At the APEC Digital Weeks in Chengdu, China, the U.S., China, and other APEC economies announced their support for open-source AI with "strong security assurance."
The 21 APEC member economies, including the U.S. and China, released a "Chengdu statement" on AI that emphasized respect for "security, data protection, and intellectual property rights," while calling for support for open-source development.
The statement also specified support for models and projects "that employ strong security assurance through development and deployment."
These details reflect how open source is moving further away from its libertarian roots and towards more state oversight. China has led recent open-source AI development amid U.S. claims of stealing from American tech.
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.
The Chengdu statement's "explicit alignment around open-source ecosystems and compute infrastructure" confirms that the Asia-Pacific is moving away from closed models to open-weight systems that are combined with state-coordinated energy, telecom, and digital infrastructure.
The APEC AI statement is the first one to include open-source cooperation at a ministerial level.
All parties recognized the risks of AI and encouraged dialogue across government, private sector, and academia to share information about cybersecurity, supply chain resilience, and online scams.
"Getting 21 economies, including both China and the United States, to recognize trusted open-source AI as something worth supporting is meaningful," said Wei Sun, principal analyst, artificial intelligence, Counterpoint Research.
"The phrase 'strong security assurance' gives more security-conscious economies room to support open models while still demanding testing, transparency, data protection, and deployment controls," she added.
But technology might end up moving much faster.
Janet De Silva, chair of the APEC Business Advisory Council Digital and Innovation Working Group, earlier on Thursday urged the ministers to prepare for the quantum computing era.
"We need trusted encryption to ensure the security of our entire financial system," she said.
