One month after Shanghai, the announcement that has aged best is not a model or a robot. It is a signature — and the response that signature has triggered.

On 16 July, representatives of twenty-nine states signed the agreement establishing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), with a permanent headquarters in Shanghai. The following day, the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference opened, and Xi Jinping placed the new organisation at the centre of his proposal for cooperation, technological access and global AI governance.

Thirty days later, it is clearer why that mattered. Reuters reported on 14 August that the US State Department is preparing a communication arguing that membership of Pax Silica may be incompatible with participation in initiatives it regards as rivals. The draft is addressed to the thirty-five countries that signed the AI Opportunity Statement in June; not all of them belong to Pax Silica, a non-binding framework with 24 signatories. Kazakhstan, which joined Pax Silica on 25 June and signed WAICO on 16 July, is so far the only country known to be present in both spaces. The US document may still change and does not yet constitute definitive public policy.

Shanghai was therefore more than a trade fair. It was one of the places where AI governance began to acquire territory, budgets, members and borders.

WAICO has a treaty, not just a communiqué

The founding agreement establishes an international intergovernmental organisation with its own legal personality, a permanent headquarters in Shanghai, a Council composed of member states and a Secretariat responsible for implementing its decisions. Each state has one vote; consensus must be sought first and, if that fails, decisions may be adopted by a two-thirds majority of those present and voting.

There is also a financial architecture: annual contributions from members, voluntary contributions and possible revenue from cooperation projects, with the budget and accounts subject to Council approval.

The difference from Pax Silica matters. Pax Silica is a non-binding political framework intended to strengthen trusted chains of critical minerals, energy, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing and AI infrastructure. WAICO, by contrast, emerges from a treaty that creates permanent bodies, voting procedures, financing and processes for accession and withdrawal. These are not two equivalent organisations competing under different logos.

WAICO’s own treaty also includes economic functions: matching technological supply and demand among members, developing capacity, facilitating scientific cooperation and promoting open ecosystems. The political institution may therefore also become an infrastructure through which technology circulates.

The relevant uncertainty is no longer the organisational chart. It lies in the transition from institution on paper to institution in practice: ratifications, the Secretariat, the effective budget, funded projects and concrete mechanisms of transparency.

Which Global South?

The geography of the initial signatories is already an argument in itself.

Among the twenty-nine are China, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Senegal, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Belarus and Serbia, alongside other African, Asian and Latin American states. No G7 or European Union country appears among those initial signatories. India did not sign either, despite belonging to BRICS. The simultaneous presence of Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar makes the Southeast Asian dimension particularly visible.

China presents this composition as a response to demands from the Global South. Xi announced 5,000 places on AI training programmes and seminars for developing countries over the next five years, as well as cooperation centres linked to ASEAN, the Arab League, the African Union, CELAC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS.

The language matters. Many of the international frameworks that have so far defined AI principles, metrics and regulation have emerged from the Global North. WAICO foregrounds technological access, capacity-building, state sovereignty and civilisational diversity.

Yet formal representation and material control are not the same thing. A state may have one vote while still depending on infrastructure, models, technical expertise or supply chains it does not control.

Bangladesh also shows that there is no single way to approach this architecture. On 1 August, it decided initially to seek observer status, a position that allows it to approach the institution without yet assuming full membership.

Between joining and staying outside, there is also the possibility of watching, negotiating and evaluating.

Which layer is being shared? The MAZU case

Here, the word “access” can be examined quite concretely.

Xi announced an intention to extend MAZU, China’s AI-supported weather early-warning system, to thirty countries. But its current footprint already contains several layers: more than forty countries have used its cloud services, while seven have customised versions deployed locally — Pakistan, Ethiopia, Solomon Islands, Jordan, Sri Lanka, Mongolia and Djibouti.

The distinction matters because access to a platform is not the same as having installed capacity, integration with national meteorological systems, staff trained to maintain it or autonomy to modify it.

MAZU allows us to replace an overly general question — whether China is “sharing” technology — with more useful ones:

Which layer is being shared? Who administers the system? Where do the data reside? What capacity remains when cooperation ends? Who can modify the infrastructure without asking permission?

The same distinction applies to open-weight models. Being able to download weights, modify them or deploy them locally can reduce dependence on private APIs and foreign services. But the model still requires compute, chips, electricity, networks and people.

Opening the model does not necessarily open everything required to run it.

The US response

In that context, Kazakhstan is especially revealing.

Pax Silica organises cooperation around the material foundations of AI: critical minerals, energy, advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, data centres and supply chains. WAICO frames its proposal around interstate cooperation, development, norms, access and capacity-building.

