Draft State Department letter would make AI coalition membership an either/or for 35 countries

The US State Department has prepared a draft letter to the 35 countries that signed its AI Opportunity Statement in June, telling them to decide whether they will cooperate on artificial intelligence with Washington or with Beijing, according to Reuters as summarised by mezha.net ^[1][2]. States that join both the American and the Chinese initiatives may be excluded from the US AI coalition ^[3], which turns supply-chain alignment from a stated preference into a condition of membership.

Pax Silica, the non-binding initiative Washington launched last year, is the vehicle ^[4]. Its stated purpose is to strengthen supply chains for AI models, semiconductors and critical minerals, and to push allies toward joint projects, coordinated export controls and less dependence on states Washington treats as adversaries ^[4][5]. Roughly two dozen countries have joined, including Japan, Australia, South Korea and Kazakhstan ^[6]. The incentive on offer is access to shared investment opportunities in AI-related projects ^[7]. Since the letter addresses 35 signatories and Pax Silica has about two dozen members, roughly a dozen of the recipients are being asked to commit to terms they have not yet signed ^[8].

The draft's language, as rendered in the Ukrainian summary, reads: "Being part of everything means being part of nothing. Signing the Pax Silica declaration is not just formalising membership, it is a commitment" ^[9]. The document states that participation in Pax Silica is incompatible with similar initiatives whose terms conflict with the expectations of the American coalition ^[10]. China is not named in the text ^[11].

The unnamed target is not hard to identify. In July, Xi Jinping presented a competing structure, the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, and Beijing has promoted open-weight AI models as an alternative to US technological influence ^[12][13]. Those open-weight models are closing the gap with closed systems from OpenAI and Anthropic ^[14]. At the same time, Beijing is weighing limits on foreign access to some of its leading models ^[15], and rising capability, including autonomous cyberattacks, is pushing governments to reconsider who gets access to frontier systems ^[16].

Kazakhstan is the only country known to have joined both Pax Silica and the Chinese initiative, which has caused concern in Washington ^[17][18]. It is also the case Washington can least afford to lose: Kazakhstan matters to the US because of its critical mineral reserves ^[19]. China has already used its dominance in critical minerals as leverage in the tariff confrontation President Donald Trump began last year, and the US response has been to hunt for alternative sources at home and among allies ^[20][21]. One US official told Reuters it is hard to see how a country can credibly present itself as a reliable partner in one technology ecosystem while joining an initiative created by China to advance a competing vision of AI ^[22].

It is not known when the letter will be sent, or whether its content will change first, and the State Department declined to comment on what it treated as a leaked internal document ^[23][24]. Watch whether the incompatibility clause survives into the sent version with any written definition of which initiatives disqualify a signatory, and watch Kazakhstan: if a minerals supplier can hold both memberships without losing coalition access, the condition is rhetoric. If it cannot, the other 34 recipients will read the precedent accordingly ^[1][17].