Editor's Note: The writer is a freelance columnist on international affairs based in Karachi, Pakistan. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of China Economic Net.

China has put open-source artificial intelligence at the centre of this year's World Internet Conference (WIC) Wuzhen Summit, and the choice answers a question that will shape the next decade of technology: who gets to own AI. The summit, which opened on Tuesday in Zhejiang Province under the theme "Open Source and Openness", rests on a simple proposition. A model that a country can download, adapt and run on its own servers serves it better than one it can only rent by the token, on terms written somewhere else.

The main forum's AI Wuzhen Dialogue brings the heads of open-source model companies together with AI scientists, and the agenda runs to 27 sub-forums, a record for recent years. Premier Li Qiang told roughly 1,800 delegates at the opening that China would keep its doors open to innovation, promote technology transfer and knowledge sharing, and help Global South countries build their digital infrastructure. He also made clear that China opposes the building of a "digital iron curtain."

Alibaba released its first open model, Qwen-7B, in August 2023. On Tuesday its chairman Joe Tsai told the summit that the company has since released more than 470 Qwen models, downloaded over 4 billion times, and that other developers have built more than 330,000 derivative models on top of them. Chinese open models as a whole crossed 10 billion downloads in the first half of this year, according to the National Development and Reform Commission, which also counted several trillion-parameter open releases from firms such as DeepSeek and Moonshot AI. On Hugging Face, the main public repository for such models, 41 percent of downloads of language models over the past year were of models developed in China.

Interestingly, one of the clearest endorsements of that record has come from an American chief executive. Jensen Huang, whose Nvidia agreed in September to acquire Hugging Face, said in July that China was "clearly dominating" open-source AI. By his own account, when Hugging Face came under cyberattack this summer, it defended itself with an Nvidia-modified version of a Chinese open-source model.

There is a limit to what open weights can do on their own, and Tsai named it in the same speech: demand for AI keeps climbing while computing power falls short. A trillion-parameter model that anyone may download is of little use to a university that cannot afford the chips to serve it.

Wuzhen's call for cases on cyberspace cooperation drew 360 submissions from 80 countries and regions, 22 of them first-timers, and international entries for its science and technology awards rose 21 percent on last year.

GSMA chief John Hoffman described the summit's longstanding aim as leaving no one behind. Compute is where that aim will now be tested.