Abstract The intraseasonal variability (ISV) of the Asian summer monsoon represented in seven coupled general circulation models (CGCMs) as part of the Development of a European Multimodel Ensemble System for Seasonal-to-Interannual Prediction (DEMETER) project is analyzed and evaluated against observations. The focus is on the spatial and seasonal variations of ISV of outgoing longwave radiation (OLR). The large-scale organization of convection, the propagation characteristics, and the air–sea coupling related to the monsoon ISV are also evaluated. A multivariate local mode analysis (LMA) reveals that most models produce less organized convection and ISV events of shorter duration than observed. Compared to the real atmosphere, these simulated patterns of perturbations are poorly reproducible from one event to the other. Most models simulate too weak sea surface temperature (SST) perturbations and systematic phase quadrature between OLR, surface winds, and SST—indicative of a slab-ocean-like response of the SST to surface flux perturbations. The relatively coarse vertical resolution of the different ocean GCMs (OGCMs) limits their ability to represent intraseasonal processes, such as diurnal warm layer formation, which are important for realistic simulation of the SST perturbations at intraseasonal time scales. Models with the same atmospheric GCM (AGCM) and different OGCMs tend to have similar biases of the simulated ISV, indicating the dominant role of atmospheric models in fixing the nature of the intraseasonal variability. It is, therefore, implied that improvements in the representation of ISV in coupled models have to fundamentally arise from fixing problems in the large-scale organization of convection in AGCMs.