China's AI Diplomacy Targets the Global South—and the West's Closed Model

At the World AI Conference in Shanghai, President Xi Jinping delivered what hosts Alice Hann and James King describe as a rare and consequential speech outlining China's vision for artificial intelligence. Xi stressed open-source AI models, multilateral governance, and capacity-building for developing countries—a strategy the hosts interpret as China's bid to position itself as the leader of an alternative, non-American AI ecosystem. The speech, King says, "says a lot about China's AI strategy," and he sent it to friends in Silicon Valley because "in closed systems it really pays to go to the source of what the leadership is thinking."

The Open Source Strategy as Geopolitical Play

The core insight from Xi's speech, according to Hann and King, is that China is deliberately building the opposite of the American AI model. Where US frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic run closed, expensive systems, China offers open-weight models that cost roughly one-tenth the price per million output tokens and can be downloaded, fine-tuned, and deployed by anyone. This price and accessibility gap matters enormously for the global south—roughly 130 countries that may be priced out of American AI entirely.