The State Department is preparing to hand partner countries an ultimatum: join China’s AI coalition or stay in America’s. A draft letter reviewed by Reuters puts it bluntly — “To be part of everything is to be part of nothing.” Countries that sign on to Beijing’s framework would find themselves shut out of Pax Silica, the US-led initiative launched last year to lock down supply chains for AI models, semiconductors, and critical minerals.
Roughly two dozen nations plus the EU have joined Pax Silica so far. But Kazakhstan is the one country sitting in both camps, and its position is exactly the kind of hedging Washington wants to eliminate. The Central Asian nation holds substantial reserves of the critical minerals that high-tech and AI supply chains depend on — which makes it valuable to both sides and uncomfortable to lose.
China isn’t taking this quietly. In July, Xi Jinping launched the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, positioning China’s open-weight models as a direct alternative to systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. The Chinese embassy in Washington responded to the US draft by arguing that forcing countries to choose will slow global AI progress and serve no one’s interests.
This is the same playbook the US ran with Huawei and 5G infrastructure, just applied to the AI stack. Then, as now, the pressure campaign only works if the coalition offers something China can’t match — and so far, Beijing’s open-weight strategy is genuinely appealing to countries that want sovereignty over their AI systems rather than dependence on either superpower. The real test won’t be what the letter says. It’ll be whether Kazakhstan and other fence-sitters decide the cost of leaving the US orbit is higher than the cost of staying in China’s.
