China will lead the creation of a BRICS AI open-source community and build an open AI ecosystem for the bloc's eleven member states, President Xi Jinping said at the BRICS summit in New Delhi1,4. The commitment, delivered as part of five initiatives Xi presented to fellow leaders, positions Beijing's growing stable of open-weight models as infrastructure for developing economies that lack the compute to train their own3.
Xi called for a "consensus-based global AI governance framework" alongside the open-source push. China will also support cooperation in developing and applying large language models, hold AI seminars and training courses, and conduct digital skills training, technological exchange, and industrial alignment, according to a statement released by China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
What Beijing is offering
The first of Xi's five initiatives is what he termed an "open source and inclusive AI initiative". Beyond the model-sharing community, Xi proposed a BRICS digital ecosystem cloud platform, a BRICS engineer cultivation alliance, and a youth exchange program for scientific and technological innovation.
China has concrete assets to back the pledge. The country currently leads the field in open-weight models, with a lineup that runs from Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, described as the largest open-weight model released so far, through DeepSeek, Z.ai's GLM series, MiniMax, and corporate players such as Xiaomi and Alibaba, whose Qwen family has become a widely used base for fine-tuning. Some of these models are now trained without Nvidia hardware, running instead on Huawei chips. For countries without large-scale data centers, freely downloadable weights represent the fastest route to domestic AI capability.
BRICS now comprises Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates.
Tension with domestic export controls
The open-source offer arrives alongside reports that China's Ministry of Commerce is weighing export controls on AI models, with consultations ongoing with companies including Alibaba, ByteDance, and Zhipu. The proposed controls would include tiered requirements for open weights: filing requirements for less capable models, security reviews for stronger ones, and a possible ban on public release for the most capable systems. ANALYSIS The simultaneous push to share open-weight models with BRICS partners and the reported deliberation over restricting their export creates a policy tension Beijing will need to resolve.
The BRICS announcement also lands as U.S. AI policy is in flux. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who proposed slowing the pace of frontier AI development, called China "the toughest dilemma" for his plan, noting that a shared speed limit is hard to reach because "the incentives to pull ahead and the military advantage are so large". Amodei's proposal pairs a slower pace with tighter chip export controls and better protection against the theft of model weights. Donald Trump dismissed the appeal, saying the U.S. is leading China in AI and that "whoever wins AI wins".
Xi is expected in the United States later this month, where AI governance is likely to be a central topic in talks with Trump.