AI Under Heaven—01 - by Alex Colville - AI Under Heaven

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AI Under Heaven—01<br>The World AI Conference, UK AISI Tests the Frontier, and Kimi-K3

Alex Colville<br>Jul 22, 2026

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Hello, and welcome to AI Under Heaven! It’s a new newsletter at ASPI that uses primary sources to track the Chinese AI ecosystem, with a particular focus on how the technology is being used to pursue the nation’s domestic and international strategies.<br>I’m using an old-meets-new theme for this. While working for China Media Project, I saw a flood of Chinese state media content trying to merge traditional Chinese culture with AI, a merger of imperial and modern China that Xi Jinping has encouraged. The link between this cutting-edge technology and man’s age-old drive for global dominance is increasingly hard to ignore, so I thought I might put my own spin on the idea.<br>I’m still feeling out the structure, but my aim is to take any developments around Chinese AI that I think are important, and analyse them for you here. These developments will be both from within the country and overseas, as well as any interesting technical news. There may also be one-off specials on stories I think are important. Feel free to reach out with ideas for things you’d like to see.<br>A little about me: I’m an Analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), focusing on China’s AI ecosystem. For the past two years I covered this beat for David Bandurski at China Media Project, where I wrote a newsletter called China Chatbot. I have a background in coding from a scholarship with the Lede Program for Data Journalism at Columbia University, and was based in Beijing from 2019 to 2022, where I worked as a staff writer for The World of Chinese. I have also written on Chinese affairs for The Financial Times, The Economist and The Wire China.<br>It won’t surprise you that this first issue will mostly talk about the World AI Conference (WAIC) that ran July 17-20 in Shanghai. As I wrote in ASPI’s Cyber and Tech Digest last week, this is a shopfront —China’s chance to present their AI products and governance solutions in a way international audiences can understand.<br>In this issue:<br>What did Xi mean when he endorsed “open-source” AI at the WAIC?

Who signed up to the World AI Cooperation Organization?

The UK’s AISI discovers that all you need to do to get around DeepSeek’s safety guardrails on cybersecurity…is just to ask again.

But First…

Events at the World AI Conference last week sparked further debate about the future of China’s open-source strategy. Is it opening up, or closing off? Both have a place in the country’s national interest, so I don’t think it’s either-or.<br>Chinese AI labs are known for releasing their models to the general public for free, which has enabled their rapid adoption by other AI developers around the globe. But estimates suggesting a Chinese lab could be as little as four months away from creating a product like Anthropic’s Mythos — a model too powerful to release to the general public — has fueled speculation that China’s open-source era might be drawing to a close.

Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers the keynote speech at the World AI Conference in Shanghai in July 2026<br>Chinese leader Xi Jinping seemed to answer that question during his speech at WAIC, where he endorsed “open-source and openness” as the future for international AI development and governance. Newspapers like the Wall Street Journal interpreted this to mean that Xi was endorsing open-source AI models. As a piece of signalling, it was unmistakable: openness is the way forward. On July 19, Alibaba announced that its latest model, Qwen-3.8, would be open-source. The previous iteration, Qwen-3.7, had been closed-source.<br>However, it’s important to remember that a Western concept can be imbued with unique political overtones in Chinese. In his speech, Xi did not mention “open-source” per se, but instead a four-character political slogan, “open source and openness” (开源开放).<br>The slogan itself first appears along with the first official Chinese policy document on AI from 2017, which sketches out China’s international policy for the technology, and seems to be a broad term referring to sharing any research or technology that could contribute to China’s AI development. It is still interpreted this way by state media: Xinhua used it in March to talk about open-sourcing AI chip architecture.<br>So what Xi promised in his WAIC speech actually has more to do with the idea of open-source, rather than specifically guaranteeing frontier AI models will always be open-source. They may be part of it, but I would argue the term is broad and vague enough to allow for frontier AI models to be taken off the table should the need arise. If Reuters is correct that the leadership has been discussing ways to restrict international access to some Chinese AI products, we may see an ecosystem that has a place for both open and closed-source AI in the future.<br>For...