Built on the WAICO founding roster
On 16 July 2026, twenty-nine states signed the founding agreement of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) in Shanghai, with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in attendance and Foreign Minister Wang Yi signing for China. The body had been proposed a year earlier by Premier Li Qiang at the World AI Conference, alongside a thirteen-point Global AI Governance Action Plan, and is now the first standing intergovernmental AI organization headquartered outside the Western world.
Bangladesh became the first state to announce it would join as an observer rather than as a founder, on 1 August 2026; that entry is recorded as an announced decision, since no instrument has been signed and the organization has published no observer roster.
Its design is the point. A Tsinghua-led working paper mapping WAICO against fifteen existing institutions finds:
- built for a position no constituted global body held;
- membership open to any sovereign state;
- no values test at the door;
- an agenda organized around development and the global capability divide, rather than rules and risk.
The founding roster bears that reading out, drawn largely from states that sit outside the Western-led clubs.
This series takes that roster as its target map. WAICO has not yet published standards, model rules or an index of its own, so what its members' law actually says is the record that matters, and these profiles document it country by country, from primary sources, at reference depth. A reader researching any WAICO member should be able to come here rather than to a generic tracker. Profiles for all twenty-nine founding members are live, from primary sources at reference depth; the founding roster is complete.
Founding agreement and roster reported by Xinhua, 16 July 2026 (report ↗). Independent research and educational profiles; not affiliated with, or endorsed by, WAICO or any government.