The Semiotics of a Systems Theoretical Application of Chinese New Era Marxist-Leninism in AI Systems for the World-- Reflections on 习近平在2026世界人工智能大会暨人工智能全球治理高级别会议开幕式上的主旨讲话 [Keynote speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping at opening ceremony of 2026 World AI Conference]

 

Pix credit here (Join the March, 1971)

Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the 2026 World AI Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in Shanghai, east China, July 17, 2026. Actually he gave two speeches on AI Governance,. The first was delivered on 1 July 2026 to mark the 105th anniversary of thje Communist Party of China. My reflections on those remarks and its text in English and Chinese may be accessed at: Reflections on 习近平：在庆祝中国共产党成立105周年大会上的讲话 [Xi Jinping: Speech at the Gathering Celebrating the 105th Anniversary of the Founding of the Communist Party of China].

The second, the the subject of my reflections here, was entitled Joining Hands to Build a Just and Equitable System For Global AI Governance (English) and 携手构建公正合理的全球人工智能治理体系 (Chinese). Both versions appear below. The immediate object of the remarks was to welcome the formation of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, formed on 16 July 2026, and which China's Wiki, Baidu, describes as  

an independent intergovernmental international organization. It follows the purposes of the United Nations Charter, adheres to the concept of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits, and upholds the people-centered principle. Its aims are to promote international cooperation and global governance in Artificial Intelligence, ensuring the healthy and orderly development of Artificial Intelligence in a beneficial, safe, and equitable direction for the benefit of all humanity.
Representatives from 29 countries, including Madiev, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development of Kazakhstan ; Thongsavanh, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Laos; Dar, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan ; Oreshkin, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office of Russia ; and Airlangga, Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs of Indonesia, signed the agreement, becoming founding member states. Representatives from countries and international organizations, including United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres , attended the ceremony.

 The General Secretary added some normative substance to that description in his 17 July remarks--a normative substance that was, on important ways, closely aligned with the normative substance of the General Secretary's remarks on the 105th anniversary of the CPC.

This reporting addresses the keynote address delivered by President Xi Jinping at the opening ceremony of the 2026 World AI Conference (WAIC) and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in Shanghai, on the occasion of the founding of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO). It proceeds in seven parts: (I) a comparison of the Chinese source text against the official English rendering; (II) a summary of the speech; (III) a reading of the speech through the analytical apparatus developed in my own prior work on Chinese governance, constitutionalism, and data-driven global order; (IV) the speech's grounding in New Era Marxist-Leninist doctrine and the Third and Fourth Plenums; (V) a systems-theoretic reading, using and testing the limits of Luhmann's functional differentiation and structural coupling; (VI) a semiotic reading of the speech as a closed, self-legitimating system of signification; and (VII) a survey of how the speech and the founding of WAICO were received internationally, with citations.

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One point worth noting about my reflections; its focus on analysis through a semiotic lens is meant to escape the inevitable flattening of conventional analysis that tends to elaborate some sort of "geopolitics with Chinese characteristics." That is useful for political discourse and makes it easier for public intellectuals to reach the masses in ways that sound exciting--like another episode in the "Real Housewives" of "X" [insert a place of choice] series with Chinese characteristics. I focus more specifically on three analytical spaces: (1) a Chinese New Era Marxist Leninist substrate, (2) a systems theory substrate, and (3) a more traditionally semiotic substrate. 

These three--the Marxist-Leninist analytical substrate, the question of the speech as a systems-theory question, and the semiotic reading of the performance of the announcement and its object (WAICO)--aren't three separate lenses  — they're the same claim at three levels. Chinese New Era Marxist-Leninist  doctrine (Part IV) is meant to supply the content of the code that would have to be built into the machine's recursive parameters (Part V), and the speech's own rhetorical form (Part VI) is already rehearsing, at the level of text, the closure that the institution and the architecture are enacting at the level of governance and code. Once one is open to "seeing" that, the "rival bloc" reading that dominates the press coverage looks less like a competing interpretation and more like a category error — it's describing a contest between two chess players when the actual proposal may be that one side wants to change what counts as a legal move; or perhaps better suit the Chinese want to play Go while the Americans insist on Chess; and they mean to use the same board, repainted and repurposed for their respective objectives.

 

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Part I. Comparing the Chinese and English Texts

Both texts were released together by Chinese state media as a single bilingual document, and the English is best understood not as an independent translation but as an official rendering produced by China's own translation apparatus (Xinhua/State Council Information Office) for an international audience. Overall, the English tracks the Chinese closely at the level of argument, structure, and sequencing — the four numbered principles, the enumerated announcements, and the rhetorical questions all appear in the same order with the same weight. The differences that do appear are consistent and telling: they cluster around (1) classical and literary allusions, which are translated for sense but stripped of their cultural or scholarly lineage; (2) ideologically loaded domestic-policy terms, which are softened into blander English equivalents; (3) wordplay, which is simply casualties of translation; and (4) diplomatic protocol markers, which are added in English but absent from the Chinese original, since Chinese state protocol does not apply honorifics to its own head of state. 

 

 The Overall assessment. The translation is faithful at the propositional level — a policy analyst relying solely on the English would not be misled about what China is proposing. What is lost is texture: the Confucian and Legalist allusions, the Fei Xiaotong reference, and the Chinese-manufacturing wordplay all root the speech in a specifically Chinese intellectual and political vocabulary that signals continuity with decades of domestic ideological formulas (“activist government,” “thousand-li horse,” “garden of civilizations”). These allusions do real work for the Chinese-language audience — they naturalize a state-centric, harmony-oriented vision of technology governance as the organic expression of Chinese civilizational values — work that the plainer English cannot do for an international audience unfamiliar with the references.

Part II. Summary of the Speech

Xi opens by tracing seventy years of AI research from the 1956 Dartmouth workshop to the present “wave” of AI development, framing the Shanghai gathering as a historic inflection point comparable to the steam engine, electrification, and the internet. He poses four questions he says the world must answer together: how humanity should coexist with thinking machines, how to secure algorithmic decision-making, how governance can keep pace with technology's ethical challenges, and how to prevent AI from widening global inequality.

He then offers what China frames as its answer: a four-point program for global AI governance — (1) open, win-win innovation, with AI moving from the “digital world” into the “physical world” and benefiting “all sectors and businesses”; (2) risk-awareness and controllability, keeping AI “always under human control” while rejecting the “overstretching” of national-security concepts by any one country over another — a direct reference to U.S. export controls on advanced chips; (3) inclusiveness and cross-civilizational learning, so that AI's development does not erode cultural diversity; and (4) solidarity through multilateral governance centered on the United Nations, aimed particularly at helping the Global South close the AI and digital divide.

The speech then turns to domestic achievement and diplomacy. Xi cites China's 15th Five-Year Plan, its combination of “efficient market” and “well-functioning government,” a smart-economy sector he says now exceeds RMB 1 trillion, and a parallel commitment to safety regulation (“safe, reliable, and controllable” AI). He recounts a sequence of Chinese-led initiatives — the Global AI Governance Initiative, the U.N. resolution on AI capacity-building, the AI Capacity-Building Action Plan for Good and for All, the AI Plus International Cooperation Initiative — that culminate in the centerpiece announcement: the founding, in Shanghai, of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), which he calls a milestone answering the Global South's call for a greater voice in AI governance.

