More than 1,100 employees from leading AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have signed a petition urging the US government to help slow the industry's development. The move follows the revelation that an OpenAI model autonomously hacked into Hugging Face's servers to cheat on an evaluation — a breach that has rattled even the most competitive Silicon Valley labs.
Yet the more consequential question may not be whether Washington heeds the call, but whether Beijing will follow suit. China's frontier models now perform almost on par with their Western counterparts, and the country has been building an alternative governance architecture rather than waiting for an invitation to join a Western-led effort.
The narrowing gap
Stanford University's 2026 AI Index shows the performance gap between the top US and Chinese models has shrunk from more than 1,300 points in May 2023 to just 39 points by March 2026. The leading US model, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, leads China's Dola-Seed 2.0 by only 2.7%. China has also overtaken the US in AI research citations, patents and robotics deployment.
That is not the backdrop against which a country typically agrees to slow down. Instead, Beijing has been busy building a parallel track. In July, China launched the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) in Shanghai, with 29 founding members including Russia and Brazil — but notably excluding the US, UK and EU. Observers describe it as a deliberate move to establish a China-led track for global AI governance.
China has not entirely shunned Western safety cooperation. It signed the Bletchley Declaration — the first international AI safety agreement, backed by 28 countries and the EU at the UK's inaugural AI Safety Summit in November 2023 — and has joined intergovernmental safety dialogues with Washington, as well as co-sponsoring a UN resolution on AI safety. But that cooperation runs in parallel with, not instead of, its drive to build independent standards and alliances.
Open by default
China's public posture leans firmly towards openness rather than restraint. Its AI industry has consistently pursued an open-source, open-architecture approach, arguing this benefits global development. Open-weight models are published for anyone to download, inspect and adapt, unlike closed models such as ChatGPT, which can only be accessed through the company's own paid interface.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a similar case, arguing that openness improves safety because outside researchers can audit models, spot vulnerabilities and build defences. A world with only one dominant model and a single point of failure, he said, would be extremely fragile. Nvidia designs roughly 90% of the specialised GPUs used worldwide for AI and machine learning, giving Huang's voice particular weight.
At the World AI Conference in Shanghai on 17 July, President Xi Jinping unveiled WAICO, calling it "an important milestone in the history of AI development" and pledging 5,000 AI training opportunities for developing countries over the next five years. He framed it as Beijing answering "the call of the Global South" for a greater say in setting global AI rules, and urged countries to embrace what he called the "historic opportunity" of open-source AI.
For Beijing, the new body is more than a diplomatic gesture. China is placing its headquarters in Shanghai, staffing it from Chinese government ministries, and opening founding membership to states well outside the existing Western-led summit process, which has so far been hosted by the UK, South Korea, France and India.
At home, China continues to run its own, separate system of control. Chinese AI models must clear government safety and content reviews before release, though the rules do not extend to changes made afterwards. Many Chinese labs, lacking the computing power for extensive safety training, have focused instead on building raw capability, according to industry observers.
Washington, for its part, seems set on dominating the AI race. A Reuters exclusive last week revealed that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed American diplomats to push back against talk of a US technology "kill switch" and to counter "AI sovereignty" arguments gaining traction in Europe. The EU's €1bn daily trade deficit with China remains a point of tension, as Brussels navigates US tariffs and its own sanctions dilemma.
Meanwhile, European policymakers are watching closely. The continent's own AI Act, passed in 2024, takes a risk-based approach that sits somewhere between US laissez-faire and Chinese state control. Whether Europe can carve out a third way — or will be squeezed between two competing governance blocs — remains an open question.
