The initiative turns China's strength in open models into an offer to developing countries; a funded seed program or a named compute pool would make that offer concrete.
The World Internet Conference’s annual Wuzhen Summit has released an action initiative calling on countries to build and share pools of computing power and high-quality datasets, set up an open-source seed fund, and help countries in the Global South develop local AI on open foundations. The document, the Initiative on Jointly Building Global Open Artificial Intelligence (《携手构建全球开放人工智能行动倡议》), was released at the summit’s main forum on November 4, CCTV News reported.
The initiative sets out 18 specific actions under four headings: advancing openness and development together, maintaining safety and trust together, taking part in dialogue and governance together, and upholding mutual benefit and inclusiveness together, according to China News Service. The full text had not been published in the reports seen by EastFrontier, so the individual actions and any funding commitments behind them are not yet known.
The summit in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, runs from November 2 to 5 under the theme "Open source and openness, building and sharing together," and AI open-sourcing was the focus of its main forum.
The initiative frames concentration of compute as the problem
The document’s starting point is a diagnosis. Computing power, data and talent are becoming more important to AI but are also highly concentrated, the initiative says, according to CCTV. The Wuzhen initiative warns that only a small number of countries and companies have the conditions to develop and apply foundation models, which could create a new digital divide.
The remedies it proposes are aimed at that gap. Shared compute pools and datasets would lower the cost of training and adapting models for countries that cannot afford their own clusters. An open-source seed fund would pay for projects built on open models, and local development "on open foundations" would let Global South governments and companies adapt existing models to their own languages and needs rather than build from scratch.
The approach matches the position China has taken in other forums. EastFrontier has examined how China uses free open-source AI to win influence in the Global South, and the Wuzhen initiative turns that strategy into a list of joint actions that other countries are invited to sign up to.
Chinese developers used the summit to make the open-source case
Speakers at the summit’s AI Wuzhen Dialogue argued that open models are spreading quickly abroad. Gao Xi, a research engineer at DeepSeek, said the company open-sources its work so that artificial general intelligence arrives sooner. If AGI were going to take 10 years, he said, he would want it in one, according to China News Service. The report noted that DeepSeek recently said it would open-source DeepInfer, its internal inference framework, and that OpenRouter data ranked DeepSeek first globally for the week of October 19 to 25.
Liu Dayiheng, who leads Alibaba’s Qwen large language model project, said open source has spread core technology beyond a few companies, raised cost-effectiveness and prevented the price monopolies that closed models could create. Bernd Holznagel, a professor at the University of Münster, said 40% to 50% of German small and medium-sized companies use Chinese open-source models, a figure China News Service reported without giving a source.
Safety was the counterweight. John Higgins, chairman of the International AI Governance Association, said safety cannot depend on luck or on a few leading scholars and needs a formal mechanism, and that open source spreads responsibility for safety across a community. The initiative’s second heading, on safety and trust, reflects that concern, though its specific actions have not been reported.
A seed fund with money behind it would be the real test
Initiatives at international conferences often stop at shared principles. The ones that matter come with money, institutions or signatories. For this document, the markers are whether the seed fund is given a size, a manager and a first round of grants, and whether any shared compute pool is linked to specific data centers or national computing networks open to foreign users.
The next place to look is the World Internet Conference itself. If the full text of the initiative is published with a list of supporting organizations, or if a Global South government announces a project under it before the conference’s next summit, the initiative will have moved from declaration to program.