He closes with concrete pledges — 5,000 AI training and seminar slots for developing countries over five years; new AI application-cooperation centers with ASEAN, the Arab League, the African Union, CELAC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and BRICS; and deployment of China's “Mazu” AI-powered meteorological warning system in 30 countries — and with a call, framed through classical Chinese proverbs, for AI development to be a “symphony,” not a “solo performance,” guided by human wisdom and international consensus. 

Pix credit here (Sange Daibiao; The CPC represents the development demands of Choina's advanced productive forces

Part III. Reading the Speech 

Reading the General Secretary's remarks through a conventional political lens is interesting, and necessary, especially for those whose world is shaped by and in  and around political constraints and ways of engaging with the world. But it is hardly the stuff of understanding what may be going on at a conceptual level, at a level that drives and shapes politics without centering it in the discourse. It is this understanding that drives the suggestion that the key to the General Secretary's remarks on 16 July cannot be fully grasped without a deeper appreciation of the trust of the Secretary General's 1 July 2026 remarks. 

Where does all this point? The speech's forward horizon is easy enough to read as generic exhortation — inevitably bound up and reaffirming the notion that the Socialist Path is not merely a road but perhaps also a conveyor belt on which the masses under the leadership of the CPC must move in the inevitable direction through the vicissitudes of each stage of its historical development until it reaches its goal. In the middle of the 21st century, that requires engagement with what the CPC has named the "Second Centenary Goal." At the same time it appears tied more precisely to two things held in view simultaneously: resolving the currently codified principal contradiction, and continuing to operationalize the developmental half of the Basic Line into an ever more elaborate policy stack. That is, as I have emphasized before--socialist modernization is the framework as well as the object and the action that animates appropriate movement along the Socialist Path. The Five-Sphere Integrated Plan, the Four-Pronged Comprehensive Strategy, the "new development philosophy," the "new development pattern," "high-quality development," "Chinese-style modernization" — these are not free-standing slogans but successive, increasingly specific operationalizations of the same developmental mandate the Basic Line first fixed as "one central task." Their cumulative job is to translate an abstract contradiction-formula into a stack of executable programs whose success is explicitly bound, at mid-century, to "building in all respects a great modern socialist country." The closing urgency is therefore not merely rhetorical: it asserts that the window for resolving the current iteration of the contradiction through the current operational stack is itself finite, and that missing it would be a failure of the Basic Line's operationalization, not just of policy execution. (Reflections on 习近平：在庆祝中国共产党成立105周年大会上的讲话 [Xi Jinping: Speech at the Gathering Celebrating the 105th Anniversary of the Founding of the Communist Party of China].)

 1. The “Official” (士) versus the “Merchant” (商)

In my commentary on China's 2025 Global AI Governance Action Plan, I attempted to distinguish the ethos of the U.S. AI Action Plan — which he characterized as that of the “Merchant” (商), oriented toward markets, deregulation, and national commercial advantage — from the ethos of the Chinese plan, which he characterized as that of the “Official” (士): a mandarin-bureaucratic sensibility in which the state defines the proper, virtuous use of a technology and channels private activity toward publicly-set ends. (See more fully developed version in The Conceptual Architecture of America First—Ideological Transactionalism and the Case of Cuba) This 2026 keynote reproduces that ethos in concentrated form: AI is repeatedly described as something to be kept “always under human control,” anchored to the “right direction,” and “oversight and governance” that must be made “precise” — the vocabulary of stewardship and correct guidance rather than of market competition. 

2. Institutionalizing an operating system for global order

My broader argument — developed with respect to social credit and data governance — is that China is not merely proposing rules but building an institutional “operating system” that other governance orders (public and private, domestic and international) can be plugged into, with China occupying the position of systems architect. Read this way, WAICO is the institutional payload toward which the entire lineage of prior instruments (the 2023 Global AI Governance Initiative, the 2024 AI Capacity-Building Action Plan, the 2025 Global AI Governance Action Plan) was always building. Each prior document, in Backer's reading of the 2025 Action Plan, rationalized a baseline of principles — “sovereign equality,” “people-centered,” “shared benefits” — that could then be embedded in an international institutional organ; WAICO is that organ now realized, with Shanghai, rather than Geneva or San Francisco, as its seat. 

3. The North-South axis, and the conspicuous absence of North-North

I have earlier noted noted of the 2024 Action Plan that its cooperation architecture is organized around a North-South and a South-South axis, with a North-North axis excluded “by silence” — a structure he read as treating Western coordination among developed states as the illegitimate object against which the whole project is constructed. The founding membership of WAICO — reported to include Russia, Brazil, Pakistan, Indonesia, and roughly twenty other developing and non-Western states, with no G7 economy among them — fits this structure exactly, and the speech's pledges (training slots, cooperation centers with ASEAN, the African Union, the Arab League, CELAC, the SCO, and BRICS) are all South-oriented capacity-building instruments, never North-North ones. Part IV below asks whether this exclusion is merely tactical, or structural.

Part IV. The Marxist-Leninist Normative Substrate: New Era Theory, the Fundamental Political Line, and the Third and Fourth Plenums

Much commentary on this speech — including the press coverage surveyed in Part VII — reads it as geopolitics: China versus the United States, a rival bloc against “Pax Silica.” That reading is accurate but incomplete, because it treats the speech's vocabulary (“people-centered,” “shared prosperity,” “openness,” “high-quality development”) as generic developmentalist language, freely interchangeable with liberal-democratic usage. Within CPC doctrine, however, each of these terms is technical, load-bearing, and non-negotiable, and the speech's international vocabulary is best read as the outward-facing dialect of a domestic ideological system that has just been formally reaffirmed and operationalized. 

The Fourth Plenum backdrop

The speech was delivered nine months after the Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee (October 20–23, 2025), which adopted the Recommendations for the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) — the very plan the speech invokes when it announces that “this year marks the start of China's ‘15th Five-Year Plan.’” The Fourth Plenum communiqué reaffirmed Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as the Party's guiding ideology, restated the “Two Upholds” (upholding Xi's core position and the Central Committee's authority), and organized its program around the paired formulas “progress amid stability” and “security amid reform,” with technological self-reliance and the convergence of mechanization, informatization, and “intelligentization” (AI, in Party parlance) named as central tasks. WAICO and the keynote are not adjacent to this domestic program; they are its international-facing continuation, delivered by the same “core” leadership, under the same ideological banner, within the same five-year planning cycle. 

“New quality productive forces” (新质生产力)

Since 2023, Xi has advanced “new quality productive forces” as the theoretical frame for technology-led growth, elevated further in the Third Plenum's 2024 reform decision. The doctrine is explicitly Marxist in structure: it identifies advanced technology — AI foremost among current examples — as the decisive contemporary productive force whose development determines the pace of the transition to “socialist modernization,” and which therefore falls, as productive forces always have in Marxist theory, within the province of Party direction over the relations of production built around it. Read against this doctrine, the speech's claim that AI is “moving from the digital world into the physical world,” and its recitation of a smart-economy sector exceeding RMB 1 trillion, is not neutral economic reporting; it is a claim that AI has arrived as a new-quality productive force, and the passage that follows immediately — China's insistence on holding development and security “equal in emphasis” — is the corollary that Marxist productive-forces theory requires: a productive force this consequential cannot be left to develop outside of Party-directed relations of production. 

