Pick a Side: US Drafts Ultimatum Telling Allies They Cannot Join Both Pax Silica and China's AI Bloc

For most of the past year, the global AI race has been described as a competition between companies and models. A State Department letter now circulating in draft form makes clear it is increasingly a competition between blocs — and that Washington intends to force countries to choose which one they belong to.

Reuters reported on August 14 that the United States is preparing to tell dozens of countries they must pick sides in the artificial intelligence race with China, warning they will face consequences if they join both Washington’s AI coalition and Beijing’s competing framework. The draft letter is addressed to the 35 signatories of the US AI Opportunity Statement — the diplomatic backbone of the so-called Pax Silica initiative — and its language is unusually blunt for a document meant to keep partners close: signatories cannot also join China’s rival AI coalition.

What the draft letter says

The core demand is simple and binary. Countries aligned with the US-led AI coalition would be barred from simultaneously joining the Chinese-initiated framework, which has come to be known as WAICO (the World AI Cooperation Organization). The draft warns explicitly against membership in the competing bloc and frames dual alignment as a strategic risk to the coalition’s integrity.

The trigger, according to multiple reports, was Kazakhstan. On June 25, 2026, Kazakhstan officially joined Pax Silica, becoming the first Central Asian country to enter the initiative. It subsequently also joined China’s coalition — making it, so far as is publicly known, the only country to have joined both. That double membership set off alarm bells in Washington, where officials concluded that without an explicit exclusivity rule, the coalition’s supply-chain guarantees would erode one hedging partner at a time.

About two dozen countries have joined China’s initiative, including Kazakhstan, which the reporting notes is a key potential source of critical minerals. That detail is not incidental. Pax Silica is, at its core, a supply-chain pact: a US-led strategic effort to build a trusted, China-free path from critical mineral mines through fabrication, advanced packaging, and ultimately frontier AI models. The State Department describes it as its “flagship effort on AI and supply chain security.” A minerals-rich country straddling both blocs undermines the premise.

Two blocs, two philosophies

The ultimatum crystallizes a split that has been building since late 2025, when the State Department first launched Pax Silica and the Declaration on AI Opportunity was opened for signature. The US framework ties AI cooperation to economic security: trusted allies get access to American chips, models, and investment, on the condition that the silicon stack — from mines to models — excludes Chinese suppliers of consequence.

China’s WAICO, by contrast, is pitched as an open, sovereignty-respecting alternative. Membership does not require exclusivity, and the framework emphasizes technology sharing, capacity building, and national control over data and infrastructure. For countries that cannot afford to build their own frontier AI sector, that pitch is not incidental — it is the product.

Analysts have taken to calling the emerging landscape “the new AI blocs,” an explicit echo of Cold War economic spheres. The Atlantic Council, in an assessment of what Pax Silica needs to succeed, identified three elements: credible commitments, real incentives, and a coalition broad enough to matter. An exclusivity ultimatum helps with none of them. It hardens the bloc boundary, but it also raises the price of membership at exactly the moment the coalition is still recruiting.

Beijing’s response: sovereignty, not sides

China’s foreign ministry did not wait long to answer. At a regular briefing on August 19, spokesperson Lin Jian urged respect for each country’s digital sovereignty and said China is “opposed to taking sides and forming camps on AI.” The statement was a direct response to the Reuters reporting, and it aligned squarely with WAICO’s founding pitch: countries should be free to cooperate with whomever they choose, without bloc discipline.

The rhetorical exchange matters because it frames the choice differently for the roughly hundred-plus countries that have joined neither framework. Washington frames the choice as security versus exposure: stay inside a trusted stack, or accept the risks of dependency on an adversary’s technology. Beijing frames it as openness versus coercion: join a framework that respects your sovereignty, or submit to one that demands loyalty tests. Both framings are self-serving; both are also, for different audiences, effective.

There is an added layer of irony that neither government acknowledges. The US diplomatic corps itself has been instructed to soften how the coalition is sold abroad. A July Reuters investigation revealed a State Department cable, signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, directing diplomats to play down talk of an American tech “kill switch” — the perception that US technology comes with a Washington-controlled off button. Telling countries they must pick sides, while simultaneously assuring them there is no kill switch, is a messaging problem the draft letter does not solve.

Why this matters beyond diplomacy

The stakes are not abstract. The side a country lands on will shape which chips it can buy, which models it can deploy, which data-center investments arrive, and which critical-minerals offtake agreements get signed. For middle powers — Gulf states, Southeast Asian economies, Central Asian republics — the calculation is a genuine dilemma: American technology is more capable today, but Chinese financing builds faster, and Chinese hardware does not arrive with alliance conditions attached.

Kazakhstan’s position illustrates the bind. As a critical-minerals power positioned between Russia, China, and the Caspian region, it has every structural incentive to hedge. Joining Pax Silica opened doors to Western AI investment; joining WAICO kept Beijing’s goodwill — and its minerals buyers — intact. The US draft letter is, in effect, an assertion that this kind of hedging era is over.

Whether the letter survives in its current draft form is an open question. Similar coalition documents have softened between draft and delivery, and State Department lawyers are reportedly sensitive to the optics of issuing ultimatums to sovereign partners. But the direction is unmistakable. The AI race is consolidating into two exclusive stacks, and the window for countries to sit between them is closing.

The deeper consequence may be the one least discussed in Washington: exclusivity cuts both ways. Every country the US pushes firmly into the Chinese bloc is a market, a mineral source, and a talent pool that Pax Silica permanently forgoes. If the goal is to keep the free world’s silicon stack broad and resilient, an ultimatum is a strange way to grow it.