Xi offers BRICS an open-source AI community as Modi warns on minerals

Xi Jinping told the second day of the 18th BRICS summit in New Delhi on Sunday that China will lead a BRICS open-source zone and community for artificial intelligence. The CCTV readout of the speech said Beijing would support cooperation in the development and application of large language models, run specialised research and training, and build an open system for AI. Xi left for Beijing the same afternoon after a 24-hour visit. China takes the BRICS chair next year and will host the following summit.

The offer sat inside a five-point package. Beside the open-source AI community, Xi proposed a BRICS special economic zone partnership with an intelligent portal, a digital industry cloud platform, an intelligent manufacturing drive that would help members build smart factories and write shared standards, and a science and talent track. He also called for a broad, consensus-based global AI governance framework.

Narendra Modi, hosting the 11-member group, used the same session to warn that the weaponisation of technology and critical minerals can become a hurdle in shared progress. He asked members to keep technology access inclusive. The joint declaration that closed the summit criticised unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures that run against World Trade Organization rules. It did not adopt Xi's AI community as a binding project and did not adopt Modi's minerals language as an operational plan.

The split is the story. Chinese firms have released open weights for large models that governments and companies in the Global South can adapt without buying a closed American stack. US labs have kept the most capable systems behind application programming interfaces and safety reviews. Dario Amodei's essay "We Must Pace the Frontier," published in the same news cycle, drew public support from Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk and helped send SoftBank down 13 percent. President Donald Trump, also on Monday, rejected tighter American guardrails and said restraint would help China. Beijing's foreign ministry called Amodei's warning about Chinese systems fearmongering ahead of a planned Xi-Trump meeting in Washington later this month.

BRICS is the venue where those two arguments meet a third audience. India wants cheaper compute and does not want a minerals squeeze. Russia wants payment and insurance workarounds, a file Vladimir Putin raised separately with a proposed BRICS insurance pool and grain exchange. Brazil, South Africa and the newer members want training and factories. Xi's list is a catalogue of those asks, written in Chinese industrial policy language. Modi's warning is a hedge against the same list becoming a dependency.

Chinese open models already circulate in India, Brazil and South Africa under company licences, not under a BRICS stamp. A community label would add training courses, shared evaluation and a claim that the stack is a club good rather than a Chinese export. Whether ministries then budget for clusters is a decision each capital will take after the leaders have gone home.

Nothing in Sunday's session funded a single cluster or named a model. The operational test is whether a BRICS open-source community produces shared weights, shared evaluation suites and shared training courses before the next summit, or whether it remains a sentence in a readout. China already ships open models without a BRICS label. A labelled community would add political cover for governments that want those models and fear a US reaction.

Trump and Xi are due to sit in the same month. AI governance is on that agenda. The New Delhi speech gives Xi a text he can point to as an alternative to Washington-led rules. It also gives New Delhi a problem. India chaired a summit that closed with a Chinese AI offer and an Indian warning about weapons made from the same technology. Both lines are now on the public record. The work of choosing between them starts when the leaders leave the hall, which they already have.