Joining Beijing's rival framework would cost a country the shared AI investment access that comes with the U.S.-led bloc, the draft warns.
The United States is preparing to tell dozens of governments that they must choose between it and China on artificial intelligence, warning that any country which also joins Beijing's rival framework will be shut out of an AI bloc led by Washington, according to an American official and a confidential draft letter seen by Reuters.
The draft was prepared by the State Department and is directed at the 35 countries that put their names to the U.S. AI Opportunity Statement in June — a set that takes in members of the voluntary Pax Silica framework as well as other states that have said they want their AI cooperation aligned with Washington.
The test is laid out in the document's own wording. Adding a name to the Pax Silica Declaration, it contends, means taking on an obligation rather than simply signing up for a service, and that membership cannot be held at the same time as membership in overlapping efforts whose demands run counter to what the U.S. expects. Belonging to everything, the draft argues, amounts to belonging to nothing, and it presses recipients to choose deliberately. China is not named outright.
A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because deliberations inside the government have not concluded, named China. The letter was written so that governments would understand they cannot play both sides, the official said, adding that a state's claim to be a trusted partner within one technology bloc loses credibility if it simultaneously joins a rival effort China built to promote its own vision of AI.
That rival effort has a name. In July, President Xi Jinping unveiled the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, pitching China's open-weight technology as a counter to American sway over the field — and the pressure now arrives at a decisive point in the technology contest, with open-weight Chinese models rapidly closing the gap on the closed, proprietary systems built by American firms including OpenAI and Anthropic.
Washington set up Pax Silica last year to make supply chains for AI models, chips and critical minerals more secure at a time of technological competition with China, and countries inside it can tap jointly available investment openings in projects tied to AI.
Roughly two dozen states have signed on so far, among them firm American partners including Japan, Australia and South Korea. Another is Kazakhstan, which Washington highlighted in June as Central Asia's first entrant, pointing to its large deposits of the critical minerals that power advanced technology — and which is the only country known so far to have joined the Chinese organization as well, a step that has caused alarm in Washington.
The State Department declined to discuss what it characterized as purportedly leaked internal documents. Neither China's nor Kazakhstan's embassy in Washington replied straight away to requests for comment on the document.
The version of the letter Reuters examined carried no date, and there was no way to establish what timing the U.S. has in mind for dispatching it, or whether the text could still be altered beforehand.