China's World AI Cooperation Organisation grew from 29 to 38 member countries within a month of its founding, built around a digital sovereignty doctrine formally filed at the UN in July. This expansion comes as the US State Department drafts (but has not sent) a letter warning 35 signatories of its AI Opportunity Statement against joining duplicative initiatives, effectively pressuring countries to pick a side between Washington's Pax Silica alliance and Beijing's WAICO. The two blocs overlap significantly, with WAICO's 38 members and Pax Silica's 25 not mutually exclusive. Beijing also points to Alibaba's Qwen models surpassing three billion downloads versus far smaller figures for Google's Gemma and Meta's Llama as evidence its open-weight strategy is gaining traction globally.
Questions this post answers
How many countries have joined China's World AI Cooperation Organisation (WAICO)?
WAICO grew from 29 founding signatories at its Shanghai launch on 16 July to 38 members within about a month. The organisation was proposed by Premier Li Qiang at the World AI Conference and formally established with backing from Xi Jinping, who framed AI development as requiring international cooperation rather than dominance by a single country. Track how AI alliances and governance blocs are reshaping global tech policy on daily.dev.
How do Qwen download numbers compare to Llama and Gemma?
Alibaba's Qwen family passed three billion downloads within six months, generating more than 300,000 derivative models, compared to 418 million downloads for Google's Gemma and 227 million for Meta's Llama across the same year, according to Hugging Face data. This gap is cited as evidence of China's open-weight model strategy gaining global traction. Compare open-weight model adoption trends like Qwen versus Llama and Gemma on daily.dev.