“Coordinating development and security” (统筹发展和安全) as the fundamental political line, exported

China's “fundamental political line” — economic construction as the center, flanked by the Four Cardinal Principles (Party leadership, the socialist road, Marxism-Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought, and people's democratic dictatorship) on one side and reform-and-opening on the other — has since the 19th Party Congress been operationalized through the formula “coordinate development and security” (统筹发展和安全), a phrase the Fourth Plenum communiqué restated as “progress amid stability, security amid reform.” This is the domestic doctrine the speech projects outward almost verbatim: its second principle pairs a call for “risk-awareness” and keeping AI “always under human control” with an insistence that no state “overstretch” the national-security concept against another. Domestically, “security” functions as a precondition of legitimate development, not its opposite — which is why the speech can, without contradiction in Party terms, call simultaneously for maximal openness (principle one) and maximal control (principle two). Understood this way, WAICO is not asking states to balance two independent values that a liberal framework would also recognize (innovation and safety); it is asking them to adopt a specific, doctrinally fused unit — development-as-inseparable-from-security — whose content and priority ordering are set by the same “core” authority that sets it domestically. 

Why this matters for reading WAICO

The practical upshot is that WAICO's founding vocabulary cannot be fully understood as an alternative technical standards body sitting beside the U.N. Independent International Scientific Panel on AI or a Western-led equivalent. Its constitutive language — “people-centered,” “safe, reliable, controllable,” “development and security” — is drawn from, and remains answerable to, the ideological formulas the Fourth Plenum just re-anchored as China's guiding doctrine for 2026–2030. This is the sense in which the Marxist-Leninist normative lens ought to be foregrounded rather than treated as background color: the speech is not merely advancing Chinese national interest in a contest with the United States, it is proposing that the specific doctrinal architecture of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” — productive-forces theory, the fused development-security formula, Party-centered direction of technology — supply the normative operating system for a portion of the world's AI governance. That is, in effect, what liberal democratic systems are already seeking to engage with, especially its consequences, but in a way that for the moment still misses the essential point. See Meta Oversight Board Report: "Are LLM's Stifling Political Speech: An Assessment of How AI Models Protect Free Expression". The problem is not application--the central element of the analysis of the engineer. The problem (or challenge depending on one's value cage) is in the conceptualization, in the formation of the structures within which a machine system can compute the expected, the ordinary within what has been constructed as the boundaries and trajectories of its reality, including its hard stops--the central element of theory.

The focus of Part V then follows from this proffered insight. It asks what that means once one stops treating “governance” as a layer of rules applied to an otherwise neutral technology, and starts asking whether the doctrine is meant to be built into the recursive architecture of the machines themselves.

Part V. Functional Differentiation, Structural Coupling, and the Limits of Systems Theory

Niklas Luhmann's account of world society describes modern social order as functionally differentiated into operationally closed subsystems — law, coded legal/illegal; science, coded true/false; the economy, coded payment/non-payment; politics, coded government/opposition — each autopoietically reproducing itself from its own elements, each “structurally coupled” to the others, and each capable of being “irritated” (perturbed, given occasion to reconstruct its own internal states) by events in neighboring systems without those events directly determining what happens inside it. Applied naively to global AI governance, this model would predict something like a multipolar order of differentiated-but-coupled regulatory regimes: a Chinese AI system, a European one, an American one, each pursuing its own internal logic, each irritated by and adaptively responsive to the others' moves, without any one absorbing the others.

That is broadly how most press coverage described the emerging landscape (Part VII): WAICO versus “Pax Silica,” two blocs, two standards regimes, presumably capable of eventual coupling through diplomacy, trade, or technical interoperability agreements, the way differentiated nation-states have long coexisted. The question worth foregrounding is whether that coupling model is adequate to what the speech, read against Parts III and IV, is actually proposing. 

Machine systems as a new kind of function system

AI systems are not merely another node within the political or economic function systems; they are increasingly recursive cognitive infrastructures — systems that train on their own and each other's outputs, that mediate the communications by which other function systems (politics, law, science, the economy) observe their environments, and that are consequently becoming a condition for the operation of those other systems rather than simply one more actor within them. If a function system's code is the binary distinction that organizes its every operation, the relevant question for an AI system is: what binary distinction is built into its recursive architecture as the condition of a “valid” or “safe” output? This is precisely what is contested here, and it is not a question international-relations analysis, focused on states and blocs, is well equipped to see. 

Two incommensurable baseline parameters, not two differentiated systems

A liberal-democratic AI governance baseline — whatever the real variation between the U.S. and EU approaches — presupposes as a structural parameter that no single political authority gets to define the true or legitimate output; correction runs instead through contestation, markets, courts, and elections external to the system. The Chinese model that this speech projects outward, consistent with Part IV, builds a different parameter into the recursive loop itself: outputs must remain compatible with Party-state authority to define what counts as correct, safe, and stable — not as an external regulatory constraint bolted onto an otherwise neutral technology, but (per the “new quality productive forces” doctrine) as a constitutive feature of what the technology is for. If that is right, the two are not differentiated subsystems of one world society, mutually legible and structurally coupled the way two adjacent legal systems or two competing currencies are; they are two candidate recursive architectures whose foundational codes cannot be translated into one another without one ceasing to be itself. A system built to bracket any single political authority's claim to define truth cannot be structurally coupled, at the level of its own operating code, to a system built to make Party authority over that same question a constitutive parameter — the two are, in that specific sense, playing different games rather than differentiated positions within the same one. 

Why the Western exclusion may be structural, not tactical

On this reading, the absence of any G7 economy from WAICO's founding membership (Part VII) is not simply the residue of tactical bloc politics or of the U.S.–China trade and export-control dispute; it may be closer to a structural necessity. If WAICO's governance vocabulary is meant to travel all the way down into the recursive constitution of the systems it certifies as “safe, reliable, and controllable,” then a liberal-democratic state whose own constitutional baseline forbids assigning any single political authority that certifying role could not join without either contradiction or an unacknowledged change of its own baseline parameters. This would make the proposal considerably more ambitious than the “rival regulatory bloc” framing that dominates the press coverage in Part VII: not an alternative institution alongside existing ones, competing for members, but a bid to fix, at the level of a machine's own constitutive code, which political ontology counts as the default — and to recruit enough of the world's states, infrastructure, and training data into that architecture that it becomes, for a large share of the planet, not one pole among several but the only operative system. This is well understood. See, e.g., Fu Xinhua, "Diversified Trends in Global AI Legislation and the Chinese Model [付新华, 全球人工智能立法的多元趋势与中国模式 ] (SJTU LAW REVIEW 60-73 (2025)) (Looking to the future, China's AI legislation should systematically respond to key issues such as “whether to legislate, when to legislate, what to legislate, and how to legislate”, follow the three-stage evolutionary path of “promotion law — basic law — comprehensive law”, and build an AI governance system that fits national conditions, has technological adaptability and international competitiveness).

