The United States is preparing to tighten the rules governing cooperation with partners in the field of artificial intelligence. According to Reuters, the State Department has drawn up a draft letter to the 35 countries that signed the AI Opportunity Statement in June. The document is intended to suggest that countries linked to the US ‘Pax Silica’ ecosystem should not simultaneously participate in Beijing’s competing initiatives. The letter has not yet been sent, and its content may change.
The dispute extends far beyond AI models themselves. Pax Silica aims to build secure supply chains covering semiconductors, data centres, energy and critical minerals. Poland is among the signatories of the AI Opportunity Statement, alongside countries such as Germany, Japan, India and the United Kingdom.
Pressure from Washington is mounting at a time when China is attempting to build its own cooperation bloc. In July, Xi Jinping promoted the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation and Chinese open-weight models, which are rapidly gaining users thanks to their lower costs and growing capabilities. At the same time, Beijing is considering restricting access to the most advanced models. This shows that AI is increasingly being treated as a strategic resource, much like chips or raw materials.
If the US does indeed force its partners to choose sides, the result could be a further fragmentation of the global technology market. For companies, this would mean less freedom in choosing cloud providers, models or infrastructure, whilst for nations it would mean decisions regarding investment and supply chain security taking on greater significance. Europe, including Poland, may gain access to investment and technology within the American ecosystem, but at the cost of reduced flexibility regarding Chinese solutions. The AI race therefore bears less and less resemblance to competition between companies, and more and more to a geopolitical division of digital infrastructure.
