Chinese president Xi Jinping speaking at the 2025 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Gyeongju, South Korea.Credit: Yonhap via AP/Alamy
Despite risks ranging from exacerbating inequality to causing existential catastrophe, the world has yet to agree on regulations to govern artificial intelligence. Although a patchwork of national and regional regulations exists, for many countries binding rules are still being fleshed out.
In October, at a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated his country’s proposal to create a body known as the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), which would bring nations together as a step towards creating a global governance system for AI.
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The proposal is part of a wider drive to be at the helm of efforts to govern AI, in contrast to a US approach that is focused on deregulation. When it comes to transparency and AI policy, “China is the good guy at the moment,” Wendy Hall, a computer scientist at the University of Southampton, UK, told reporters at an event in London in October.
Many hurdles lie in the way to creating a binding intergovernmental agreement on AI, but some advocates say it is possible, comparing the technology to other risky but useful endeavours for which agreements exist, such as nuclear power and aviation. Nature looks at China’s approach, what a global AI governance body might look like and its chance of success.
How does the Chinese AI ecosystem differ from those of other countries?
Encouraged by the government, Chinese firms tend to release models as open weight, meaning that they can be downloaded and built on. And compared with Western nations, China has less of a focus on making machines that could outsmart humans — often referred to as artificial general intelligence — and is instead concentrating on a race to use AI to drive economic growth. This is exemplified by a policy introduced in August called AI+, says Kwan Yee Ng, who leads international AI governance at Concordia AI, a Beijing-based consultancy that focuses on AI safety.
How does China approach AI regulation?
China was among the first nations to introduce AI-specific regulations, beginning in 2022, and has wide-ranging rules on harmful content, privacy and data security, for example. Developers of public-facing AI-powered services must let Chinese regulators test their systems ahead of deployment, says Ng. The result is that models such as those developed by the Hangzhou-based company DeepSeek, which found world fame with its R1 model earlier this year, are among “the most regulated in the world”, says Joanna Bryson, a computer scientist and researcher in AI ethics at the Hertie School in Berlin. Despite this, the authorities often take a soft approach to enforcing that regulation, says Angela Zhang, a law researcher and specialist in AI regulation at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
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