“To be part of everything is to be part of nothing.” That line sits in a draft State Department letter that Reuters reported on August 14, 2026, and it sums up the message: partners of the United States may have to pick between American and Chinese approaches to artificial intelligence.
Michael Martina reported the story for Reuters, citing a U.S. official and an internal document. The Next Web carried the details a day later.
What the letter says
The draft is addressed to the 35 countries that signed Washington’s AI Opportunity Statement in June. It says that signing the Pax Silica Declaration is “not merely a membership subscription, but a commitment,” and urges countries to choose deliberately.
China is never named. The text speaks of “duplicative initiatives whose expectations conflict with our own.” The U.S. official was blunter, telling Reuters that officials wrote it to make clear “you can’t have it both ways.” Such a country, the official said, would struggle to present itself as a trusted partner in one technology ecosystem while joining an initiative designed by China to advance a rival vision.
Reuters could not say when the letter would go out or whether the wording might change first. The draft carries no date. The State Department told the agency it would not comment on “purportedly leaked internal documents.”
Pax Silica and the wider group
Washington launched Pax Silica the year before. Its aim is to secure supply chains for AI models, semiconductors and critical minerals. About two dozen countries have joined, among them Japan, Australia, South Korea and Kazakhstan. Members get access to shared investment opportunities in AI projects, and the framework nudges them toward joint work and coordinated export controls.
The group of 35 is looser. Signing the AI Opportunity Statement means agreeing, in a symbolic way, on a “common purpose” and a “shared vision” with the United States, according to the State Department’s own posting. The framework is non-binding, and the letter appears to be an attempt to firm it up.
Kazakhstan, the test case
One country set this off. Kazakhstan joined Pax Silica in June, and Under Secretary Jacob Helberg marked it as the first Central Asian accession. The country holds large reserves of the minerals that advanced chips depend on. It then also joined China’s framework. Kazakhstan is the only country known to have signed up to both, and Reuters reported that this set off alarm bells in Washington.
The Chinese body is the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, which Xi Jinping announced in July at a conference in Shanghai. He pitched China’s open-weight models as an alternative to American influence. Reuters reported in July that Beijing is itself weighing limits on overseas access to its leading models.
The pressure behind it
Chinese open-weight models have narrowed much of the gap with proprietary systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. Hugging Face’s chief executive told CNBC that month that China is winning the open-model race, with 41% of downloads. Separately, the Commerce Department is examining how China gets remote access to Nvidia chips it cannot buy.
Whether the letter is ever sent is still open. So is the identity of the 35 signatories, since Pax Silica has announced its accessions one at a time.
