China proposes five-part BRICS AI plan

China’s Xi Jinping proposed a five-initiative BRICS cooperation program on September 13, putting AI, trade, digital industry, smart manufacturing, and talent development on the same industrial-policy agenda. The official summit announcement says China’s AI initiative will support cooperation on developing and applying large language models, while Xi’s full speech calls for open-source development and an AI-empowered new-industrialization initiative. Builders targeting Global South deployments should file this as a market signal—not an operating standard yet—and watch whether open-weight compatibility, shared R&D, and regional supply-chain partners become procurement requirements, much as Mistral’s sovereign-AI economics show that local control can be part of the product.