Whilst Trump accuses China, Xi Jinping launches his own AI coalition

Rome. Whilst on Thursday evening US President Donald Trump accused China, live on television from the White House, of interfering in the 2020 elections, Chinese leader Xi Jinping was preparing to deliver his first speech at the opening ceremony of the World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Shanghai. Trump denounced “shocking vulnerabilities” in US voting systems, claiming that Beijing had improperly acquired data on millions of voters and that “this breach represents an unprecedented nightmare for electoral security”. Xi did not respond – the Chinese Foreign Ministry described the US allegations as “pure fabrication” and “a malicious smear campaign” – and in his speech in Shanghai he never mentioned the United States except at the very beginning, when he referred to events seventy years ago, when “a group of young scholars first proposed the concept of artificial intelligence at the Dartmouth Workshop in New Hampshire”.  

Although he never explicitly addressed the United States, the Chinese leader criticised the US approach to the artificial intelligence sector in several passages of his speech, stating that it “should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation” and he portrayed China as an alternative path, with a multilateral approach, which aims to offer its technology and training to countries in the Global South – those with whom cooperation is “mutually beneficial” – for “a free and fair system” and in order to prevent the creation of “new historical injustices”, overseen by the United Nations. Xi announced training programmes and seminars on artificial intelligence, which he described as “opportunities”, as part of a coalition of 29 countries including Russia, Belarus, Serbia, Cuba, Pakistan, Brazil and Venezuela, presented on Wednesday as the World Organisation for Cooperation on Artificial Intelligence, with top positions held by Beijing’s leadership and its headquarters in Shanghai.

During the conference, which runs until 20 July and brings together over a thousand Chinese technology companies, the start-up Moonshot AI presented the Kimi K3 model as the largest in terms of the number of parameters, with performance comparable to that of models from OpenAI and Anthropic. In recent months, US companies have on several occasions issued warnings about Chinese interference in the development of their models, in addition to restrictions on imports of Chinese technology, citing national security as one of the reasons. Xi Jinping responded indirectly to the accusations by emphasising that the new coalition with the BRICS countries, ASEAN, Latin America and the African Union must “jointly oppose the excessive extension of the concept of national security in the field of AI or the prioritisation of one country’s security over that of others”.

Yet the Beijing government itself is reportedly considering restricting foreign countries’ access to its most advanced models, and in recent years has imposed rules and restrictions to ensure that artificial intelligence does not pose a threat to security or escape the control of the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing’s own intelligence agency, the Guoanbu, has repeatedly singled out artificial intelligence as a threat to ‘national security’, a key term in Xi Jinping’s vocabulary. The authorities at the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s internet regulator, have long established that Chinese companies are obliged to ensure that chatbots are trained exclusively using government-approved information and that they reflect “fundamental socialist values”, that is, those dictated by the Party. As early as 2024, in the ‘AI Safety Governance Framework’ document, they stated that uncontrolled artificial intelligence could destabilise society by ‘transforming traditional views on employment, fertility and education’, and just this week they issued new rules prohibiting chatbots from ‘encouraging emotional dependence’, in order to curb the phenomenon of virtual boyfriends, which appears to be on the rise among young Chinese people.

To praise the artificial intelligence coalition, Xi Jinping quoted a Chinese proverb: ‘A single string cannot make music, a single tree does not make a forest.’ This alliance ‘will be a milestone in the history of AI development’, he said. Beijing is banking on artificial intelligence to compete with the United States; according to the latest estimates, its economy slowed more than expected in the second quarter of 2026, and its focus on technology may be masking deep shortcomings in other areas of the Chinese system. Ruchir Sharma writes in the Financial Times that “even by official figures, artificial intelligence is not providing a sufficient boost to overcome the other forces weighing on China”: a shrinking workforce, rising debt, a property market in crisis, the resurgence of an intrusive regulatory state and the resulting exodus of capital and people.