A draft State Department letter tells 35 countries they can't join both the US and Chinese AI blocs

A draft letter sitting inside the State Department tells 35 countries they may not belong to both the American and Chinese AI coalitions much longer. Reuters reported on August 14 that the letter, addressed to every signatory of the U.S. "AI Opportunity Statement," argues that continued membership in China's rival AI framework is incompatible with Pax Silica, the Washington-led coalition on AI supply chains. The draft's own language is blunt: "To be part of everything is to be part of nothing." As of this writing, the State Department has declined to comment, and Reuters could not confirm the letter has actually been sent.

Pax Silica launched in December 2025 with seven founding members — the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia and Israel — built around a straightforward pitch: pool investment, align export controls, and secure the minerals, chips and data-center capacity AI runs on. It grew fast. By the Second Pax Silica Summit in June 2026, 25 countries had signed the founding Declaration, and 35 — including Argentina, Germany, India, Italy and Kazakhstan — had signed a lighter companion document, the AI Opportunity Statement, which is the one at the center of this letter. That same summit added 10 more Declaration partners, launched a pilot AI-logistics project for Panama, and opened a Stanford-run workforce program called Foundry School — the kind of tangible, non-military benefit the coalition uses to recruit.

Five weeks later, on July 16, China answered with a coalition of its own. Twenty-nine countries — including Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa and Kazakhstan — signed the founding agreement for the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) in Shanghai, an idea Premier Li Qiang first floated in July 2025 and Xi Jinping formalized a year later at the World AI Conference. Headquartered in Shanghai and pitched squarely at the Global South, WAICO's stated aim is cooperation and access rather than the export-control alignment Pax Silica asks of its members — a genuine alternative framework, not merely a rhetorical one, for any country unwilling to commit to either superpower's supply chain.

One country has signed both documents: Kazakhstan. Its deputy prime minister, Zhaslan Madiyev, put his name on WAICO's founding agreement in Shanghai on July 16 — the same country that had already signed Pax Silica's AI Opportunity Statement months earlier. The overlap isn't symbolic. Kazakhstan holds real reserves of tungsten, copper and rare-earth elements that both blocs want processed outside China's existing dominance of the refining stage, commonly estimated at up to 90% of global rare-earth refining capacity. (Rare-earth reserves and rare-earth refining capacity are different assets — Kazakhstan has real deposits of the first and almost none of the second, which is exactly the leverage both Washington and Beijing are using to court it.) Kazakhstan is the dual membership the draft letter appears written to close — and the government in Astana has not said which way, if either, it would choose.

The letter's hard line is a break from Washington's own public messaging. Jacob Helberg, the State Department's Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and Pax Silica's chief pitchman, told reporters in Singapore in May that the coalition "isn't about countries choosing" — pointing out that existing members like the UAE and Qatar already sit inside China's Belt and Road Initiative without losing their place in Pax Silica. Three months and one WAICO founding later, an anonymous U.S. official gave Reuters a considerably less accommodating version of the same policy.

“You can't have it both ways.” — a U.S. official, describing the draft letter's intent to Reuters

The strategic logic underneath the ultimatum is about compute, not diplomacy for its own sake. Washington's theory is that denying China as much of the chip-mineral-energy stack as possible, through allied export-control alignment, matters more than winning any individual country's public loyalty. WAICO doesn't ask members to restrict chip exports to Beijing; it asks them to cooperate on standards and access instead. A country that signs both documents can, in theory, draw on Pax Silica's investment stream while also opening itself to WAICO's alternative supply and standards regime — which is exactly the arbitrage the draft letter is trying to close.

Nothing here is settled. The letter is still a draft, and Reuters could not learn whether the State Department intends to send it as written, soften it, or shelve it entirely. If it goes out unchanged, Kazakhstan becomes the test case — the first country asked, in writing, to give up one of the two blocs it has already formally joined. Other Pax Silica members already sit inside China-linked arrangements of a different kind — the UAE and Qatar's own Belt and Road ties are the example Helberg himself raised — but none of them have signed WAICO specifically, which is the line this letter actually draws. How Kazakhstan answers, and whether Washington enforces the choice on anyone else, is what the rest of the roster is waiting to see.