How China's push for a more inclusive global AI order offers opportunities for Pakistan

Chinese President Xi Jinping used a speech at Shanghai's World AI Conference to call for AI development to become "a symphony of global cooperation" rather than a field dominated by any single country, days before China launched the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation (Waico) on July 16 with 29 founding member states, including Pakistan.

A new bloc for AI governance

Waico's founding membership spans a deliberately broad set of developing and middle-income economies, including Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia, South Africa, Senegal, Russia, and Pakistan — a roster that positions the organization as an alternative to AI governance frameworks that have so far been shaped predominantly by the United States and its close allies. Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar signed on behalf of Pakistan, giving the country a founding-member position in a body still in its earliest stages of defining what practical cooperation among its members will actually look like.

What China is offering

Beyond the symbolic framing, China has attached concrete commitments to the initiative: a pledge of 5,000 AI training opportunities for developing nations, plans for regional AI cooperation centers, and support for deploying Chinese AI models in partner countries overseas. Those offers arrive at a moment when China holds substantial leverage in two areas critical to AI development — it dominates global rare earth mineral production, an input increasingly essential to advanced computing hardware, and possesses significant domestic computing infrastructure it can extend or share with partner nations.

The broader US-China backdrop

Waico did not emerge in a vacuum. It sits squarely within an intensifying technology competition between Washington and Beijing, in which the US has restricted China's access to advanced semiconductors while China has, in turn, limited exports of critical minerals the US and its allies depend on. Waico represents China's attempt to build an alternative pole of AI cooperation, one explicitly marketed as more accessible to Global South economies than the more restrictive, US-anchored frameworks currently dominating global AI governance discussions.

What this could mean for Pakistan

For Pakistan specifically, membership arrives alongside its own National Artificial Intelligence Policy 2025 and the AI Seekho programme, which aims to train one million people in AI-related skills. Analysts see potential for meaningful collaboration on research, workforce training, computing infrastructure, and technology transfer through the Waico framework — areas where Pakistan faces real fiscal constraints and skills shortages of its own. Whether that potential translates into substantive projects, rather than remaining another diplomatic membership on paper, will depend on how quickly Waico moves from founding declarations to funded, operational programs that member states can actually draw on.

Navigating two competing spheres

Pakistan's Waico membership also raises a practical question its policymakers will need to manage carefully: how to draw on Chinese AI cooperation and infrastructure support without foreclosing access to Western technology, cloud platforms, and semiconductor supply chains that remain critical to much of the country's existing tech and telecommunications infrastructure. Countries navigating the broader US-China tech rivalry have generally found that leaning too heavily into one bloc's ecosystem can carry longer-term costs in the other, meaning Pakistan's real opportunity may lie less in choosing a side outright and more in extracting concrete, non-exclusive benefits — training slots, compute access, and technology transfer — from Waico while continuing to maintain its existing technology partnerships elsewhere.