Xi Jinping Proposes a BRICS AI Open-Source Community

Image: METAL

Summary

President Xi Jinping proposed building a BRICS AI open-source community during the second session of the 18th BRICS Summit on September 13.
AI was placed first among five cooperation initiatives, alongside large language model collaboration, training programs, and building an open ecosystem.
The speech left out the funding scale, launch timing, eligibility to participate, and who would hold rights to models the community produces.

While the United States argues internally over whether to slow down AI, China chose to bring other countries together instead. Chinese President Xi Jinping said in his address at the second session of the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi, India, on September 13, that China would take the lead in building a BRICS AI open-source community. The proposal topped the list of five cooperation initiatives he put forward. The same weekend split the world into a place arguing over whether to make rules at all, and a place arguing over who to make them with.

In the full text of the speech, which METAL reviewed, the AI section consists of four commitments. Xi said, "China will take the lead in building a BRICS AI open-source community, support cooperation in the development and application of large language models, hold specialized AI seminars and training programs, and build an open ecosystem for AI." Community, models, training, and ecosystem are laid out side by side in that order. It's not simply an offer to hand over technology — it's a plan to build the place where people learn it, too.

The frame for the speech was rules. Xi said, "A world without rules is like an intersection without traffic lights, where chaos and disorder are virtually guaranteed." He added that a people-centered approach should be taken, AI should be developed in a beneficial direction, and a consensus-based global AI governance framework should be built. Who gets to install the traffic lights is the speech's real subject, and BRICS is the venue he offered as his answer.

The remaining four initiatives are the path for bringing AI down into industry: a BRICS economic-zone partnership to facilitate trade and investment, a BRICS digital ecosystem cloud platform for technology exchange and skills training, cooperation on intelligent manufacturing, and a BRICS engineer-training alliance with youth exchange. Xi said, "China stands ready to help BRICS members build smart factories and develop standards and norms." The words "standards and norms" appearing in the intelligent-manufacturing item carry the most weight in this speech.

A proposal to build standards together always resembles the story of electrical outlets: whoever sets the specification first determines the shape of every device that plugs in afterward. Xi also said an incubator for innovation should be built, traditional industries upgraded, emerging industries grown, and future industries laid out. That's why the three words community, platform, and alliance keep recurring.

What threads all five initiatives into one is the sequence: open up the model, train the people to use it, build the factories and zones where the trained people will work, and jointly write the standards those factories will follow. It's too broad to be called technology transfer, and the return is too clear to be called aid. If BRICS countries follow this sequence, the lower tiers of the AI supply chain get bound together into a single bloc.

Leading with open source is also the hand China actually holds right now. METAL reported that Tencent released an open-source speech model that generates and edits voices, and reported that DeepSeek shelved its 1.6-trillion-parameter model to switch to a 552B model. Opening up weights runs in exactly the opposite direction from U.S. companies that keep their frontier models closed. For developing countries, open source is the option they can get without paying for it.

The weight of the summit itself also matters for reading this announcement. The 18th BRICS Summit ran for two days, September 12 and 13, in New Delhi, and Xi put forward this proposal just as China prepares to take over the next rotating chairmanship. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at the same summit, "BRICS is not merely a gathering of nations, but an ecosystem of solutions," urging that agreements move from paper into actual results. The incoming chair and the outgoing chair ended up applying different pressures using the same words.

What the speech didn't say is what lets you gauge the real size of this initiative. There's nothing in the speech about the open-source community's funding scale, its launch timing, which countries can join under what terms, or who holds the rights to models the community produces. The line about helping develop standards and norms also doesn't say who gets to approve those standards. The commitment is public; the design is still empty.

The picture sharpens when you set it alongside what happened elsewhere the same weekend. In the United States, reports emerged that Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google had been privately discussing an industry-led standards body, while the White House insisted there's no reason to slow the pace of development. In one place, companies are writing the rules in meeting rooms; in the other, a state is building a bloc at a summit. Both approaches share one thing: neither goes through a multilateral institution.

The competition over AI governance is no longer about the content of the rules — it's about who gets to sit at the table where the rules are written. The table Xi chose is the one where most developing countries already sit, and what he brought to it were open-weight models. Technology with a low barrier to entry always spreads wider, and the specifications of widely spread technology eventually become the standard. A proposal to install the traffic lights is really a proposal about who owns the intersection.