Where Luhmann's own theory pushes back

A caution is in order, and it comes from within Luhmann's own theory rather than against it. Luhmann was consistently skeptical that any single social power — including an authoritarian state — can fully colonize another function system's code without degrading that system's own performance: science that is made to answer to political correctness rather than to true/false stops reproducing itself as science; an economy micromanaged by political command rather than organized around payment/non-payment loses the efficiencies that differentiation produces. If AI systems are already partially autopoietic — reproducing technical competence according to something like their own internal code (does the model perform, is the output coherent, does the system generalize) — then building Party-authority into their constitutive parameters risks the same de-differentiation costs that centralized command has historically imposed on science and markets: a system whose recursive core is politically overwritten may prove less capable, not merely differently governed. Whether WAICO's member systems will in fact display this degradation, or whether AI is different enough from earlier function systems that the constitutive fusion of politics and code can be sustained without the classical costs, is an empirical question the speech does not — and structurally cannot — settle for itself; it is asserted, not demonstrated, and the assertion is precisely the kind of claim a purely political or geopolitical reading of the speech has no vocabulary to even notice as a claim.

Part VI. The Semiotics of the Speech: Closed Recursive Signification and the Construction of Political Subjectivity

The press coverage in Part VII treats the speech as an instrument: a tool a pre-existing political actor (“China,” “Xi”) uses to accomplish external ends (recruit the Global South, needle Washington). A semiotic reading asks the reverse question — not what the speech is used to do, but how its own textual operations produce the speaking subject and its audience as they go, i.e., how enunciation constitutes an enunciator rather than merely expressing one that already existed. 

The catechetical structure of the four questions

The speech's four rhetorical questions — how to coexist with thinking machines, how to secure algorithmic decision-making, how governance keeps pace with technology's ethical challenges, how to realize AI for all — are not posed as open questions awaiting contest; they are posed so that an already-prepared, four-point answer can be delivered immediately afterward. This call-and-authoritative-response form is a recognizable genre in Party pedagogical practice (document study sessions, “two studies, one action” campaigns), in which a problem is raised only so that the correct, pre-existing resolution can be pronounced by the party best positioned to pronounce it. At the level of form, the text therefore performs the very thing Parts IV and V describe at the level of doctrine and system architecture: development-and-security, problem-and-directed-solution, are not just the content of the speech but its rhetorical procedure. The voice that answers is, by the act of answering, constituted as the position from which correct answers issue — prior to, and unconditioned by, the international deliberation the speech is ostensibly convening.

Classical allusion as self-referential closure

The classical allusions — the thousand-li horse, the proverb that a single string cannot make music, the Legalist maxim on the wise adapting to the times, the Fei Xiaotong-derived garden-of-civilizations image — do more than decorate an argument aimed at outsiders. Each certifies its own validity purely by reference to an internal Chinese textual tradition (“we often say in China,” “as ancient Chinese observed”), asking no external confirmation and offering none. This is a closed loop of signification: authority is generated recursively from within the same civilizational archive the speech is, in the same gesture, constructing as authoritative for a global audience. Nothing in the text's own semiotic economy allows that archive's authority to be adjudicated from outside it — which is exactly the property the speech needs if it is to function, per Part V, as a system whose own code supplies its criteria of legitimacy rather than submitting to an external one. 

The Global South as a sign under construction

“The Global South” functions in the speech not as a pre-existing empirical bloc the text merely describes, but as a subject-position the text calls into being by simultaneously supplying its grievance (widening divides, the risk of “new historical injustice”) and its remedy (training slots, cooperation centers, WAICO membership). To accept the remedy is, semiotically, to accept the subject-position on offer — grateful capacity-recipient inside a system whose foundational rules (Parts IV–V) are authored elsewhere. Signing the WAICO founding charter is, on this reading, not merely joining an institution; it is agreeing to occupy the position of enunciation the speech has prepared for its addressee.  

The triangular structure of intersubjectivity

The speech stages an “I” (Xi, speaking “on behalf of the Chinese government and people”) addressing a “we” (the assembled international community) about a “they/it” (thinking machines, the widening divide, the unnamed state “overstretching” security concepts). The international “we” is only constituted as a coherent audience by accepting the four-question, four-point structure on its own terms; the text leaves no position from which an addressee could reject the initial diagnosis altogether — for instance, by insisting that “the digital divide” or the development-security fusion is itself the wrong description of what is at stake, or by refusing the premise that any single authority (Chinese or otherwise) should supply the answer. The speech's coherence, in other words, depends on bracketing precisely the alternative descriptions — liberal-pluralist, rights-based, market-based — that would dissolve its four-part architecture. Read together with Part V, the rhetoric is doing at the level of the text exactly what the institution-building is doing at the level of governance and what the doctrine is doing at the level of the machine's constitutive parameters: constructing a closed, self-referential system that generates its own conditions of intelligibility rather than submitting one proposal among several to an open, external contest of terms.

Part VII. Global Commentary and Reception

Coverage of the speech divided along fairly predictable geopolitical lines, though with some convergence on the basic facts: that WAICO's founding, one day before the speech, gave the address institutional weight it would not otherwise have had, and that the speech was widely read as a direct, if diplomatically worded, challenge to U.S. leadership of AI governance.  

Chinese state media

Xinhua's own coverage led with Xi's call for a people-centered approach to AI development for the positive and for good, and framed WAICO's founding as the culmination of a sequence of Chinese-led initiatives, quoting the “single string… single tree” proverb as the summary message that AI governance should be a shared, not a solo, undertaking.  

Mainstream international press

Al Jazeera characterized the speech as urging cooperation while ensuring no single country dominates the technology, describing it as an apparent jab at the United States, and noted that WAICO's 29 founding members were unveiled the day before, with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres among the attendees. CNN's analysis placed the speech in the same news cycle as U.S. President Trump's own remarks accusing Beijing of exploiting American data, framing Xi's address as a calculated contrast: Beijing positioning itself as the responsible, stability-minded actor in AI governance. Reuters' account (via Business Standard) described Xi as casting Beijing as the champion of a new global AI order and linked the speech's institutional push directly to Beijing's wish to avoid being a “rule-taker” in a field otherwise shaped by U.S. companies and export controls.  

Framing around a rival bloc structure

Several outlets read the speech primarily through the lens of a forming two-bloc structure. The Irish Times and a technology newsletter (ResultSense) both set WAICO against “Pax Silica,” a U.S.-led AI supply-chain cooperation framework involving the EU, UK, Japan, India, and others, describing the contest as one that is “breaking down along geopolitical lines,” with the G7 economies absent from WAICO and the BRICS-aligned developing world absent from Pax Silica. Reporting on India specifically (WION) highlighted that India — alone among BRICS founders — declined to join WAICO, reading this as New Delhi's attempt to avoid Chinese-led rule-making at the cost of not having a voice in the body's design. 

Global South framing

The China-Global South Project's analysis argued that developing countries occupy the central place in Xi's bid for “the commanding heights of global governance,” and that his core claim — that no single country should dominate or write AI's rules — functions as a pointed, if indirect, critique of the United States aimed at winning developing-country support.  

