Technology & Science
U.S. Drafts ‘Pick-a-Side’ Letter on AI Blocs: Pax Silica vs. WAICO
A leaked, undated State Department letter warns 35 governments that joining China’s WAICO will trigger expulsion from the U.S-led Pax Silica technology pact, converting AI cooperation into an explicit allegiance test.
Focusing Facts
- The draft targets all 35 signatories of the June 2026 AI Opportunity Statement, telling them Pax Silica membership is incompatible with WAICO participation.
- China’s WAICO was launched on 16 Jul 2026 with 29 founding members, while Pax Silica began on 12 Dec 2025 and has about 25 members.
- Kazakhstan is presently the only country in both blocs, valued for its critical-mineral reserves central to chip production.
Context
Washington’s ultimatum echoes the 1949–1994 CoCom export-control regime, when the U.S. forced NATO allies to restrict high-tech sales to the Soviet bloc; once again, technology chokepoints (then numerically-controlled machine tools, now GPUs and lithography gear) become levers of alliance discipline. The letter also resurrects the binary-camp logic that the 1955 Bandung Conference and later Non-Aligned Movement tried to escape, suggesting a reversal of three decades of post-Cold-War economic interdependence. Longer-term, the move signals that advanced compute is being codified as a strategic commodity like oil in 1908 or uranium in 1945—governance is shifting from multilateral standards bodies to rival politico-industrial cartels. Whether this moment endures hinges on two uncertainties: (1) if open-source AI and alternative chip architectures erode U.S. chokepoints, much as cheap Soviet oil undercut the 1973 embargo, the ultimatum may age poorly; (2) if nations such as Brazil or India coalesce a third, non-aligned AI corridor, the forced-choice framework could fracture. Either way, historians looking back a century will likely mark 2025-26 as the period when access to ‘compute’ overtook hydrocarbons as the premier currency of geopolitical power.
Perspectives
US tech-industry media
e.g., Crypto Briefing — Portrays Washington’s ‘pick-a-side’ push as a calculated strategy to secure AI and semiconductor supply chains and preserve U.S. technological primacy against China’s rival WAICO bloc. Coverage largely echoes U.S. officials’ framing, stressing benefits for allied economies while playing down how the policy pressures smaller states and could deepen global tech fragmentation.
Asian mainstream press
e.g., The Manila Times, The Hindu — Emphasises that the leaked U.S. letter would force dozens of countries—Kazakhstan in particular—to abandon China’s AI body or face exclusion from Pax Silica, warning the ultimatum could ‘stifle global AI advances.’ Stories spotlight U.S. coercion and quote Chinese diplomats, reflecting regional wariness of being caught between superpowers, while giving limited scrutiny to Beijing’s own geopolitical ambitions.
Investor-focused business commentary
e.g., MyrtleBeachOnline/The Street — Frames the draft letter as a market-moving ‘loyalty test’ that could redraw the addressable market for companies like Nvidia by hard-splitting global AI demand into U.S. and China camps. Analysis is filtered through stock-market impact, potentially sensationalising geopolitical risk to attract investors’ attention and glossing over security or ethical dimensions of AI governance.
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