Pakistan has joined China’s AI body. Now comes the hard part

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Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar spent last week in a Shanghai signing room, putting Pakistan’s name to the founding charter of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), a new China-led body for AI governance. Twenty-eight other states signed alongside him, from Russia to Indonesia to Kazakhstan. No tanks moved. No treaty was renegotiated. But beneath the export controls and the compute gap separating American and Chinese frontier models sits a second, quieter contest: whose rules, whose standards bodies, and whose training pipelines middle-income states plug into as they build AI capacity. That contest just reached Islamabad, and it will reach dozens of other capitals in the years ahead. 

The case for WAICO membership is diversification, not a vote for Chinese AI over American AI. Pakistan already depends on China for infrastructure, telecom, and energy through CPEC; AI cooperation extends a relationship that predates the current technology race by decades. Islamabad gains knowledge transfer, joint research, and training pipelines it cannot easily obtain elsewhere, while maintaining that it remains free to buy American cloud services and adopt European regulatory templates. 

The argument is coherent. It is also familiar. Pakistan made comparable claims about non-alignment at Bandung in 1955, about its nuclear program in the 1970s, and about IMF programs run in parallel with Chinese loans. The........

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