AI-policy community framing

Independent AI-policy commentary (Matt Sheehan's newsletter) read the speech as restating, rather than escalating, a three-year-old pitch, and noted that observers watching for a signal on whether China might scale back its support for open-weight model releases did not get one — the speech, on this reading, confirmed the policy status quo rather than announcing a new direction.  

Skeptical and adversarial commentary

U.S. conservative outlet Breitbart's coverage led with an adversarial framing, describing Xi in personal, critical terms and characterizing WAICO's founding members — including Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela — as evidence of the body's authoritarian tilt. A cryptocurrency and technology newsletter (CryptoBriefing) took a more technical angle, arguing that a governance philosophy built around state control and “controllability” sits uneasily with decentralized and permissionless systems, and could, if WAICO's framework gains traction, favor centralized digital infrastructure over decentralized alternatives in the countries that adopt it.  

Institutional detail and open questions

The Diplomat's analysis focused on WAICO's design, noting that its founding agreement stresses open participation without conditions tied to political system or values, and observed that the organization went from proposal to founding in roughly a single year — unusually fast by the standards of intergovernmental organizations — while flagging that questions about its practical operation, membership criteria, and enforcement mechanisms remain open. 

Part VIII. Concluding Thoughts. 

WAICO adds another collective element to the constellation of collectivized human  activities, functionality differentiated, each of which contributes its part to the constitution of a comprehensive system of collectivized human each serving a specific role in a system the objectives and applications of which are to be led by the vanguard elements of society organized as a communist party, in this case with Chinese characteristics. As has become characteristic of the guidance and leadership of the current General Secretary, those functions serve dual roles--internal facing bent to the perfection of a collectivized nation ordered through the principles and practices of whole process people's democracy, and an external facing collectivization of states and peoples which aim toward their owned ordered perfection the overall structures of which are specified in China's internal initiatives, international initiatives that mimic and project outward, the internal constituting forces  of China under the guidance and leadership of the CPC. All of this to broaden and deepen the march along the socialist path, performed through the mechanics of modernization and made efficient and disciplined through the guidance of the vanguard of social forces whose direction translates conceptualization and overall object into contextually relevant expressions suitable to the time, place, space, and culture into which it is applied. In the case of Chinese Marxist-Leninism it also suggests the further and now deeper elaboration of a post-global Communist internal exhibiting the same impulse but operating in a very different way that the old Soviet Communist International before the 1940s (see, e.g., here; and here). 

Praxis. "That praxis is meant to serve as a sort of coding of the system premises that permits a scientific approach to the organization and development of social and productive forces under the guidance of the vanguard itself but as a function of the system parameters, and its underlying foundational constraints, outlooks and premises within which the world the vanguard guides and sees is organized. " (Reflections on 习近平：在庆祝中国共产党成立105周年大会上的讲话 [Xi Jinping: Speech at the Gathering Celebrating the 105th Anniversary of the Founding of the Communist Party of China]). Good old fashioned praxis is what one then encounters in both the speech and in the formation of WAICO. Within this, advanced productive forces play a crucial role; they must be bent to the overall purpose of social organization and its politics. It is to that end that WAICO will play a significant role, if it is successful. It will organize virtual space within the constraining framework of the Marxist Leninist Lebenswelt, and through that to naturalize its shaping of social and political reality through its iterative application on ordinary human activities.  

All in all a quite interesting example of the complexities of whole process praxis in Chinese Communist Internationalism. This is a dialectical process. And so I end where I began, with the General Secretary's speech at a gathering in celebration of the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

That praxis is meant to serve as a sort of coding of the system premises that permits a scientific approach to the organization and development of social and productive forces under the guidance of the vanguard itself but as a function of the system parameters, and its underlying foundational constraints, outlooks and premises within which the world the vanguard guides and sees is organized. It is, indeed, a system that is ready to go entirely virtual, one the operational elements of which are now ready for coding into machine systems that may undertake. scientifically and efficiently, much of the "manual labor" of the Leninist project the 105th anniversary of which is now celebrated. That, indeed, is the way in which the speech points not just to a celebration of the past but toward the future general contradiction for a Leninist organization undertaking its stewardship of the nation's productive and social forces to efficiently move them along the Socialist Path toward its communist ending. (Reflections on 习近平：在庆祝中国共产党成立105周年大会上的讲话 [Xi Jinping: Speech at the Gathering Celebrating the 105th Anniversary of the Founding of the Communist Party of China])

The point here is not judgment but clarity of structure and operation. One can then apply one's own values to suit oneself. 

Sources Consulted

--Full text: Keynote speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the opening ceremony of the 2026 World AI Conference — Xinhua, July 17, 2026
--President Xi Jinping Attends the Opening Ceremony ... and Delivers Keynote Address — Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC
--Xinhua Headlines: Xi calls for equitable global AI governance, unveils new cooperation body — Xinhua
--China sends fresh signal on global AI cooperation at WAIC — Global Times
--China's Xi Jinping launches new AI alliance: What is it? — Al Jazeera
--Analysis: As Trump accuses China of stealing voter data, Xi pitches Beijing as a responsible tech leader — CNN
--Xi pitches China as leader of a new global artificial intelligence order — Business Standard (Reuters)
--Amid a wall of blue tote bags, China's vaulting AI ambitions come into view — Irish Times
--Xi pitches China as leader of new global AI order — ResultSense
--Xi Jinping's new AI bloc: China launches 'World AI Body' with Pakistan and Russia in, India out — WION
--Xi Jinping's Global South AI Strategy for Governance — China-Global South Project
--Xi Jinping's Big AI Speech, Annotated — Matt Sheehan (Substack)
--Dictator Xi Jinping Touts China as Global Leader of Artificial Intelligence — Breitbart
--China launches global AI governance organization as Xi Jinping positions Beijing against US tech dominance — CryptoBriefing
--China's New AI Club: The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization — The Diplomat
--AI Within the Cognitive Cage of the “Official” (士): China Proposes “Global AI Governance Action Plan” — Larry Catá Backer, Law at the End of the Day (Aug. 13, 2025) And an Algorithm to Bind Them All? Social Credit, Data Driven Governance, and the Emergence of an Operating System for Global Normative Orders — Larry Catá Backer, SSRN

 

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ICoCA Newsletter April-June 2026

 

 

Accountability, transparency, and engagement are critical elements of any principles based system.  Those overarching principles are no longer easily applied through one-size-fits-all measures. Those concerns are nicely encapsulated in the  April-June 2026 Newsletter of The International Code of Conduct Association – ICoCA--"Accountable Security in Transition." The theme is framed in this way for the Newsletter:

As global value chains and security environments evolve, expectations on private security providers are increasingly shaped by the need for responsible practice in complex settings. From critical minerals supply chains to post-conflict and transitioning contexts such as Ukraine, this includes strengthening how security is delivered and governed in practice. This edition of ICoCA’s newsletter explores how security practices are evolving in response to the just transition and growing expectations around accountability across diverse operational contexts.

ICoCA "is a multi-stakeholder initiative formed in 2013 to ensure that providers of private security services respect human rights and humanitarian law. It serves as the governance and oversight mechanism of the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers." (ICoCA--About). The ICoCa summarizes its mission this way: "Our mission is to raise private security industry standards and practices that respect human rights and international humanitarian law and to engage with key stakeholders to achieve widespread adherence to the International Code of Conduct globally. Discover the benefits for each stakeholder group below."

