Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a keynote address on July 17, 2026, at the opening ceremony of the 2026 World AI Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in Shanghai. He called for a multilateral framework to steer artificial intelligence development and warned against using national security concerns as a pretext to restrict technology access.

The speech, titled "Joining Hands to Build a Just and Equitable System For Global AI Governance," laid out four observations on AI development and governance, according to a readout published by China's official English-language government portal (english.www.gov.cn). The conference runs through July 20 in Shanghai.

Xi's central message was that AI governance must be collective. "AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation," he said, according to Al Jazeera. He also pushed back against unilateral restrictions: "We should jointly oppose overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI or placing one country's security over that of others."

That phrasing lands directly against the backdrop of U.S. export controls. Export controls are government rules that restrict what technology can be sold to whom, and in this case they limit China's access to advanced AI chips. In May 2026, the U.S. Commerce Department affirmed that restrictions on AI chip shipments apply to subsidiaries of Chinese companies located outside China, extending the reach of curbs beyond U.S. borders (Al Jazeera). Xi's remarks did not name the United States, but the phrase "overstretching the national security concept" is a standard Chinese diplomatic formulation used to describe American technology restrictions.

Xi also stressed what he termed a "people-centred" approach to AI, calling for guardrails to keep the technology under human direction. "We should put in place laws and regulations, technological monitoring, early warning, and emergency response systems, in order to … ensure AI is always under human control," he said.

On the international dimension, Xi announced plans to cooperate with bodies from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and BRICS countries to provide AI-related opportunities. (BRICS is a grouping of major emerging economies that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, among others.) He framed equitable access to AI capacity-building for developing countries as a way to prevent "new historical injustices." That language echoes China's broader diplomatic posture of positioning itself as a champion of the Global South in technology governance, a theme consistent with the pitch CNBC reported under the headline "Xi pitches China as AI partner to developing world."

The Shanghai conference carries institutional weight beyond the speech itself. On July 16, the day before Xi's address, twenty-nine countries signed an agreement to establish a global AI cooperation body at the conference, according to Reuters. That agreement builds on a proposal Xi first advanced at the APEC leaders' meeting in November 2025, where he pushed for a global body to govern AI (Reuters).

China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning had announced at a regular press conference in early June that China would host the 2026 World AI Conference in Shanghai that July, signaling that the diplomatic groundwork for the governance push was laid weeks in advance.

The broader context here is a competition over the architecture of AI governance itself. Western-led initiatives have tended to emphasize safety, alignment, and export controls as governance instruments. Alignment, in this context, refers to the technical challenge of ensuring AI systems behave in line with human intentions. Beijing, by contrast, is articulating a framework that pairs safety rhetoric with an explicit call to distribute AI capacity across the developing world. The twenty-nine-country agreement, if it matures into a functioning body, would give institutional form to that alternative architecture. The countries that signed were not enumerated in the available reporting, and the governance body's specific mandate, voting structure, and relationship to existing multilateral institutions are not yet detailed.

Xi's speech also draws a clear line between his vision and the unilateral export-control approach exemplified by the Commerce Department's May ruling. By framing chip restrictions as a national-security overreach and offering developing countries a seat at an AI governance table, Beijing is making a bid to set the terms of the debate rather than merely contest the rules as written in Washington.