US reportedly tells partner nations to choose its AI coalition over China's

A draft US State Department letter, reported by Reuters, reportedly tells signatories of Washington’s “Pax Silica” AI-supply-chain framework that membership is incompatible with joining a rival organisation China launched the previous month. Reuters said it had reviewed the letter but that the State Department declined to comment on what it called “purportedly leaked internal documents,” so neither the letter’s final wording nor whether it had actually been sent to partner governments was confirmed.

Pax Silica, launched in 2025, groups roughly two dozen countries — including Japan, Australia, South Korea and Kazakhstan — around cooperation on AI models, semiconductors and critical minerals. In July 2026, Chinese president Xi Jinping launched a competing body, the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), promoting China’s open-weight AI technology as an alternative to US-led supply chains. The draft letter, according to Reuters, argues that the two frameworks’ expectations conflict and warns that “to be part of everything is to be part of nothing,” urging the roughly 35 signatories of a June “AI Opportunity Statement” to “choose deliberately.”

Kazakhstan was named as the only country so far to have joined both initiatives, a fact Reuters said had drawn particular US concern given the country’s reserves of critical minerals used in chip and AI hardware supply chains. The episode illustrated how the contest between Washington and Beijing over AI infrastructure was extending into demands that smaller and middle-income countries pick a bloc, rather than hedge between both, at a point when neither coalition’s membership had fully solidified.