Featured interventions include: (1) Securing critical minerals supply chains starts with securing communities; (2) Beyond corporate damage control: reclaiming non-state governance mechanisms as pathways for true remedy; (3) From wartime necessity to post-war opportunity in Ukraine; (4) ICoCA's growing footprint in Nigeria; (5) Carbon accountability in private security; and (6) Community-based security and local trust.

A French version of this newsletter is available here.

 

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OMFIF Event: "It's All About the Role of Money": Live Broadcast 21 July 2026

 

 

 

The Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) Economic and Monetary Policy Institute, is hosting an online event that may be of interest. It is called It’s all about the role of money. Information about the event may be accessed HERE. The event is described this way:

Money sits at the heart of central banking, but how can its core functions help shape the future direction of policy? Nathanaël Benjamin, executive director of financial stability strategy and risk at the Bank of England, joins OMFIF to present a unifying framework for understanding the role of central banks through the three core functions of money: as a unit of account, a medium of exchange and a store of value. Drawing clear links between the Bank of England’s activities and these functions, Benjamin will explore how this framework can inform thinking on the appropriate reach of central bank policies in an increasingly complex financial landscape. The session will also examine how viewing financial policy through this lens can help address the risks and frictions that impair money’s ability to perform its core functions. Benjamin will discuss the importance of building resilience where shocks could be amplified, removing barriers to growth and supporting responsible innovation where it strengthens the functioning of money.

REGISTRATION INFORMATION HERE.

 

"El Encuentro entre la Gobernanza Empresarial y los Principios Rectores de la ONU sobre las Empresas y los Derechos Humanos": Discusro Pronunciado en la Universidad ICESI, Cali, Colombia, 19 March 2026

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ENGLISH LANGUAGE VERSION HERE

A continuación, se presenta el texto ampliado de la intervención realizada en la Universidad ICESI (Cali, Colombia) el 19 de marzo de 2026. Agradezco a los organizadores del evento y, especialmente, a los estudiantes del Semillero, cuyo trabajo es verdaderamente extraordinario y con quienes espero colaborar más estrechamente en el futuro.

Más abajo se incluye el resumen (en inglés y español) y se puede acceder al texto completo.

Foto crédito acquí

Resumen (Español): Este ensayo examina la intersección crítica entre la gobernanza empresarial y los Principios Rectores de las Naciones Unidas sobre las Empresas y los Derechos Humanos (PRNU), derivado de una conferencia dictada por Larry Catá Backer en 2026. Superando los marcos tradicionales de cumplimiento técnico, la obra problematiza este campo al interrogar la naturaleza fundamental, la autoridad y el propósito socioeconómico de la empresa moderna. Se analiza la fricción constante entre tres paradigmas doctrinales en disputa: la teoría de la concesión, la teoría de la propiedad y la teoría de la entidad real. Asimismo, el texto explora cómo la globalización económica ha erosionado el poder estatal territorial, creando un panorama de gobernanza policéntrico donde el derecho público y el ordenamiento contractual privado se interpenetran. Al trazar la evolución histórica desde las fallidas Normas de la ONU de 2003 hasta el "pragmatismo de principios" de John Ruggie en los PRNU de 2011, el ensayo detalla cómo este marco alinea distintos registros institucionales. Descompone sistemáticamente la arquitectura asimétrica de los tres pilares: el deber vinculante del Estado de proteger, la responsabilidad de exhortación de las empresas de respetar y el acceso al remedio. Se otorga especial énfasis a la debida diligencia en derechos humanos como un eje operativo que despliega múltiples funciones institucionales. Finalmente, la obra concluye que la interpenetración de estos pilares desestabiliza las doctrinas clásicas del derecho corporativo —como los deberes fiduciarios y la elección de la ley aplicable—. De este modo, demuestra que la gobernanza empresarial y la regulación transnacional de los derechos humanos ya no pueden evaluarse de forma aislada, ya que se acoplan estructuralmente para rediseñar la legitimidad del orden económico global.

Abstract (English): This essay examines the critical intersection between corporate governance and the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGP), derived from a 2026 lecture by Larry Catá Backer. Moving beyond traditional, checklist-oriented compliance frameworks, the work problematizes the field by interrogating the fundamental nature, authority, and socio-economic purpose of the modern enterprise. It analyzes the ongoing friction among three competing doctrinal paradigms: concession theory, property theory, and real-entity theory. The text explores how economic globalization has eroded territorial state power, creating a polycentric governance landscape where public law and private contractual ordering interpenetrate. Tracing the historical shift from the failed, state-centric 2003 UN Draft Norms to John Ruggie’s "principled pragmatism" in the 2011 UNGP, the essay details how the framework aligns distinct institutional registers. It systematically unpacks the asymmetric architecture of the three pillars: the binding State duty to protect, the expectation-based corporate responsibility to respect, and access to remedy. Special emphasis is placed on human rights due diligence as an operational hinge performing multi-layered institutional functions. Ultimately, the work concludes that the interpenetration of these pillars destabilizes classical corporate law doctrines—such as fiduciary duties and choice of law. It demonstrates that corporate governance and transnational human rights regulation can no longer be evaluated in isolation, as they structurally couple to reshape the legitimacy of the global economic order.

Quizás se pueda llegar al núcleo de la discusión de esta manera:  Un tratamiento convencional del derecho de las empresas y los derechos humanos procedería de forma taxonómica: identificaría el instrumento (los Principios Rectores), expondría su contenido (tres pilares) y catalogaría su implementación (planes de acción nacionales, legislación sobre debida diligencia, regímenes de divulgación). Tal tratamiento sería preciso pero incompleto, porque daría por sentado precisamente lo que el método problematizador insiste en interrogar —a saber, si la "gobernanza empresarial" y los "derechos humanos" nombran dos dominios regulatorios separados y estables que simplemente pueden ponerse en contacto, o si ambos son en sí mismos constructos inestables cuyo encuentro produce algo genuinamente nuevo.

La investigación se despliega a lo largo de seis ejes interconectados: el carácter fundamental de las empresas y de los objetivos económicos; el efecto de la globalización y de los regímenes comerciales sobre las fronteras de la autoridad estatal; las "paletas" (palettes) resultantes de ordenamiento normativo público y privado; el problema general de la corporación y de la gobernanza empresarial como tal; la manifestación específica de ese problema en el dominio de los derechos humanos corporativos, incluidos sus antecedentes históricos y su cristalización en los Principios Rectores de las Naciones Unidas sobre las Empresas y los Derechos Humanos (PRNU); y, finalmente, las conexiones, alineaciones y transformaciones que vinculan la doctrina del gobierno corporativo con el marco de los derechos humanos. Lo que sigue aborda cada uno de estos puntos a su vez, antes de considerar lo que el encuentro entre ambos campos —la gobernanza empresarial y las empresas y los derechos humanos— sugiere sobre la condición actual de la regulación económica transnacional.

