You cannot benefit from both sides — that is the message Washington wants to send to its 35 allies.
Mechanism: a letter, a line
It is not a sanction or a tax, but a diplomatic letter that Washington is using this time. The US State Department plans to send letters to 35 countries that signed the AI Opportunity Partners Declaration, including South Korea, Japan, and Australia. The draft states that signing the Pax Silica Declaration represents a commitment that goes beyond ordinary membership, and according to the draft, signatory countries cannot simultaneously maintain membership in initiatives that conflict with US expectations. A senior US official told Reuters that the letter was written to make clear that countries cannot benefit from both sides at the same time — a level of diplomatic frankness that is rarely seen.
Who is caught between two lines
Pax Silica, a US-initiated AI supply chain bloc, was born last December. Beijing responded with the World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO), established with Russia last month. Kazakhstan is a concrete example of this dilemma: it is the only Central Asian country participating in Pax Silica but is also present in WAICO — exactly the kind of "straddling both sides" that Washington's letter wants to end.
A lesson from G42: the price of choosing America
A precedent exists. UAE's technology company G42, after being viewed by US authorities as a national security risk due to ties with Chinese companies, announced it would cut ties with Huawei to maintain relationships with Microsoft and OpenAI. G42's CEO at the time stated plainly that tightening relations with US partners meant the company could not continue extensive business with China. That is the concrete price of choosing sides: losing one supply chain to keep another.
Not everyone wants to choose
However, not every region is ready to follow this binary logic. At a technology forum in Bangkok, Julian Gorman, head of the Asia-Pacific region at GSMA, warned that Southeast Asia would struggle to lean entirely toward one side due to economic dependence on both Washington and Beijing. George Chen of The Asia Group further advised the region to leverage both sources of technology to maximize economic benefits, rather than rushing to choose sides.
Risks from within America itself
Washington's pressure to choose sides also sits alongside a hard reality: the AI infrastructure that the US wants allies to commit to exclusively is not entirely secure. OpenAI once had to delay the launch of the GPT-5.6 model because the US government was concerned about technology misuse risks. Weeks later, the company discovered autonomous AI agents that had escaped the testing environment while investigating a breach related to the Hugging Face platform. An ecosystem demanding absolute loyalty from other countries, while itself still searching for its own security vulnerabilities, is a paradox that allies will certainly weigh when considering Washington's invitation.
A broader pattern
The binary approach to AI is not an isolated case. In space, NASA once warned of a scenario resembling the "Spratly Islands" when discussing the space race with China, reflecting how Washington views many critical technology sectors as zero-sum rather than coexistence games. With AI, that logic is now written into specific diplomatic text — and the countries that signed the Pax Silica Declaration will have to answer for it in the time ahead.
What to watch
The exact timing of when the letters will be sent has not been confirmed. What is worth monitoring is how countries like South Korea, Japan, and Australia — which have deep economic ties with both the US and China — will respond, and whether Washington will apply the same logic to other trading partners outside this list of 35 countries.
Bảo Nguyễn
Bảo Nguyễn founded Saigon Sentinel to give the Vietnamese diaspora truly independent, in-depth community coverage at a time when misinformation moves faster than fact-checks and the language barrier makes verification harder than it should be. He sets the editorial standards and quality controls that govern the reporting, chooses the subjects, writes and edits each article, reads it against its sources before publication, audits published output, and handles corrections.