Beijing Tells Washington Not to Make Countries Pick an AI Side

Asked on Wednesday about an American plan to tell dozens of governments they cannot belong to both the US and Chinese artificial intelligence camps, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian never once said the words United States. He did not need to.

“AI is the collective wisdom and precious asset shared by all humanity,” Lin told the ministry’s regular press briefing on August 19, responding to a question from the Shanghai outlet The Paper. “All countries have the right to decide for themselves who they wish to partner with according to their own national conditions and development needs. China firmly opposes forcing countries to take sides or creating bloc confrontation on AI.”

He then delivered the phrase Beijing has spent the summer building an institution around: “We hope that all sides will abandon the zero-sum mentality, advocate solidarity, respect digital sovereignty of all countries, and build a just and equitable system for global AI governance.”

The document behind the question

The reporting Lin was reacting to came from Reuters correspondent Michael Martina, who on August 14 described an internal State Department draft letter, citing a US official and the document itself. The letter is addressed to the 35 signatories of an American AI Opportunity Statement signed in June, and its argument is a single blunt line: “To be part of everything is to be part of nothing.” Signing the Pax Silica Declaration, the draft says, is not merely a membership subscription but a commitment.

The letter is careful in a way the official briefing on it was not. It never names China or Beijing’s new World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, referring instead to “duplicative initiatives whose expectations conflict with our own.” The US official who spoke to Reuters, on condition of anonymity, was plainer, saying the text was drafted to make clear that countries cannot have it both ways, and that it is difficult for a government to credibly position itself as a trusted partner in one technology ecosystem while joining an initiative designed by China to advance a competing vision.

Two caveats travel with the story and are easy to lose. The draft is undated and, as of last week, unsent. And it sets out no explicit penalty on chips, cloud services or critical minerals. The stated consequence is exclusion from the US-led grouping and the shared investment opportunities that come with it, not a legal sanction. The State Department told Reuters it would not comment on purportedly leaked internal documents.

Pax Silica itself launched in December 2025 under Under Secretary for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg, with seven founders: the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia and Israel. Its declaration now carries roughly 25 signatories after a June summit added ten more, including the European Union, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece, Panama, Chile, Argentina and Kazakhstan. The framework covers three chokepoints at once, semiconductors, critical minerals and AI infrastructure, and pushes members toward joint projects and coordinated export controls.

China’s rival body is barely a month old. WAICO was signed into existence in Shanghai on July 16 by 29 countries, a year after Premier Li Qiang first floated it. Xi Jinping used the accompanying summit to argue that AI development should be “a symphony of international cooperation” rather than “a solo performance by a single country.” The South China Morning Post reported this week that membership has since grown to 38.

Analysis: the arithmetic is the problem

The two lists overlap, and that overlap is the thing the draft letter exists to end. Kazakhstan joined Pax Silica in June, an accession Helberg marked publicly as the first in Central Asia, and then signed on with Beijing as well. It is the only country publicly known to sit in both camps, and it happens to hold significant reserves of the minerals advanced chips depend on. Reuters reported that this is what set off alarms in Washington.

Chinese commentary has been happy to name the strategy. “Washington wants a divided AI world by drawing a digital curtain to split the global market in two,” Li Yong of the China Society for WTO Studies told Global Times. On the American side, the case for the letter is that a non-binding framework offering export-control coordination and supply-chain vetting cannot function if members simultaneously commit to a body whose stated purpose is to dilute that coordination.

The instruments each side is actually deploying explain the asymmetry. Washington’s leverage runs through hardware and logistics. The State Department piloted a concierge service in February to accelerate AI infrastructure exports for signatories, and this month posted a funding notice for a Pax Silica AI Assistance Project to build a supply-chain credentialing and provenance platform, beginning as a pilot integrated with Panama’s ports and customs authorities. Meanwhile, ByteDance and Tencent have each received only about 10,000 Nvidia H200 chips in recent weeks, against the 100,000 apiece Washington had been willing to license, because Beijing itself discouraged the purchases.

Beijing’s leverage runs through downloads. Alibaba’s Qwen family passed three billion downloads in six months with more than 300,000 derivative models, against 418 million for Google’s Gemma and 227 million for Meta’s Llama across 2026, according to Hugging Face. Open weights are a form of diplomacy that export controls struggle to reach. Beijing’s own position is less open than the pitch suggests: Reuters reported on July 7 that officials are weighing curbs on overseas access to China’s leading models.

What to watch

Three things settle this. First, whether the letter is ever sent, and whether the final text keeps the exclusivity language. Second, Kazakhstan, the test case that holds the minerals and whose response will show whether the threat has force. Third, the full list of 35 recipients, which Washington has never published. Until those names surface, no capital outside the State Department can be certain it is being asked to choose.