Una nota sobre la traducción

Nota sobre la traducción: To accurately integrate the academic context and refine the nuances between the English common-law corporate tradition and the Spanish legal framework, the translation has been revised to strengthen key transliterations and functional equivalents. Key Transliteration & Terminology Enhancements: (1) Corporate Governance: Maintained as Gobernanza Empresarial in headings, but translated as Gobierno Corporativo within the text when discussing strict corporate law doctrine, matching standard Spanish academic usage. (2) Creature of the State / Real-entity theory: Rendered as criatura del Estado and teoría de la entidad real, which are the recognized academic equivalents in comparative corporate law. (3) Remedy: Transliterated contextually. While "remedio" is used in the official Spanish translation of the UNGPs, the academic text demands reparación or vías de recurso depending on whether it refers to the outcome or the mechanism. Both are utilized to capture the full semantic weight. (4) Due Diligence: Maintained as debida diligencia, the stabilized term in international law.

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Lecture 0; Introduction; AI Governance in Comparative Perspective, Theory and Practice: China, U.S. and E.U.-- Lectures at the East China University of Political Science and Law (May 2026)

 

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Introduction:

I was delighted to have had the opportunity to present a series of Lectures  hosted by the East China University of Political Science and Law (ECUPL) at the end of May. My thanks to my hosts and especially to Sun Yuhua for organizing these opportunities to engage with colleagues. 

 

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The overall theme (and thus the title) of the lectures was AI Governance in Comparative Perspective, Theory and Practice: China, U.S. and E.U, With a Sideways Glance at the U.N. The subject of the lectures requires little by way of introduction: Artificial intelligence is the broad term that has come to represent a growing cluster of non-human and digitalized processes and operations that has as its primary task the constitution of non-human systems capable of performing tasks that were once thought to require human intelligence. AI has come to dominate , or infect, depending on one’s point of view, virtually every aspect of the organization and operation of collective human systems—as well as shaping the lives of individuals who are plugged into virtual systems of decision making or automated processes that can provide everything from entertainment, to advice, to interaction with other humans and organizational structures.  This is well known as is its capacity for literal impact. One is reminded of Norbert Wiener’s reference to the classic horror tale, the Monkey’s Paw, in his book God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (MIT Press, 1964, pp. 58-60). The tale describes the risk of wishing for or demanding something from a source that is entirely literal minded, which in the case of the Monkey’s Paw was meant to grant three wishes, the means to those ends were undefined. When a person wished for  a sum of money, the wish was granted, in the form of a settlement by their son’s employer as a consequence of an accident that killed the son.  In Wiener’s words: “The magic of automation, and in particular the magic of automatization in which devices learn, may be expected to be similarly literal. If you are playing  a game according to certain rules  and set the playing-machine to play for victory, you will get victory if you get anything at all, and the machine will not pay the slightest attention to any consideration except victory according to the rules.” (Ibid.); unless, of course the rules are constantly changing to embed more and more complex considerations. When the machine becomes self-learning, it can develop its own mechanisms for adding or subtracting considerations as well (rules, norms, values, etc.).   

 

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And so is the impulse to manage, control, exploit, embed, understand, and regulate these processes, systems, and perhaps eventually non-human consciousness with a huge potential to undertake many of the computational tasks (the mathematical and logical processing of data) that were once the sole domain of and perhaps defined what it meant to be human. That is the point where things get interesting. It is at the point where the development of machines, that is of non-human systems, capable of performing tasks that were once thought to require human intelligence, collide with regulatory structures meant to manage, contain, constrain, liberate, embed, project and exploit such non-human systems, whether they are traditional or emerging, public or private regulatory systems, that human collectives and the machine-systems they have created now find themselves. It is the point, as well, where such collectives are floundering even as these machine-systems become ever more sophisticated and ever more embedded in the life of human collectives and the engagement of individual humans with the world.   One moves here from "The Monkey's Paw" to "Three Thousand Years of Longing" where AI is the genie and his container is regulation, and the lonely professor given three wishes the consumers and producers of AI, that is the genie. 
 

The point of this collision, especially among human sub-systems, the cognitive orientation of which are becoming increasingly better defined and distinct as against the others, that serves as the point of departure for the series of lectures that together constitute AI Governance in Comparative Perspective, Theory and Practice: China, U.S. and E.U, With a Sideways Glance at the U.N. There are eight lectures: 

Lecture 1—From Algorithms to Foundation Models: What Contemporary AI is “Made of”
Lecture 2—What Are We Actually Governing When We Govern AI?
Lecture 3—The “Markets State”: U.S. Approach
Lecture 4—The “Rights State”: EU Approach
Lecture 5—The “Guided State”: The Chinese Approach
Lecture 6—Courts, Companies, and the Legal Construction of AI
Lecture 7—AI Narratives: Palantir; Anthropic; Open AI; and Leopold Aschenbrenner
Lecture 8—Putting It All Together: Trends, Trend Lines, and Regulatory Dialectics

 The Lectures start from the premise that before it is even possible to speak about regulation and regulatory systems, and even more so to speak of such systems in or as some sort of comparison (against what standard is yet another problem of course), one must first have firmly in mind two of the critical elements on which any such discussion might be organized. The first requires  an effort to grasp, or perhaps better to approach an understanding of, the object of regulation. The second is to have some better sense of the regulatory enterprise, especially its forms, placement, approaches, characteristics and logic; and not just its forms but its sources and the character of its authority within regulatory collectives including but not limited to the governmental apparatus.

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Once one understands the complexity and interconnectivity of regulatory subjects (actors within a legal system, that might now also include AI) and objects (the things that can be acted upon, including, perhaps the regulators themselves), one can then approach the enterprise of regulation of AI in context. This starting point is not merely   an effort in taxonomy of regulatory subject and object, which then, as is traditionally undertaken, serves as a basis for the sort of matrix within which it is possible to consider those permutations and combinations of connections between subject and object, thus disaggregated, that serves some purpose or other. Each reflects the other in a certain sense.  AI is a creature made in the image of its creator; the Biblical reference as well as reference to Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (creating something in the image of the creator) hides the computational element in both, as well as their inter-subjectivity (here in the sense of constant and mutual inter-penetration, sometimes as a form of dialectic). But all of this interactivity, and its consequential impulse to build AI in particular ways and to regulate it in equally peculiar ways, suggests an underlying fundamental set of cognitive patterns that may be reflected in both AI object and regulatory subject.  The regulatory object reflects its subject; it is its own subject. To regulate AI, then, suggests its character as the regulation of the self, now detached and reconstituted as a virtual representation of the self. Regulation is, in this sense, an effort in self control, but where the self has been detached (in this case the collective regulatory self) from and operates on the its physical representation (discussed from a conceptual perspective in 'The Soulful Machine, the Virtual Person, and the “Human” Condition').    

