Introduction
Welcome back to Laboratory. This week, our spotlight swings to China’s Global AI Governance Action Plan: a 13-point blueprint that puts the UN at center stage, treats compute like national infrastructure, and recasts open source as compliance-ready and safety-first. Released at WAIC 2025, it signals where standards, procurement, and power build-outs may steer the race.
In this briefing, we’ll chart:
UN-first, sovereignty-first: how multilateral coordination meets national control, and what that means for cross-border models, datasets, and deployments.
Compute as policy: why clean power, intelligent computing power, and data centers are now strategic assets, and how a unified compute standard could reshape benchmarks.
Open source with guardrails: the push for secure platforms, license clarity, and documentation you can audit rather than anything-goes releases.
Strap in as we translate diplomacy into operating reality, showing builders, investors, and students where this plan truly moves the needle, and where the hard engineering still lies.