They are different constructions, but they ultimately arrive at the same question: who can use which technology, and within which network of relationships.

The US draft seeks to turn that network into a boundary of belonging. If eventually applied in those terms, cooperating with Washington in some layers and Beijing in others would cease to be an acceptable strategy for certain states.

It is still too early to speak of two fully formed blocs. Bangladesh is observing, India remains outside WAICO and Kazakhstan is trying to inhabit both architectures.

Some actors, however, are already attempting to make the map behave as though a choice must be made.

Four thousand four hundred objects

Diplomacy in Shanghai coexisted with a much more material scene.

WAIC closed with more than 100,000 square metres of exhibition space, 1,117 companies, 4,486 products and more than 400,000 in-person visits. Organisers counted 351 presentations as global debuts. Two cautions matter: these were accumulated visits, not necessarily unique individuals, and “global debut” is also a promotional category. China Daily published that closing balance on 21 July; a later piece on the 27th described precisely the movement of AI from code and screens into factories, pharmacies and workplaces.

Collaborative robots, dexterous hands, agents, chips and supernodes made visible an AI trying to leave the screen.

Huawei’s Atlas 950 SuperPoD offers a particularly clear example. Its architecture had been presented earlier, but WAIC hosted the public debut of the physical hardware. Reuters described the system as a demonstration of China’s capacity to build large clusters around Ascend processors and reduce dependence on the most advanced US accelerators.

The difference between software and object seems small until we think in terms of infrastructure.

A model can travel as a file. A supernode needs land, electricity, cooling, networks, contracts, maintenance and a jurisdiction in which to exist.

It also needs people.

Behind agents and robots remain the people who manufacture components, assemble equipment, maintain data centres, prepare datasets, test systems and reorganise their work around automation.

Embodied intelligence has a body because it first had labour.

Diversity: from word to institution

Only two days ago, this Radar asked — through linguists, humanities researchers and Chinese intellectual debates — what culture enters an artificial intelligence. Giving AI a Heart examined how a technology often presented as universal begins to be reinterpreted through particular languages, categories and traditions.

Shanghai’s political documentation now allows that conversation to be connected to the institution.

The WAIC presidency argued that AI should respond to different cultural contexts and help preserve civilisational diversity. WAICO also incorporates such diversity among its principles.

The question is what will happen when that word has to become practice.

Will it change who designs systems, which languages receive resources, which forms of knowledge become data, who governs those data and which criteria are used to evaluate a technology?

Or will it remain primarily diplomatic vocabulary?

Another declaration will not answer that. We will have to follow who designs, who funds, who trains, who hosts and who is able to say no.

The institution is also a technology

There is something deeply anthropological about looking at an eighteen-article treaty beside an exhibition hall full of robots.

Both organise possibilities.

A robot distributes the capacity to act across sensors, models, actuators, infrastructures and people. An institution distributes it across states, votes, secretariats, budgets, procedures and norms.

WAICO also introduces a particularly interesting boundary: its agreement explicitly restricts its activity to the civilian domain of artificial intelligence.

That separation appears clear in law and far less clear materially.

A weather system such as MAZU can protect crops, anticipate floods and save lives while also processing atmospheric and geospatial observations through satellites, networks and strategically important computing systems. A data centre can train scientific, commercial or security models. The same semiconductor supply chain can sustain multiple uses.

Legal categories need precise boundaries.

Sociotechnical infrastructures do not always respect them.

The map that remained

One month after Shanghai, the scale of WAIC is probably the least interesting thing about it.

The question is what relationships China is attempting to organise around its technological capabilities.

WAICO promises cooperation, training, access, capacity-building and a greater presence for states that for years have occupied peripheral positions in the digital economy.

That promise deserves to be taken seriously precisely so that it can be followed critically.

We already know the treaty, the voting system and part of the financial architecture. The next things to watch are ratifications, the Secretariat, the first budget, specific projects, contracts, where infrastructure is located and the terms attached to technology transfer.

MAZU offers one metric: distinguish cloud access from installed capacity.

Bangladesh offers another: observe who joins, who prefers to watch as an observer and who remains outside.

Kazakhstan adds a third: test how far it will be possible to inhabit several technological ecosystems once major powers begin to demand exclusivity.

AI governance is ceasing to be a collection of principles about future machines. It is becoming institutions, budgets, data centres, chips, training, alliances and borders.

And when borders appear, the anthropological question returns:

who can cross them, who can draw them, and who has to live within them.

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