Two rooms. Xi meets Trump in Washington on 24 Sept over AI cyberattacks and copied models. In New Delhi he offered BRICS an “open-source” zone, a digital cloud, and engineer training. Author: most states want a file they can run and retrain if U.S. ties sour.

Downloads beat speeches. Qwen passed 3 billion downloads in August; Chinese models took over 30% of OpenRouter U.S. tokens since February (peak 46%). SEA-LION and Sahabat-AI ride cheap open weights; Africa holds ~0.6% of world data-center capacity. The declaration is closer to open-weight than full open source; India has its own labs.

Cartel or commons. Anthropic (10 Sept): ~200 million alleged distillation hits by Chinese labs, 151 million tied to Alibaba—unaudited telemetry; Beijing denied it. Amodei wants capability caps plus chip denial. A July open-weights letter (now 270 firms, not Anthropic) calls distillation normal. Author: keep a cyber channel, skip a ceiling cartel, fund U.S. open weights and training; test whether Beijing’s licenses and compute actually arrive before it chairs BRICS in 2027.

When Xi Jinping sits down with Donald Trump in Washington on September 24, the American side plans to raise AI-directed cyberattacks and accusations that Chinese labs copied U.S. models. Less than two weeks earlier in New Delhi, Xi offered the BRICS bloc something incredibly valuable and low-cost: an open-source AI zone, a digital industry cloud platform, and a BRICS engineer-training alliance.

The two agendas describe different contests. Washington is arguing over who gets to hold the best model. Most of the world is asking for something plainer: can a health ministry in Jakarta or Pretoria........

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