29 Countries Sign Founding Agreement for the World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO), Headquartered in Shanghai

My take: The World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO) is now real: 29 countries signed its founding agreement today in Shanghai, at the opening of the largest AI event China has ever hosted. This makes WAICO the first intergovernmental organization dedicated to AI governance headquartered outside the Western world.

What matters here is that WAICO is not a discussion forum: it is a membership organization with a permanent seat and, by design, no values test or regime-type requirement for entry. That explains who signed on: Russia, Brazil, Pakistan, Indonesia, Cuba, Venezuela, Belarus, Serbia, Kazakhstan, and Laos, among others. The message is direct: China is building its own global AI governance system, running parallel to the one led by the West.

For any company or creator working with AI tools, this fragmentation has practical consequences: the rules about what you can do with models, how they are audited, and what data they can use will increasingly depend on which governance framework your market falls under.

Is your organization already tracking both AI governance systems: the one the West is building and the one China is constructing?