Building an Alternative Center: WAICO and China’s AI Rulemaking Strategy
- Iqbal Saputra
- 5 hours ago
- 5 min read
The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) should be understood not only as a neutral cooperation platform and more as China’s strategic hedge against Western‑dominated AI governance. By establishing a China‑centered intergovernmental organization with open membership, a focus on sovereignty, and a development‑first agenda, Beijing is seeking an alternative venue to set AI rules and norms on its own terms, rather than simply adapting to standards emerging from processes driven by the OECD, the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), and the European Union’s AI regulatory framework. WAICO thus represents a bid to reshape, rather than merely join, the evolving architecture of global AI governance.
Western initiatives over the last decade have steadily consolidated a liberal, risk‑ and rights‑centric approach to AI. The OECD AI Principles foreground human rights, transparency, and accountability as global baselines. GPAI builds on this by creating expert networks and working groups that translate these principles into concrete recommendations. The European Union, through the AI Act and related digital regulations, has positioned itself as the primary regulatory entrepreneur, exporting a “Brussels effect” in AI standards via market power and regulatory density. For states engaging these forums, the language of acceptable AI governance is largely pre‑scripted, any legitimate framework is expected to prioritize fundamental rights, democratic oversight, and safeguards against misuse, especially by states.
From Beijing's perspective, this landscape poses at least three problems. First, Western forums limit the vocabulary and priorities used to formulate AI governance, making it difficult to highlight development, industrial advancement, or state security without appearing biased. Second, these forums embed implicit political requirements, such as rights-based benchmarks, that can be read as criticism of China's domestic practices in surveillance, content control, and data governance. Third, these forums make China structurally dependent on institutions where it is a key player, but not an agenda-setter. Even active participation does not guarantee that the resulting norms will align with China's preferences for state sovereignty, regime stability, and technology-driven development.
WAICO directly addresses this dependency by creating what could be called an alternative center of gravity for AI rulemaking. As an intergovernmental organization headquartered in China and launched through Chinese diplomatic initiatives, WAICO allows Beijing to play the role of convener, rather than responder. The institutional form is crucial. Unlike the looser multi-stakeholder or expert networks that characterize Western initiatives, WAICO places sovereign states as the primary actors. This design reflects and legitimizes a state-centric vision of AI governance, in which governments retain broad discretion to determine how AI is implemented, regulated, and integrated into security or social management functions.
Open membership, at least in principle, allows China to attract a broad coalition of countries, particularly from the Global South, that may be skeptical of human rights-laden requirements or lack the capacity to engage deeply in Western regulatory processes. For these countries, WAICO can be viewed as a platform for capacity building, technology transfer, and training, rather than as a form of compliance with a complex legal regime designed in Brussels or Paris. By positioning WAICO as a provider of resources and opportunities, such as workshops and pilot projects, as well as standards guidance, China gains symbolic and practical influence as a country translating AI promises into concrete cooperation, not just abstract principles.
At the discursive level, WAICO allows Beijing to advance a development‑first and sovereignty‑respecting narrative of AI governance. Instead of centering individual rights and risk mitigation, the emphasis is on closing the AI divide, supporting industrial modernization, and protecting each state’s right to choose its own regulatory path. This language resonates with long‑standing themes in Chinese foreign policy non‑interference, South–South cooperation, and the right to development,that have been central to other initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative. Transposed into the AI domain, it underwrites a governance model in which states are encouraged, rather than constrained, to harness AI for economic growth, social management, and security objectives as they define them.
The hedge function of WAICO thus operates on multiple levels. Institutionally, it offers a parallel forum in which China can shape agendas, draft communiqués, and promote standards without needing Western consensus. Normatively, it legitimizes an alternative framing of “responsible AI” that centers development and sovereignty over rights and restrictions. Geopolitically, it signals to other states that alignment with Western AI clubs is not the only path to international recognition or support. Even if WAICO does not immediately produce binding rules, its existence alone changes the bargaining environment: Western actors must now compete with, rather than merely accommodate, a China‑led narrative of what global AI governance should prioritize.
But what WAICO can actually do is limited by the way it is built. It’s hard to see how an intergovernmental body that prizes sovereignty above all and is so inclusive could ever come to any deep agreement on sensitive topics such as surveillance, disinformation or the military use of AI. The flexibility, the lack of interference and the emphasis on development that make WAICO attractive to many different states, also work against strong, legally binding rules that could have the same global effects as European rules. There is a real risk that WAICO will remain a place for issuing official statements, projects to build people’s skills and displays of unity, rather than a body that creates the laws and technical rules that apply to AI systems around the world.
It might also make people more inclined to participate for practical reasons rather than moral ones because of the idea that WAICO is heavily influenced by China. Many governments may join to get training, money, or good will from other countries, but still follow Western standards to get access to markets and protect their reputations. In this case, WAICO is a useful diplomacy and soft-power tool for China but not enough to change the global order of AI rule-making. “The hedge is still important because China is less likely to be shut out of Western events, but it’s still not clear how much normative power it has.”
But even a partially successful WAICO complicates the emerging global AI order. It institutionalizes fragmentation, creating a China-centered node in an already crowded regime complex, and allowing states to move between development-oriented and rights-oriented venues. It further consolidates AI as a space where institutional connectivity through organizations, summits and cooperation frameworks, becomes a space of strategic competition in its own right. WAICO is not merely an AI policy initiative, but rather China’s wider strategy to build alternative global governance hubs in critical technology and economic sectors.
Understanding WAICO as a strategic hedge against Western‑dominated AI governance thus clarifies both its ambitions and its constraints. It reveals China’s determination to avoid being merely a rule‑taker in an AI order scripted elsewhere, while highlighting the trade‑offs inherent in constructing a broad, sovereignty‑centric coalition. Whether WAICO evolves into a durable pillar of an alternative AI governance architecture or remains largely symbolic, it already signals that the struggle over AI norms will be fought not only through technologies and markets, but also through the competing institutional centers that claim the authority to govern them.
This article written by Iqbal Saputra, an independent researcher focused on international relations, international political economy, and geopolitical dynamics.