President Xi Jinping has opened China's flagship artificial intelligence conference as he seeks to turn the country's rapidly advancing AI capabilities into geopolitical power. Xi is presiding over the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, a day after China and nearly 30 countries including Russia, Brazil and Indonesia signed up to a new organisation to be based in the Chinese financial capital.

The body, to be known as the World AI Cooperation Organization, will give China influence over international standard-setting and other issues as its AI models increasingly compete with their US rivals for global influence. The move comes as China is increasingly adding artificial intelligence to its suite of diplomatic offerings to other countries, especially developing nations from the so-called global South that it is seeking to draw closer into its economic orbit.

In a meeting with Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Xi said: "China is willing to share digital economy and artificial intelligence technologies to help Kazakhstan achieve digital transformation." Chinese AI start-up Moonshot has released a large language model with capabilities approaching those of frontier US labs, such as Anthropic. Western companies including DoorDash, Siemens and Airbnb are adopting AI tools built in China, drawn by models that are cheaper, increasingly capable and, in some cases, easier to run on their own infrastructure.