closing the performance gap with US firms.
An increasing number of users around the world are also opting for their models’ open-source format and lower operating costs relative to Silicon Valley’s offerings.
Chinese firms accounted for 20 of the daily top 50 AI models on OpenRouter in May, a platform which allows users to interact with a wide variety of models, up from only five at the start of 2025, according to an analysis by Our World In Data. Most others are American.
Washington in recent months alleged that Chinese entities were engaging in “deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI,” referring to a process by which a smaller model trains off a larger one to improve its own capabilities.
Earlier this month, a Chinese regulator warned it had identified a serious security “backdoor” risk in US firm Anthropic’s Claude Code tool. Anthropic said the so-called backdoor was an experimental mechanism to track abuse of its platform and that access to it was not allowed in China.
There are also deep-seated concerns in Washington that foreign actors could use powerful AI models to find and exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities in US critical infrastructure. The White House earlier this week launched an effort to address those.
Beijing is also exploring potentially restricting overseas access to China’s most advanced AI models, Reuters reported earlier this month, citing sources.
Both countries agreed to start an AI dialogue following a May summit between Trump and Xi in Beijing.
Norm-setter
The strengthening foothold of Chinese AI models globally may help China’s ambitions to lead the technology’s proliferation and regulation.
The conference in Shanghai shows both the extent and the limits of its reach, with limited involvement of American firms despite what state media called record attendance at this year’s event.
Attendees of the four-day Shanghai conference include UN Secretary General António Guterres, nine Nobel laureates and Turing computing prize awardees, as well as more than 1,000 global enterprises, organizers said.
This is the first time Xi has attended the flagship event since its launch in 2018, a clear signal of the importance Beijing attaches to AI and the mounting competition with the US to lead its future.
Western analysts have raised concerns that Beijing’s expanding role setting global norms around AI will enable it to export the norms of its own highly restrictive media and internet environment.
And there are questions around how much global interest Beijing can generate in its new WAICO international body.
No major Western country will likely sign on to a China-controlled organization that will likely have a broad mandate for both the promotion of AI and AI governance and safety, according to Paul Triolo, a partner at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group consultancy in Washington.
“For the US, the main action will be building a credible bilateral dialogue with Beijing around frontier AI model governance,” he said.
“Both sides must deal with complex bureaucratic challenges around the issue, and deep distrust on both sides.”
The-CNN-Wire
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