China’s World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization has gone from 29 founding signatories to 38 members in the month since it was signed into existence in Shanghai on 16 July. Nine countries joined a brand-new multilateral body inside four weeks, which is not how multilateral bodies normally grow.
The timing is the story. WAICO added those nine members while the U.S. State Department was drafting a letter telling 35 countries they have to pick a side. Reuters obtained the draft on 14 August. It warns the 35 nations that signed Washington’s AI Opportunity Statement in June that membership in Pax Silica is “not merely a membership subscription, but a commitment” — and that joining Beijing’s framework is incompatible with staying in America’s. The line doing the rounds in diplomatic circles: “To be part of everything is to be part of nothing.”
Run the arithmetic. Pax Silica, launched by the State Department in December 2025 with seven founders — the U.S., U.K., Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia and Israel — now carries 25 declaration signatories. WAICO has 38. The larger bloc is the one Washington is threatening people for joining.
The overlap is the whole point
Pax Silica’s 25 and WAICO’s 38 are not mutually exclusive lists today, and that is precisely what the draft letter exists to change. Membership in Pax Silica buys coordinated chip investment streams, aligned export controls and shared AI infrastructure co-investment. The letter’s implicit threat is that those things get switched off.
Kazakhstan is the test case, and it is an awkward one. It joined Pax Silica and then became a WAICO founding member inside the same month — the only country currently sitting in both. It is also sitting on rare earths, tungsten, copper and uranium: the inputs that advanced semiconductor manufacturing runs on and that Pax Silica was explicitly built to source outside China.
So the ultimatum has a hole in the middle of it. Expelling Kazakhstan to punish dual membership would damage the mineral-supply diversification the coalition exists to achieve. Not expelling it tells the other 34 recipients that the letter is bluff.
Our take: Washington is running an exclusivity play from the smaller list. That only works if the excluded option is worthless, and for a mid-sized economy it isn’t — Chinese models are cheap, open-weight and improving, and WAICO asks for far less in return. The nine countries that joined during the drafting window already answered the question. The real risk to the U.S. position isn’t that allies defect to Beijing; it’s that an enforced choice converts hedging into a permanent decision, and some of those decisions won’t go America’s way.
What this actually splits
Pax Silica bundles three things into one commitment: AI models, semiconductors and critical minerals. That bundling is its leverage and its fragility. A country that wants American chips but Chinese-priced inference now has to give up one of them. A country whose main export is minerals has leverage the letter can’t easily overcome.
WAICO’s founding roster — Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa, Pakistan, Russia, Kenya, Senegal and two dozen others — is heavily weighted toward economies that were never going to be first in line for U.S. compute anyway. For them the choice is between a queue and a framework that is already offering something. Nine of them, at minimum, have made it.
What to watch
- Whether the letter ships. It is still a draft. Sending it converts a negotiating position into a policy that has to be enforced.
- Kazakhstan. If it keeps both memberships without consequence, the ultimatum is dead on arrival for everyone else.
- WAICO’s next intake. 29 to 38 in a month is a rate, not a level. Another nine by late September would mean the pressure campaign is accelerating the thing it was meant to stop.
- Whether any Pax Silica signatory resigns. Nobody has yet. The first one to leave sets the price.
Technology blocs are a familiar shape — 5G ran this play in 2019 and 2020. The difference is that 5G was one layer of infrastructure. This one bundles chips, models and the minerals underneath both, and it is being decided by countries whose leverage nobody spent much time modelling.