China Pushes Creation of World AI Cooperation Effort

China has proposed creating an organization to promote global artificial intelligence (AI) cooperation.

The country wants to help guide worldwide efforts to regulate AI and share China’s own innovations, said Premier Li Qiang, whose remarks at the annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Saturday (July 26) were reported by Reuters.

Li’s comments came days after President Donald Trump unveiled an AI blueprint designed to expand American AI exports to its allies, an effort designed to bolster the U.S.’s advantage against China in the AI race.

While Li did not specifically mention the U.S., Reuters said, he did appear to refer to White House efforts to hinder China’s AI advances, warning that the technology could become the “exclusive game” of a few countries and companies.

He added that China wants AI to be shared among all countries, particularly the “Global South,” or developing/lower-income economies concentrated in the Southern Hemisphere.

Regulating AI’s growing risks was another worry, Li said, adding that roadblocks included an insufficient supply of AI chips and rules limiting talent exchange.

“Overall global AI governance is still fragmented. Countries have great differences particularly in terms of areas such as regulatory concepts, institutional rules,” he said.

“We should strengthen coordination to form a global AI governance framework that has broad consensus as soon as possible.”

In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote last week about the prevalence of phony AI agents. While companies are being deluged by vendors who want to sell them agents, most of the systems on the market aren’t truly agentic, according to a report from business research and insights firm Gartner. According to that report, just 130 of the thousands of AI agent systems touted by vendors are actually real.

Agentic AI, or systems that have the autonomy to plan, reason and act toward goals without much — or any — human input, is being conflated with simpler tools without those capabilities.

“Many vendors are contributing to the hype by engaging in ‘agent washing’ — the rebranding of existing products, such as AI assistants, robotic process automation (RPA) and chatbots, without substantial agentic capabilities,” Gartner wrote.

Vendor selection is crucial. When CFOs look into deploying generative AI, 25% said reliance on vendors was one of the drawbacks to integration, according to a PYMNTS Intelligence report from May of last year. Jump ahead a year and CFOs have grown much more comfortable with generative AI but are not sure if agentic AI is “battle-ready,” according to a more recent PYMNTS Intelligence report.