What Is BRICS, and Why Is Xi Jinping Proposing a BRICS 'Open-Source AI Zone'?

The country hosting the summit is the one BRICS member that didn’t join China’s AI club.

That’s the part worth holding onto. On Sunday, at the closing session of the 18th BRICS summit in New Delhi, Xi Jinping announced that China would “pioneer the establishment of a BRICS AI open-source community” — an “open-source zone for artificial intelligence” spanning the bloc. Two months earlier, 29 countries signed the founding agreement of the World AI Cooperation Organization in Shanghai. Brazil signed. Russia signed. South Africa, Indonesia, and Ethiopia signed. India, standing at the podium as this year’s BRICS chair, did not.

So the proposal is real and the enthusiasm is not evenly distributed. To see why, you need to know what BRICS is, and what “open source” is actually doing in this sentence.

BRICS is a coordination forum, not an institution

The acronym started as a bank note. Jim O’Neill, then at Goldman Sachs, coined “BRIC” in 2001 to label four large economies he thought would dominate growth. The countries then did something unusual: they adopted the marketing term and started holding summits. First leaders’ meeting in 2009, South Africa added in 2010 to make the S.

Expansion came much later and much faster. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE joined on January 1, 2024. Indonesia joined in January 2025. Saudi Arabia was invited in 2023 and has spent the years since being listed as a member on official BRICS materials while declining to formally accede — Riyadh keeps the trade and energy benefits without signing away optionality with Washington. Depending on how you count Saudi Arabia, BRICS is 10 or 11 members, plus a partner tier of about ten more.

The aggregate numbers are genuinely large: roughly 41% of global GDP on a purchasing-power basis against the G7’s 28%, and just under half the world’s population, about 3.9 billion people. The composition is lopsided, though. China alone is 48.5% of the bloc’s GDP; India is another 20.7%. Two members are two-thirds of the economy.

And here’s the thing that makes headlines about BRICS decisions misleading: there’s no treaty, no permanent secretariat, no binding instrument. Everything runs on consensus and rotating chairship. India chaired 2026 and got the New Delhi Declaration adopted on September 12 — UN and IMF reform, terrorism, West Asia, and a section on AI governance emphasizing Global South access and trustworthy systems. China chairs 2027.

A declaration is a press release that eleven governments agreed not to veto. That’s not nothing. It’s also not a commitment to build anything.

What Xi actually put on the table

The AI zone was item one of a five-point plan. In full, the first point covers: establishing a BRICS AI open-source community, supporting cooperation on developing and applying large language models, running AI seminars and training courses, and building an open AI ecosystem. The other four points are a BRICS special economic zone partnership, a digital ecosystem cloud platform, help building smart factories and manufacturing standards, and an engineer training alliance with a youth exchange program.

Notice what isn’t in there. No funding figure. No compute commitment — no shared cluster, no GPU allocation, no inference capacity. No timeline, no governance body, no named models. The concrete deliverables in point one are a community, a mailing list’s worth of institutional scaffolding, and training courses.

Which doesn’t make it hollow. It makes it cheap, and cheap is the strategy.

Open source is what you compete with when you can’t sell chips

US export controls cut China off from the top end of Nvidia’s product line. The response, across DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen, Moonshot, and Zhipu, was to get efficient — leaner architectures, aggressive mixture-of-experts sparsity, models that train and serve on hardware a tier or two down. Then release the weights.

That combination does something specific to the market. If your competitor’s advantage is a proprietary model served from data centers full of chips you can’t buy, you can’t beat them on the stack. But you can make the model layer worth zero. A free MIT-licensed model that gets 90% of the way there kills the subscription revenue that pays for the stack. Chinese open-weight models now out-download American ones on Hugging Face, and in Global South developer ecosystems — where the binding constraint is cost per token, not the last two points on a benchmark — they’re already the default.

The American offer is the mirror image. Pax Silica, launched out of the State Department, signs partners up for secure supply chains and full-stack American AI; Commerce’s American AI Exports Program requires consortium proposals where more than half the components are US-made, and State is piloting a “concierge” service across roughly 270 diplomatic posts to help signatories buy the hardware, power, cooling, and software as a package.

One side sells you the whole stack and wants you inside its supply chain. The other gives away the layer it can’t sell you and wants you building on its ecosystem. New Delhi was a sales pitch, delivered to the room with the most undecided customers in it.

The part that undercuts it

Since July 2026, China’s Ministry of Commerce has been meeting with Alibaba, ByteDance, and Z.ai about restricting overseas access to Chinese AI models. A tiered framework floated in a Supreme People’s Court journal would put basic tools under a filing requirement, intermediate systems under security review, and frontier models under domestic-use-only restriction, with criminal penalties discussed for distilling Chinese models. The consultations reportedly cover unreleased frontier models and open-weight releases both.

No rule has been published, and Reuters reported it may bind only future models — DeepSeek’s and Qwen’s already-released weights are out in the world permanently. But it means Beijing is building a software-layer export control regime that rhymes with the hardware one Washington built, at the same moment it’s offering an open-source zone to eleven countries. Open, tiered by recipient, is a different product than open.

India’s abstention from WAICO reads differently in that light. India has its own models, its own compute buildout, and a chair’s preference for outcomes over communiqués — Modi spent the summit pressing BRICS to deliver concrete things rather than statements. Being handed free weights by the bloc’s largest economy is not obviously the deal it looks like.

China takes the BRICS chair next year and hosts the 19th summit. That’s the deadline that matters: if the open-source zone is real, by then it has to be something you can actually clone.

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