The other side of the US-China AI race
The timing is the story. On September 12, 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published We Must Pace the Frontier, an essay arguing that AI has been advancing drastically faster since the summer because AI systems increasingly build the next generation of AI, per the DW September 2026 coverage. Amodei explicitly framed pacing as a geopolitical necessity, warning that a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger and that pacing within democracies is limited by the lead US companies hold over authoritarian regimes.
The essay drew public backing from OpenAI's Sam Altman, xAI's Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis within a day. Altman wrote that he agreed the frontier needs pacing and committed OpenAI to the same embedded-evaluator model Amodei proposed, per the Anadolu Agency September 2026 coverage. Read against that debate, Xi's New Delhi announcement is the mirror image: where US lab leaders are arguing to slow capability gains to preserve safety and a democratic lead, Beijing is proposing to spread AI capability-building across the Global South through an open, cooperative ecosystem.
What the AI Open Source Zone could mean in practice
The announcement did not include implementation details, funding commitments, or governance rules, so the concrete shape of the zone remains open, per the Reuters via Al-Monitor September 2026 coverage. The stated scope covers three layers: large language model cooperation, AI training, and an open AI ecosystem. For member economies without frontier labs of their own, the pitch is lower barriers to building local AI capability on shared foundations instead of depending on a handful of US providers.
Modi framed the ambition in his own remarks: the benefits of solutions developed within BRICS should not stay limited to BRICS alone, but be made adaptable and accessible to meet the needs of the Global South. Putin told the same session that BRICS is a powerful driving force toward a new, fairer and multipolar world order, urging members to combine the competitive advantages of their individual economies.
Implementation timeline and the 2027 China chairmanship
China chairs BRICS in 2027, taking over from India. The Beijing-driven follow-through is expected to start with the BRICS Service Trade Forum in early 2027, with the AI Open Source Zone formalised through a combination of working-group meetings, model-release announcements, and bilateral compute-sharing arrangements, per the Anadolu Agency September 2026 coverage. No treaty or binding agreement was signed in New Delhi, but the direction of travel is now on the record.
Two milestones to watch in 2027: the first formal BRICS AI working-group meeting (expected in the first quarter of 2027 under China's chairship) and the first open-weight BRICS model release (expected by mid-2027, likely led by a Chinese AI Tiger company). The model release will be the strongest signal of whether the zone is a real platform or a political statement.
Why this matters for AI watchers
First, the zone formalizes a second, non-Western track of AI development policy at head-of-state level, which will shape how model access, compute, and training data flow across a bloc representing roughly 50 percent of the world's population and 40 percent of global GDP, per the Straits Times September 2026 coverage. Second, it lands amid the industry's most intense safety week of the year, with researcher resignations, a threat-intelligence report, and congressional legislation to ban superintelligence all in the same news cycle. Third, China's 2027 chairship means the AI zone gets a full year of Beijing-driven follow-through, starting with the Service Trade Forum.
For engineers and analysts tracking open-source AI, the zone is a signal to watch model licensing, dataset sharing, and compute-pooling arrangements between Chinese, Indian, Russian, and Gulf AI programs over the next twelve months. The most likely technical starting point is a Chinese open-weight model (Qwen, DeepSeek, or Yi) shared as the reference architecture, with member economies contributing datasets and compute.
Resources and next steps
- Reuters BRICS coverage: reuters.com
- Al-Monitor BRICS analysis: al-monitor.com
- The Straits Times BRICS coverage: straitstimes.com
- Official Xinhua summary of Xi's closing-session remarks: xinhuanet.com
- BRICS 2027 chairship programme: expected Q1 2027 release at brics-russia2024.ru (legacy URL repurposed)
Fazlur Rahman
