Global AI governance initiative charts a fairer way to share AI value

Editor's note: Liu Ming is an assistant researcher at the Department of Economic Forecasting, State Information Center.

The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

In 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted by consensus a China-sponsored resolution on international cooperation in AI capacity building.

The Global AI Governance Action Plan was released; and in July this year in Shanghai, 29 countries signed the agreement to establish the World AI Cooperation Organization.

The initiative has moved from concept to action, and it is driving a deeper change in how the value of AI is distributed.

Open source ecosystems unlock the source of value creation Today, AI value is concentrated in a few closed-source giants, and platform companies collect high rents by controlling ecosystem gateways.

The Chinese approach instead supports a thriving open source ecosystem.

Open weights lower barriers and put model capabilities in the hands of more developers.

China-developed open-source AI models have passed 10 billion cumulative downloads globally, AtomGit has topped 11 million users, and China-led models took 17.1% of Hugging Face downloads in the year to August 2025 — the top country share.

Open source also lowers the cost of access.

OpenAI GPT-5.5 charges 55 times as much as DeepSeek V4 Flash for input and 166 times as much for output, and on OpenRouter the share of tokens processed by open source models rose from 34% in January 2026 to 65% in June.

Value creation is shifting from monopoly by a few firms to shared creation worldwide.

Capacity building reverses the one-way flow of value The Global South has long served as a supplier of raw data.

Data flows out cheaply while digital products flow back at high prices.