Li Lecheng, China’s Minister of Industry and Information Technology, spoke at a press conference on July 23, 2026, in Chengdu, China, as part of the APEC Digital Weeks.<\/p>\n
Evelyn Cheng | CNBC<\/p>\n
CHENGDU, China \u2014 Governments increasingly want to control artificial intelligence, as companies release more powerful open-source models, a new multilateral statement indicates.<\/p>\n
The 21 APEC member economies, which include the U.S. and China, released a “Chengdu statement” on AI<\/a> that emphasized respect for “security, data protection and intellectual property rights,” while calling for supporting open-source development.<\/p>\n The statement released Thursday also specified support for models and projects “that employ strong security assurance through development and deployment.” <\/p>\n Those details reflect how open source is moving further away from its libertarian roots, and toward one involving more state oversight. China has led recent open-source AI development, amid U.S. claims of stealing from American tech<\/a> to do so.<\/p>\n Open-source models from Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and GLM 5.2 are free to use and download, in contrast to U.S. companies such as Anthropic that only offer closed, pay-to-use AI models.<\/p>\n The Chengdu statement’s “explicit alignment around open-source ecosystems and compute infrastructure” confirms that Asia-Pacific is moving away from closed models to open-weight systems that are combined with state-coordinated energy, telecom and digital infrastructure, said Winston Ma,\u00a0 adjunct professor of law at New York University,<\/p>\n The APEC AI statement is the first one to include open-source cooperation at a minister level, according to Li Lecheng, China’s industry and information technology minister, who chaired the leaders’ meeting on Thursday.<\/p>\n He noted all parties recognized the risks of AI, and encouraged dialogue across the government, private sector and academia to share information about cybersecurity, supply chain resilience and online scams.<\/p>\n