Xi offers BRICS an open-source AI community China would lead
In New Delhi on Sunday the Chinese president proposed seminars, training and joint large-language-model work. The plan was not written into the New Delhi Declaration. SoftBank fell as much as 13 percent on Monday after US lab chiefs called for a slower frontier.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping told the second session of the 18th BRICS summit in New Delhi on Sunday that China would be "a pioneer in establishing a BRICS AI open source community." The package, which he labelled an "open source and inclusive AI initiative," would support joint work on large language models, run specialised seminars and training courses, and "build an open ecosystem for AI." The text comes from the official English version of the speech released by CGTN and from the CCTV readout.
The proposal was one of five. The others were a BRICS special economic zone partnership with an "intelligent portal," a digital ecosystem cloud platform, an intelligent manufacturing drive in which China would help members build smart factories and standards, and a wider trade and investment facilitation track. On Saturday Xi had already invited BRICS governments to join the World AI Cooperation Organization, a Beijing-founded group that Chinese officials say 29 countries joined on 16 July.
The New Delhi Declaration did not adopt the open-source community as a BRICS project. That omission is the useful fact. Xi can offer training and model weights. He cannot, on this evidence, get India, Brazil and the new members to put a China-led AI club into the communique. India holds the chair this year. China takes it next year and will host the 2027 summit, which is when the offer is likely to return with more staff and a draft charter.
The timing collided with a different AI argument on the other side of the map. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay on Saturday titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," calling rapid capability jumps reckless and warning that swarms of agents could one day cause huge damage by taking over large parts of the public internet. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind and Elon Musk said they agreed. Altman also told Fortune that OpenAI would not list this year and would match Amodei's offer to embed outside safety evaluators. SoftBank, which is due to have about $65 billion in OpenAI by October, fell as much as 13.2 percent in Tokyo on Monday. SK Hynix dropped 6.3 percent. TSMC slipped 1.2 percent. Siemens Energy lost 7.4 percent in Europe.
Those two stories belong together even though no leader in Bharat Mandapam mentioned Amodei. One capital is offering cheaper, open weights and training seats to the Global South. The other set of labs, which sell closed models and need public markets to fund data centres, spent the weekend talking about slowing the frontier. Investors treated the second message as a threat to the spending that has held up chip and infrastructure stocks. Beijing treated the first message as a way to lock in customers who will never be first in line for the closed US systems.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, chairing the same session, warned that "the weaponisation of technology and critical minerals can hinder our shared progress" and said India had "emphasised inclusivity in the adoption of technology." He did not name China. He did not need to. China processes about 90 percent of the world's rare earths and tightened export controls last year during the tariff fight with Washington. Paragraph 67 of the New Delhi Declaration repeats language from last year's Rio text on diversified, resilient mineral supply chains and on sovereign rights over the resource.
BRICS now has 11 members and a growing list of partners. Trade among members, Putin said on Sunday, has reached $1.2 trillion. That is a political number as much as a commercial one. An open-source AI community would sit inside that story: shared tools, Chinese hosting, training in member capitals, no US cloud account required. Whether the models that come out of it are good enough to displace Western systems is a separate test that will not be settled by a summit sentence.
Xi left Delhi on Sunday afternoon after a 24-hour visit. He is due in the United States later this month to see Trump, where AI governance will be on the table. The New Delhi offer is a marker for that meeting as well. China will tell Washington it is building an open alternative for countries that do not want US terms. Washington will tell Beijing the alternative is a vehicle for standards and data. The BRICS text, by staying silent on the community itself, leaves both claims unused for now.
