Digital and AI ministers from all 21 APEC economies met in Chengdu on July 23 and issued a joint statement backing open source AI, with the United States and China both signing on. The meeting was chaired by Li Lecheng, China's minister of industry and information technology, who described it as the first APEC statement to secure cooperation on open source at ministerial level.
The language is careful. The Chengdu statement calls for supporting the development of open source models and projects while encouraging systems that employ strong security assurance through development and deployment, alongside respect for security, data protection and intellectual property rights. Open source sits inside one of five consensus areas, the one covering investment and open ecosystems for digital growth. Ministers also encouraged dialogue among governments, industry and academia on cybersecurity, supply chain resilience and online scams.
What makes it worth reading is the shape of the argument rather than the commitments. For most of this year the debate has run as a straight tradeoff, with openness on one side and security on the other, and each government picking a side. The Chengdu text refuses that framing and asserts instead that open models are worth supporting and should be built to a security standard. That is a third position, and it is the one the technical community has been arguing for while the policy conversation went the other way.
The timing is what gives it weight. Washington has spent the month weighing restrictions on Chinese open models, Beijing has been discussing limits on overseas access to its own, and an industry letter signed by NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft, Dell, IBM and Palantir asked US lawmakers not to restrict open weights at all. Against that, a sentence that both Washington and Beijing were willing to put their names to is a rare point of contact, whatever else the two governments are doing to each other on chips.
The caution is the obvious one. Consensus language is written to be signable, which usually means it is written loosely, and strong security assurance is not defined anywhere in the text. What this buys is a floor for negotiation rather than a rule. Given the direction of the past month, a floor is still more than the open weights debate had last week.