The U.S. State Department has prepared draft letters to the 35 countries in Pax Silica, the American-led AI supply-chain grouping launched last December, warning that joining "duplicative initiatives" such as China's World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO) would be incompatible with membership. South Korea, Japan and Australia are among the recipients. Reuters obtained and reported the draft.
What the letter says
According to Reuters, the draft is addressed to the 35 states that signed a joint statement on AI opportunity partnership in June. The operative line reads that a country "cannot participate in Pax Silica while joining duplicative initiatives that conflict with our expectations" — in effect a demand to choose.
광고 문의 · 300×250Pax Silica was launched under U.S. leadership in December 2025 as a supply-chain grouping for artificial intelligence, with the stated aim of reducing dependence on China for AI models, semiconductor chips and the critical minerals used in chip and battery manufacturing. Members have worked jointly on supply-chain due diligence, export-control coordination and data-centre investment standards.
The target
The "duplicative initiative" the draft has in mind is read as WAICO, established last month by China together with Russia and others. WAICO launched on a platform of transferring AI capacity to developing countries and sharing computing resources, and has emphasised its low barrier to entry.
The two bodies point in different directions. Pax Silica builds entry barriers by securitising the supply chain; WAICO widens membership in the name of access. This letter, in effect, tells countries hoping to straddle both that no middle ground exists.
Where Korea, Japan and Australia sit
Among the recipients, South Korea, Japan and Australia are U.S. security allies for whom China is either the largest trading partner or close to it. In semiconductors, batteries and rare-earth processing alike, their supply chains run through both sides. If the demand is enforced, this is also the group facing the highest adjustment costs.
Korea in particular still produces a substantial share of its memory chips and back-end foundry work inside China. Whether "not joining duplicative initiatives" refers only to membership of formal bodies, or extends to technical cooperation by individual firms, would change the reach of the measure enormously. At draft stage that boundary is not defined.
Nothing is settled
What is confirmed is that a State Department draft exists and its contents have been reported. Whether the letter is actually sent, and whether the language survives intact, are separate questions. Diplomatic drafts routinely soften as they pass through interagency review and assessments of how recipients will react.
Timing matters too: a U.S.–China leaders' summit is under six weeks away. Revealing a pressure card during a negotiating phase is leverage, but it also raises the threshold for the meeting itself.
A third perspective
Hwagyo Sibo will not reduce this to the word "bloc-building." The confirmed facts are a draft, 35 recipients, and a line barring parallel membership. From the vantage of Chinese communities abroad, the significance lies elsewhere. Chinese-owned firms in Korea, Taiwan and Southeast Asia have long been rooted in both markets at once, and bloc logic reclassifies that dual belonging as risk. We will not repeat either side's vocabulary, and we will keep tracking whose livelihoods that reclassification actually charges, and how much.
