SCO's Bishkek Declaration Makes AI a Bloc-Wide Security and Economic Priority

A week after ten heads of state left Bishkek, the technology content of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation's 26th summit is coming into focus — and it is more substantial than the usual communiqué boilerplate. Alongside the Bishkek Declaration marking the bloc's 25th anniversary, SCO leaders on 1 September approved a dedicated concept for building regional data centres and compute capacity, signed an intergovernmental memorandum on artificial intelligence cooperation, and folded AI explicitly into the organisation's security doctrine. Analyses published this week, including a detailed post-summit assessment from The Times of Central Asia on 7 September, make clear that AI has moved from the margins of the SCO agenda to its declared priorities.

The summit was held at the Yrys-Ordo Congress Hall under the chairmanship of President Sadyr Japarov, closing Kyrgyzstan's 2025–2026 rotating chairmanship under the motto "25 Years of the SCO: Together for Sustainable Peace, Development and Prosperity." Per the SCO Secretariat's official readout, the meeting drew Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, Shehbaz Sharif, Masoud Pezeshkian, Aleksandr Lukashenko and the presidents of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan — all ten member states. 28 documents were adopted in total.

What Was Actually Signed

Precision matters, because the AI package is spread across four instruments rather than one headline agreement.

The heads of state signed a Concept for the Establishment of Regional Data Processing Centers, Computing Capacities and the Development of the Artificial Intelligence Industry within the SCO — the compute-infrastructure piece. Separately, member governments signed a Memorandum on Cooperation in the Field of Artificial Intelligence, and authorised agencies signed a Memorandum on Cooperation in the Information Sphere. Leaders also adopted a Cooperation Plan on Ensuring International Information Security for 2026–2028. The full list was published by Kyrgyzstan's presidential office and reported by Trend News Agency on the day of the summit.

The Bishkek Declaration itself — the only one of these texts published in full — is more cautious. As summarised by News Central Asia's Elvira Kadyrova, member states "support the safe and responsible use of AI technologies" and consider it unacceptable to use AI deliberately to cause harm to human life and health, or to the national security, territorial integrity and sovereignty of states. The same section opposes the militarisation of information and communication technologies and asserts that unauthorised satellite internet services provided without a national licence violate international telecommunications law — a pointed reference in a bloc where several members restrict foreign satellite constellations.

Note what the declaration does not do: it sets no compute targets, no funding commitments, no compliance mechanism, and no shared standards body. The concept document and memoranda are the operational layer, and their texts have not been released.

Beijing's Parallel Track

Xi Jinping used his summit address to push a set of Chinese national initiatives that sit alongside, rather than inside, the SCO framework. He called on the bloc to "expand cooperation in emerging areas such as artificial intelligence, digital economy, green industry and green mining," and announced that China will establish an international cooperation center on AI applications for SCO countries, set up a China-SCO port economy cooperation centre in Tianjin, and jointly implement 100 technological cooperation projects with SCO countries over the next three years, according to Xinhua's account of the speech.

Putin was more direct about the intergovernmental instrument. "There are also promising prospects for cooperation in the high-tech sector," he told the council, per the Kremlin's published transcript. "The adoption of the Memorandum on Cooperation in Artificial Intelligence and the Action Plan for the Introduction of Green Technologies will be an important step in this regard." He also noted that Russia's trade with SCO member states exceeded $400 billion last year, with national currencies accounting for more than 98 percent of settlements.

Japarov, for his part, warned that unequal access to technology should not become a new dividing line between member states — a Central Asian anxiety about being on the wrong end of a China- and Russia-dominated compute build-out.

Why It Matters

The Bishkek AI package is best read not in isolation but as the second beat of a sequence. In July, Xi announced the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization at the World AI Conference in Shanghai; 29 countries signed the founding agreement on 16 July, with the body headquartered in Shanghai and founding members including Russia, Kazakhstan and Pakistan. Six weeks later, the SCO — whose members represent nearly half the world's population and, by Putin's summit accounting, more than a third of global GDP — adopted its own regional AI infrastructure concept and governance memorandum.

That is the shape of an emerging non-Western AI governance stack: a global-facing institution in Shanghai, a regional Eurasian layer in the SCO, and national sovereignty carve-outs written into the binding political text. Its organising principle is not safety benchmarking or model evaluation, the axis of the Bletchley-to-Seoul-to-Paris summit series, but technological sovereignty — domestic compute, state control over the national internet segment, and a prohibition on AI use that threatens territorial integrity.

It is worth resisting overstatement. The SCO is a consensus body containing India and Pakistan, and China and India, whose interests on data flows and chip supply chains diverge sharply. The declaration explicitly states the SCO is not a military-political bloc and rejects "bloc-based and confrontational" approaches. And the summit failed to launch the long-discussed SCO Development Bank — the institution that would actually finance regional data centres — with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan submitting rival headquarters bids.

What to Watch

Pakistan assumes the chairmanship for 2026–2027 under the theme "Turning Vision into Action: Connectivity, Innovation and Shared Prosperity," and has already floated a sovereign AI infrastructure proposal for the bloc. Three markers will show whether Bishkek was substance or signalling: whether the texts of the AI concept and memoranda are published; whether the Development Bank reaches a founding agreement, capital commitment and location before the Islamabad summit; and whether China's promised AI applications centre for SCO states materialises with named projects rather than a ribbon-cutting.