Washington drafts an exclusivity clause for its AI supply-chain club

The State Department has drafted a letter telling dozens of partner governments they must pick sides in the AI race with China, warning they will be shut out of the U.S.-led coalition if they also sign up to Beijing's competing framework, according to a U.S. official and an internal draft reviewed by Reuters ^[1]. The letter is addressed to the 35 signatories of the "AI Opportunity Statement" signed in June ^[5], which turns a symbolic declaration into an exclusivity condition and prices political risk into any compute, chip or minerals project sitting in a hedging jurisdiction.

The vehicle is Pax Silica, launched last year to secure supply chains for AI models, semiconductors and critical minerals ^[3]. About two dozen countries have joined, including Japan, Australia, South Korea and Kazakhstan ^[4]. The framework is non-binding [c1a] and aims to push partners toward joint projects and export controls and to cut reliance on adversaries for minerals, models and chips ^[13]. On the benefit side, the published offer is thin: Pax Silica members get access to shared investment opportunities in AI-related projects, while AI Opportunity Statement signatories have agreed symbolically on a "common purpose" and "shared vision" with Washington, according to the State Department's own website ^[14].

The draft's language is blunter than the framework it enforces. "To be part of everything is to be part of nothing," it says, calling signature "not merely a membership subscription, but a commitment" and urging countries to "choose deliberately" ^[6]. Membership "cannot be held alongside membership in duplicative initiatives whose expectations conflict with our own," the letter says, without naming China ^[7]. The U.S. official, speaking anonymously, said the point was that "you can't have it both ways" ^[15].

Kazakhstan is the test case. Washington promoted it in June as the first Central Asian country to join Pax Silica, citing significant critical-minerals reserves ^[16], and it is the only country so far known to have joined both the U.S. initiative and China's, which Reuters reports set off alarm bells in Washington ^[8]. President Xi Jinping launched the rival World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization in July, promoting China's open-weight technology ^[9].

For operators, the arithmetic matters more than the rhetoric. There are 35 statement signatories against roughly two dozen Pax Silica members, so on the order of eleven governments have signalled alignment without accepting the supply-chain commitments [c-d1]. Those are precisely the jurisdictions where offtake agreements, minerals licences and data-centre siting decisions are being negotiated now, and where the enforcement lever is exclusion from deal flow and export-control-adjacent arrangements rather than tariffs ^[14][13]. A contract underwritten on the assumption that a host state stays on the U.S. list is exposed to a condition it probably does not name.

The context cuts both ways. Chinese open-weight models have gained rapidly on proprietary systems from OpenAI and Anthropic ^[20], Beijing is weighing restrictions on overseas access to some of its leading models ^[17], and China has already used its near-monopolies in critical minerals as a retaliatory instrument in the tariff war launched last year by President Donald Trump ^[19].

Reuters could not determine when the letter will be sent or whether it will be amended first, and the draft was undated ^[10]. The State Department said it would not comment on "purportedly leaked internal documents" ^[11]; China's embassy in Washington said it opposes politicizing trade and technology and that "such actions will only stifle global AI advances and serve no one's interests" ^[18]; the Kazakh embassy did not respond to Reuters ^[12].

Watch whether the letter goes out with the exclusivity clause intact ^[10], whether Kazakhstan drops one of its two memberships ^[8], and whether Washington attaches anything more concrete than shared investment access to the loyalty it is now demanding ^[14].