Seventeen non-Chinese operators have told the 3GPP that the 6G core should evolve from 5G, setting up a standards fight with Huawei, ZTE and China Mobile, who want a radical, AI-native redesign ahead of a November architecture deadline.

At a 3GPP plenary in Madrid last month, the global standards body moved closer to defining the architecture for the next mobile generation. The talks exposed a fault line that mirrors the geopolitical contest between China and the West, with vendors and operators splitting into three competing camps over the role of artificial intelligence in the core network.

What do Western operators want from 6G?

The 17 operators — every major European and US incumbent — submitted a joint position paper calling for "evolution as the starting point" in 6G system architecture. The 5G core should be "an important architectural foundation for 6G," they wrote.

Vodafone's head of R&D Luke Ibbetson summed up the position. "The 6G core is a very lightly tweaked version of the 5G core," he said. "It's not a new thing."

Ericsson has framed its own 6G strategy in the same evolutionary language since last year. Marie Hogan, the Swedish vendor's head of 6G portfolio strategy, said in June: "What we're pushing for is a move to that standalone 5G core. The 6G core will reuse a large part of that."

The Ericsson and Nokia camp is now labelled Direction 1 in 3GPP parlance: AI lives in a separate domain, untouched by the core itself. A second camp, Direction 2, backed by NTT Docomo, Vodafone, LG Electronics, NEC and Samsung, accepts some AI injection into dedicated network functions.

Why is Huawei pushing for revolution?

Huawei and ZTE, together with China Mobile, want Direction 3: AI agents deeply integrated into core procedures, what Omdia senior principal analyst Ruth Brown called "agent-handled connectivity" in recent research.

The China camp also proposes a new signal routing function independent of the access and mobility management function (AMF), potentially scrapping what Brown described as "procedural, multi-hop bloat" in current designs.

Is there room for compromise?

One European telco executive who attended the Madrid plenary was blunt. "I am surprised that people don't want to compromise," he said. "Everyone wants simplicity as long as they get their own solution."

Brown sketched a possible middle path in a Light Reading blog: a "partial merge" of Directions 1 and 2 that keeps AI separate but tweaks routing. That would still leave a wide gap with Direction 3.

What are the stakes?

The 3GPP must finalise a 6G architecture by November. If no consensus emerges, Brown warned, operators could end up "managing two divergent cores: a revolutionary single-vendor solution in Chinese domestic markets and an evolutionary multi-vendor architecture in the rest of the world."

The risk looks more concrete than at the equivalent stage of 5G. Ericsson and Nokia's combined share of the Chinese market has fallen from about 10% seven years ago — a figure cited by then-Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm — to roughly 3% by late 2025, according to Nokia executives. Big European operators say they have already removed Huawei from their core networks even where Huawei RAN gear remains in place; no major US carrier buys from Huawei or ZTE at all.

Why are operators so cautious about 6G?

The conservative mood stems from 5G disappointment. Operators have spent heavily on 5G standalone, yet features such as network slicing remain in trial rather than commercial scale. "It was a big wow feature and that's still in progress," Brown said.

A counter-view comes from Omdia's Gabriel Brown, who compared incremental 6G design to legacy carmakers retrofitting combustion platforms for electric powertrains. "The chassis design really wasn't ideal, but it kind of worked," he said. "What they've now found is that EV-native is the better way to do it."

For now, the November deadline will test whether the 3GPP can hold the line on a single global standard, or whether 6G inherits the same non-standalone-versus-standalone split that has defined 5G for nearly a decade.