US to 35 countries: drop China's AI pact or get locked out of ours

The State Department has drafted a letter telling the 35 countries that signed Washington's "AI Opportunity Statement" last June that they can no longer sit in both the US-led and Chinese AI camps. The undated draft, reviewed by Reuters, turns a voluntary sign-up into a precondition for access to the US-led supply chain for AI models, semiconductors, and critical minerals (Reuters via ITnews).

The target list comes from the AI Opportunity Statement, signed at the second Pax Silica summit in June 2026. The declaration is non-binding, but it gave Washington a ready mailing list of capitals already on record as wanting to align AI policy with the United States (second summit outcomes). That list is broader than the Pax Silica coalition itself, which Reuters puts at about two dozen members; the 35 signatories include both Pax Silica governments and countries that have signalled interest in aligning AI cooperation with Washington (State Department Pax Silica page; Wikipedia: Pax Silica). The State Department has declined to comment on "purportedly leaked internal documents," and the letter could still be amended before any version is sent.

Pax Silica is not a software alliance. It bundles cooperation on AI models with the physical inputs those models run on: advanced semiconductors and the critical minerals needed to build them. That is the gate the draft letter is now trying to close. The letter does not name China directly, but it tells recipients that Pax Silica membership "cannot be held alongside membership in duplicative initiatives whose expectations conflict with our own." The framing, in the draft's own words, is explicit: "To be part of everything is to be part of nothing. Signature of the Pax Silica Declaration is not merely a membership subscription, but a commitment." The letter urges signatories to "choose deliberately."

The parallel Chinese framework the letter targets is the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, which Xi Jinping is reported to have launched in July. The first country to feel the pressure is Kazakhstan. Astana is the only government known to have joined both Pax Silica and the Chinese-led organization, and it is also a significant source of the critical minerals the US coalition is built to secure. The Kazakh embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Beijing's response was on the record before the draft surfaced. China's embassy in Washington said Washington is politicizing trade and technology, and warned that "such actions will only stifle global AI advances and serve no one's interests."

The strategic logic, as described in the wire reporting, is denial: the United States wants to deny China the AI models, the advanced chips, and the critical-mineral inputs that a competitor would need for either military or economic dominance. The June AI Opportunity Statement gave Washington the names; the Pax Silica program gave it the supply chain to make the names matter; the draft letter is the bridge between the two.

For other signatories, the choice the letter poses is whether to give up access to a US-aligned AI stack: models, training compute, and the mineral inputs to both. The price of keeping a seat at China's parallel table is the US stack. Until the State Department dates and sends a final version, the letter is leverage, not policy. The collision has already happened in Astana; the rest of the list is the next round.