The US Is About to Tell 35 Countries to Pick a Side on AI

Washington is preparing to make its partners choose. A draft State Department letter, reviewed by Reuters and circulating since mid-August, tells 35 countries they cannot belong to America's AI supply-chain coalition and to China's rival framework at the same time. The language is unusually blunt for a diplomatic cable. "To be part of everything is to be part of nothing," it reads, urging recipients to "choose deliberately."

The letter goes to the 35 signatories of an American "AI Opportunity Statement" from June. At its center is Pax Silica, the initiative Washington launched last year to lock down the supply chains behind advanced AI, meaning the models, the semiconductors and the critical minerals that feed both. Around two dozen countries have joined, including Japan, Australia and South Korea. The draft frames membership as "not merely a membership subscription, but a commitment," and warns that signing up for "duplicative initiatives whose expectations conflict with our own" is incompatible with staying inside the American bloc.

The rival on the other side

The initiative it will not name is China's. In July, Xi Jinping announced the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, pitching China's downloadable open-weight models as an alternative to the American-controlled access that Pax Silica represents. The contrast is the whole story. One bloc offers the frontier hardware and the tightly held top models, on the condition that you stay inside the fence. The other offers weights you can download and run yourself, with fewer strings and fewer guarantees.

The catalyst for the letter appears to be a single country. Kazakhstan is the only nation known to have signed up to both frameworks, and its critical-mineral reserves make that hedge alarming to Washington. A country sitting on the raw inputs for AI hardware, keeping a foot in each camp, is exactly the outcome Pax Silica was built to prevent.

An uncomfortable choice for a lot of governments

For the nations receiving this letter, the demand is harder than it sounds. Many of them want American chips and want Chinese technology and investment too, and until now they have not been forced to rank the two. India, which has courted both Washington and Beijing on AI, is the clearest example of a government that would rather not answer the question. Forcing the choice risks pushing undecided countries toward China's more permissive offer rather than away from it, which is the gamble hidden inside the tough language.

A few caveats are worth stating plainly. The draft is undated, and the State Department has declined to comment on what it called "purportedly leaked internal documents." Reuters could not establish when, or whether, the final version will be sent, or how the text might change first. So this is a document of intent rather than a policy in force. But intent from the world's largest AI power, aimed at 35 governments at once, is itself the news. It signals that the export-control fights of the past two years are widening into something broader, a demand not just about which chips cross which borders, but about which technological world a country chooses to live in.