The signing ceremony for the agreement on the establishment of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, known as WAICO, took place in Shanghai during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in July 2026. Signatories include China, Kazakhstan, Laos and a range of other nations across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, giving the new body its first footprint on the world stage.
WAICO is structured as an independent intergovernmental international organisation, and its permanent headquarters has been located in Shanghai. The organisation's stated ambitions centre on three areas: deepening global collaboration on AI research and deployment, narrowing the digital divide between developed and developing economies, and building a standardised framework for how AI systems are governed.
Its principles draw on ideas long associated with China's approach to AI policy — human-centric design, data sovereignty, and algorithmic transparency — but the wording also echoes, and in places exceeds, the standards set by Western frameworks. In other words, WAICO is not merely copying an existing model; it is proposing its own. Observers note that, like the World Health Organization for medicine or the International Atomic Energy Agency for nuclear energy, WAICO aims to be the body where rules for a transformative technology are debated and, eventually, codified.
The launch sits at the heart of a broader shift in who sets the rules for artificial intelligence. Where the US and Europe have led through export controls, private-sector norms and unilateral safety regimes, WAICO offers a multilateral, developing-world-led alternative. The practical test will be whether its meetings, standards and research programmes translate into anything more than diplomacy — and whether major technology powers eventually join, or simply keep writing their own rules elsewhere.