The US is about to tell 35 countries to choose between it and China on AI

Michael Martina reported the draft for Reuters on 14 August, citing a US official and an internal document. The letter goes to the 35 signatories of an American “AI Opportunity Statement” from June. Its message is that countries must choose.

The wording is blunt for a diplomatic text. “To be part of everything is to be part of nothing,” it says. Signing the Pax Silica Declaration is “not merely a membership subscription, but a commitment”. The letter urges countries to choose deliberately.

Reuters could not establish when Washington will send it, or whether the text changes first. The draft is undated. The State Department said it would not comment on “purportedly leaked internal documents”.

What Pax Silica actually is

Washington launched it last year. The aim is to secure supply chains across three things at once: AI models, semiconductors and critical minerals.

About two dozen countries have joined. Reuters names Japan, Australia, South Korea and Kazakhstan. Members get access to shared investment opportunities in AI projects, and the framework pushes them towards joint projects and coordinated export controls.

The wider group is looser. Signing the AI Opportunity Statement means agreeing symbolically on a “common purpose” and a “shared vision” with the US, according to the State Department’s own posting. That is the group of 35 now receiving the letter.

The framework is non-binding. That is precisely the gap the letter is trying to close.

One country set this off

Kazakhstan joined Pax Silica in June. The State Department made a point of it at the time, with Under Secretary Jacob Helberg marking it as the first Central Asian accession. The country holds significant reserves of the minerals that advanced chips depend on.

It then joined China’s framework as well. Kazakhstan is the only country known to have signed up to both, and Reuters reports that this set off alarm bells in Washington.

The minerals are what make it awkward. China has already used its near-monopolies here as a retaliatory weapon during the tariff war. A supplier hedging between the two blocs is the exact scenario Pax Silica exists to prevent.

What Xi launched in July

The rival body is barely a month old. Xi Jinping announced a World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization at a Shanghai conference, and pitched China’s open-weight models as the alternative to American influence.

The offer is different in kind. Pax Silica offers investment access and shared controls. Beijing offers models you can download.

China’s own position is less open than the pitch suggests. Reuters reported in July that Beijing is weighing restrictions on overseas access to its leading models. Both sides are working out how much access they are willing to give away.

The word the letter avoids

China is not mentioned. The letter refers instead to “duplicative initiatives whose expectations conflict with our own”, and leaves the reader to fill in the name.

The US official Reuters spoke to was less careful. Officials drafted it to make clear “you can’t have it both ways”, the official said, on condition of anonymity.

The rest of that quote is the argument in full. It is difficult to see how a country can credibly position itself as a trusted partner in one technology ecosystem, the official said. Not while it signs up to an initiative designed by China to advance a competing vision.

The timing is not accidental

Chinese open-weight models have closed much of the gap on the proprietary systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. Hugging Face’s chief executive put numbers on it this month, telling CNBC that China is winning the open-model race with 41% of downloads.

American industry is not united behind the closed approach either. Nvidia and several other large firms broke with OpenAI and Anthropic over open weights this year.

The enforcement machinery has been tightening in parallel. The Commerce Department is examining how China gets remote access to Nvidia chips it cannot buy. The Treasury Secretary has threatened to sanction Chinese AI firms outright.

Europe does not appear in this story

Here is what stands out from a European desk. Reuters names Japan, Australia, South Korea and Kazakhstan among the members. It names no European country at all.

That is not proof of absence, because the report does not publish the full list. It is still striking for a framework covering chips and critical minerals, given how much of both Europe handles.

Brussels has spent the year building a third position rather than picking a side. The Made in EU rules start at a 5% local-content threshold and cover hardware, and the sovereignty push runs through European compute, European satellites and European models.

A letter demanding a binary choice arrives into that. Whether any European capital receives one is the thing to watch.

The counter-argument arrived within hours

The China analyst Rui Ma made the case that the letter may cost more than it gains. Writing on X, she argued that the world is watching one side weaponise supply chains and controlled access. The other promotes open technology and broad access.

Her point about durability is the sharper one. Alliances are not permanent and incentives change, she wrote, which is a caution about coercion rather than a defence of Beijing.

A third argument turned up alongside it. Several developers responded that countries should build their own systems and depend on neither bloc, because either dependency hands someone else a switch over your economy. That is easier to say than to fund.

What would settle it

Three things, and the first is whether the letter is ever sent. It is a draft, it is undated, and the State Department has not confirmed it exists.

The second is Kazakhstan. It is the test case, it holds the minerals, and what it does when the letter lands tells you whether the threat has force.

The third is the full membership list. Pax Silica has announced accessions one at a time. Until the 35 names surface, nobody outside Washington can say whom the US is asking to choose.