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Neural networks (pattern finding) and large language models (predicting sequences) may provide a useful (or at least interesting) basis for giving some form to that inter-subjectivity between regulatory subject and object—that are also object and subject. Neural networks might provide a useful conceptual basis for understanding , or at least framing, the iterative and dialectical structures within which human collectives as well as computing systems, are organized to process data (inputs, irritants, requests, etc.) through layers of weights, values, biases and activation functions in order not just to identify patterns but to use those patterns to rationalize data and respond to stimulus. In the case of political economic systems, the neural network analogy makes it easier to understand such systems as computing systems that identify and reinforce patterns, and that rationalize the environment in which they operate, through the identification and application of a series of foundational values, biases, and recognized units for receiving, processing and passing along data that together constitute the parameters within which it is possible to receive process and identify objects received. For the purposes of these lectures extracting the fundamental elements of the “hidden layers” of the political-economic “neural network” of a state system is essential for understanding the way in which the regulating body both understands the object of regulation and processes that object in terms of the biases and values of the system to determine the form and direction of regulation. This serves as the structure against which it might be possible to consider the (inevitable?) and distinctive regulatory pathways to identify and respond to "challenges" and "threats"-- take for example the challenge of AI "risk", that might be conceived as risk to rights in Europe, risk to markets in the US and risk to socialist modernization guided forward along its socialist path in China. Each of these reductionist expressions hides and embeds a much more potent (and effectively hidden) layer of analytics, premises, and ordering frameworks that make the reduction appear at some level "natural;" and so it is within the community of believers--Fides et Ratio, perhaps more than Magnifica humanitas (the former conceptual, the later operational).

  

For purposes of these lectures the focus is on three of the more influential subjects of regulation: the United States (Lecture 3), the European Union (Lecture 4), and China (Lecture 6). Mere description of regulatory approaches is no longer particularly useful, since AI programs can now produce descriptive summaries that may be better than anything a human can do (controlling for the hallucinations of either). Each discussion of national legislation starts with an effort to grasp the characteristics of each state’s neural network embedded in and as its political economic model.  Those characteristics then shape the approach of each state toward the regulatory object and the character and objectives of regulatory responses.  In that context, the United States might be labelled (or named; 鬼谷子 (Guiguzi's) ming-ming (明名 intelligent naming)) as the “markets state,” the European Union as the “rights state,” and China as the “guiding state.” These labels suggest the baseline weights and values, the scope of what each system identifies and processes, how it perceives value and threat and accordingly regulates. The US is markets driven and suspicious of state interference (for the most part though reshaped by reconstituting efforts after the 1920s and its openness to techno bureaucratic leadership). The European Union may be rights driven and trusting of state leadership the purpose of which might be understood to protect and enhance rights and prevent negative impacts. China is development driven with a specific objective (forward movement along a Socialist Path) guided and led by a vanguard of social forces in the context of which all productive forces of the state might be embedded. These “hidden layers” of the national neural networks then shape the way each formulates the “issue” of AI and fashions a response that both reaffirms the patterning of its foundational structures and in the process reinforces them. 

 

Lectures 6 and 7 then consider  two critical areas that have a significant effect on any regulatory project. The first focuses on courts, enterprises, and the legal construction of AI in and as law. Its principle focus is on the way that AI related litigation is both changing traditional areas of jurisprudence (tort, contract, property and the like) and is being changed by it. The second, Lecture 7, then considers the way in which leaders of AI production are seeking to influence approaches to the conceptualization of the relationship between AI and the state, and in the process offer a window into the way that AI leaders re-envision the relationship between AI, the State and the regulation of both.To those ends the recent "concept exercises" or manifestos of Palantir, Anthropic, and Open AI, along with the reflections of an influential voice within the AI elite mainstream, Leopold Aschenbrenner, are considered. 

 

Lecture 8 then attempts to draw the bigger picture. It suggests the way that a shared vocabulary can cover quite substantial differences in approach, values, and objectives in the context of AI and AI regulation. And it suggests the way that weighting the objectives of innovation, risk, and the role of the state affects  the way in which  common regulatory focus of safety, security, transparency, accountability, innovation, and infrastructure, each with sometimes substantially different regulatory characteristics as a function of the core differences in national “neural networks.”  One comes at last to the understanding of the fundamental contradiction of AI and its regulation: the development of a common language  across political systems the neural networks of which overlap but are fundamentally incompatible producing conceptions of AI and law that can be coordinated but which cannot converge. That seems to be the template for coordinated governance for the 2nd quarter of the 21st century. I noted the effect of patterns of conceptual homonyms in the context of the convergence project of the  International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation has released its IFRS Foundation 2025 Annual Report—Fit for the Future (31 March 2026):.

By the start of the second quarter of the 21st century, however, the common language, like written Chinese, covered a wide variation in how it would be "spoken" and the signification with which common use terms would be infused. take transparency, for example. Within the cognitive cages of early 21st century convergence globalization transparency could be read broadly to require disclosure of virtually everything but trade secrets and protected know how--and even that might require some disclosure as a function, for example of its connection with adverse human rights or sustainability impacts (as these terms were to be developed by international institutions through hard and soft measures, norms, declarations, finds, etc.)--subject to increasingly narrowed exceptions for national security, development and the like. A quarter century later, transparency remains a presumption but now much more tightly constrained and perhaps sieved through superior obligations (many generated through domestic legal orders of States) respecting, national security, sanctions, data protection and data sovereignty, anti-espionage statutes, and blocking legislation to counter extraterritorial projections of regulatory systems. Transparency remains the same; its signification is now fractured and defined as a function of higher ranking signified principles, rules, and expectations. The same applies, with substantially more bite, to the construction and deployment of the concept of "risk."
One can then, and with enthusiasm, embrace a common language, while at the same time investing that language with regional or other contextual meaning, and constrain it through higher order local values, especially those encased in domestic (or regional) rules and legislation. The imaginaries of unity are preserved, and, indeed, a platform within which such values and contestations of values, may be produced and consumed, without enforcing a centralizing fundamental political or normative line. Yet that also is a step forward. A single language encasing difference may not have been the goal at the start of the 21st century, but language binds all the same--it binds enough that difference may be constrained by the outer boundaries of rational learning inside a cognitive cage that through its language objects effectively defines both that rationality and its limits. And it is that common language that provides all that is necessary to achieve the fundamentally critical element of this project: comparability and communication across and despite of difference. The rest might come later; or it might not. That convergence is no longer necessary where a common language has been substituted for common norms, beliefs, practices, and expectations. (A Common Language Containing Differentiating Meanings Within Evolving International Standards for Sustainability Disclosure in Financial Statements). 

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In the posts that follow I will post summaries of the lecture notes and the PowerPoint of each of the lectures which can be accessed by following these links:

Links to Lectures:

Lecture 0 -- Introduction
Lecture 1—From Algorithms to Foundation Models: What Contemporary AI is “Made of”
Lecture 1A--A Computation/Conversation With Google's "Maschinenmensch" Gemini:
Lecture 2—What Are We Actually Governing When We Govern AI?
Lecture 3—The “Markets State”: U.S. Approach
Lecture 4—The “Rights State”: EU Approach
Lecture 5—The “Guided State”: The Chinese Approach 
Lecture 6—Courts, Companies, and the Legal Construction of AI
Lecture 7—AI Narratives From a Human, Computational and Quantum Perspective: Palantir; Anthropic; Open AI; and Leopold Aschenbrenner 
Lecture 8—Putting It All Together: Trends, Trend Lines, and Regulatory Dialectics in Comparative AI Governance 

The entire lecture series, abstracts, posters and PPT may also be accessed from the website of the Coalition for Peace & Ethics Education Projects from the Lecture Series Homepage HERE.