Washington asks about 35 countries to pick an AI camp; Beijing says no

Washington has written to about 35 signatories of a joint statement on AI partnership, telling them they cannot remain in the US-led initiative while also joining Chinese-backed efforts ^[2]. Beijing has declined the choice: foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said at a briefing that China opposes taking sides or forming camps on AI, and that each country has the right to choose partners based on its own national conditions and development needs ^[1].

The letter is not the whole of it. Reuters, which reviewed an internal US draft and spoke to a US official, reported that the government is preparing to tell dozens of countries they must line up behind a US-led AI coalition or be shut out of it if they sign onto Beijing's rival framework ^[3]. That converts a diplomatic preference into an exclusivity clause, and exclusivity clauses have to be enforced, which is a different administrative burden than issuing a joint statement.

Lin's counter-framing is the predictable one and also the cheaper one: respect for each country's digital sovereignty, and an end to what he called zero-sum thinking in favour of a fairer global system for governing AI ^[4]. Beijing has already published a paper on global cyber governance built around national control over data and infrastructure ^[5], so the vocabulary is not improvised. Cryptopolitan's assessment is that by presenting itself as the side not demanding exclusivity, China can win over the same governments Washington is lobbying ^[6]. Treat that as the publisher's read rather than an observed outcome, but the asymmetry is real: one side is asking buyers to sign something, the other is asking them to sign nothing.

For operators selling AI systems into those roughly 35 markets, the consequence is that a stack choice now behaves like a foreign-policy commitment. A ministry that adopts a US vendor under an exclusivity condition inherits switching costs it did not price, and a ministry that hedges will want portability, second suppliers, and open weights it can run itself. The hedging instinct is not hypothetical inside the US either: Beijing has noted that nearly 200 US startups asked their own government not to cut off access to Chinese open-source models, warning it would hurt American competitiveness ^[11].

The wider dispute is already past rhetoric. In late July China's Ministry of Commerce urged Washington to stop threatening Chinese AI firms with sanctions, calling the pressure a form of "AI hegemony" that it said lacked factual or legal grounds ^[7]. Those threats followed claims by US companies that Chinese labs distill American models and use the outputs to train cheaper ones ^[8], and a White House memo from science adviser Michael Kratsios accused China-based entities of industrial-scale distillation campaigns ^[9]. Chinese regulators are moving to bar domestic firms from taking US investment without approval ^[10]. US officials added foreign-built advanced robots to a restricted list, blocking new Chinese-made robot models from the US market ^[12]; the robotics maker Unitree was affected and still saw its shares jump 629% on their first day in Shanghai, about 7.3 times the issue price ^[13][15], with a valuation near $66 billion at one point ^[13]. Officials are also still checking whether China obtained restricted Nvidia chips ^[14].