AI’s global architecture has settled into a duopoly: closed models from a handful of American firms on one side, Chinese open-weight labs backed by the State and industrial priorities on the other. At the BRICS+ summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed that member-States establish open-source AI with pooled compute, shared foundation models, and joint training programmes. Xi’s pitch is compelling. Closed models are rented through the labs that built them, on pricing and terms those labs control, and their weights
AI’s global architecture has settled into a duopoly: closed models from a handful of American firms on one side, Chinese open-weight labs backed by the State and industrial priorities on the other. At the BRICS+ summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed that member-States establish open-source AI with pooled compute, shared foundation models, and joint training programmes. Xi’s pitch is compelling. Closed models are rented through the labs that built them, on pricing and terms those labs control, and their weights — model weights being the recipe for the intelligence — are hidden and proprietary. Open-weight models publish their trained parameters; anyone with sufficient compute can download and adapt them for local use. The first arrangement is akin to renting, the second to owning but with higher infrastructure costs. The second matters most for the Global South, whose languages, public services, and research focus are not the commercial priorities of a few Californian firms.
But accessibility is not the only question. Systems that will decide loans, diagnoses, welfare, etc., depend on the principles they encode as much as the compute they run on. China’s AI regime requires models within its jurisdiction to align with State objectives, and its surveillance rules apply. BRICS+ with Beijing as the lead partner cannot shed that specification, especially on the need for transparency on what happens to the data.
India and France proposed a different framework: AI with strategic autonomy from tech powers and rooted in democratic values, with collaboration centred on open-access infrastructure and privacy-preserving data sharing. Accessibility and democratic principles are to go together. For democracies unwilling to trade the second for the first, it is the more coherent framework — the third way to build alongside, and, if needed, against the two poles that have so far defined the field.
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