APEC CEO Summit participants call for cooperation over confrontation in AI industry

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been spotlighted at the ongoing APEC CEO Summit in Gyeongju, the Republic of Korea, with many participants calling for cooperation rather than confrontation in the industry.

Themed "Bridge, Business, Beyond", the four-day summit opened on Wednesday as part of the larger APEC Economic Leaders' Week.

At the summit, Beijing-based AI firm 4Paradigm expressed frustration over navigating U.S. export restrictions on advanced chips essential for AI training.

"Actually, it's a problem nowadays. We should face squarely the problem. We are making better and better chips. We can develop a lot of systems based on these chips, but there's still some gap. But we are catching [up with] them," said Dai Wenyuan, founder and CEO of 4Paradigm.

As the AI sector navigates intensifying U.S.-China rivalry, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum's commitment to multilateral collaboration collides with geopolitical tensions, though numerous participants maintain an optimistic, cooperative stance.

"I don't think there's a competition between the U.S. and China. We should cooperate. Even if there are some barriers, we can also improve our work, because our goal is to do better and better technologically and make the life better," Dai said.

As two leading AI powers in the world, the U.S. and China have developed distinctively different ecosystems, each building its own large language models and generative tools for images and audio.

However, tech leaders at the APEC CEO Summit say that diversity ultimately benefits companies in choosing which AI technology to adopt.

"There's a lot of innovation, obviously, coming out of the U.S. But now, China has actually also been catching up with respect to the frontier models, and the application and adoption of AI. It is less going to be, from a global business standpoint, versus it's going to be, and how do you adopt the innovation coming out from different regions," said Nitin Mittal, a principal with Deloitte Consulting.

APEC CEO Summit participants call for cooperation over confrontation in AI industry

The U.S. State Department announced Wednesday that it is pausing immigrant visa processing from 75 countries.

The measure will apply to "countries whose migrants take welfare from the American people at unacceptable rates. The freeze will remain active until the U.S. can ensure that new immigrants will not extract wealth from the American people," the department said on X.

The pause impacts countries including Somalia, Haiti, Iran and Eritrea, "whose immigrants often become public charges on the United States upon arrival," said the State Department.

Earlier on Wednesday, the department announced in a memo that it would suspend visa processing for 75 countries, including Somalia, Russia, Afghanistan, Brazil, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria, Thailand and Yemen, according to a Fox News report.

The pause will begin Jan. 21 and will continue indefinitely until the department conducts a reassessment of visa processing, the report said. The move came after the White House announced on Tuesday that it is ending temporary protected status for Somali immigrants amid fraud allegations in Minnesota.

On Monday, the State Department announced on social media that it had revoked over 100,000 visas since U.S. President Donald Trump took office nearly a year ago.

In November 2025, Trump announced his intention to permanently suspend immigration from what he described as "Third World countries", following the death of a National Guard member after being shot near the White House by an Afghan national.

U.S. freezes immigrant visa processing from 75 countries