Washington is telling 35 countries to pick a side on AI. That's not a coalition — it's a chokepoint being cashed in.

There is a line in the draft letter the U.S. State Department is reportedly preparing to send to 35 countries, and it is worth reading twice, because it tells you what kind of document this actually is. “To be part of everything,” it says, “is to be part of nothing.” That is not the language of partnership. That is the language of an ultimatum wearing partnership's clothes.

The reporting, first out through Reuters, is that Washington intends to tell the 35 nations that signed its AI Opportunity Statement earlier this year that they cannot stay inside America's AI coalition — Pax Silica, the initiative built to lock down supply chains for models, chips and critical minerals — while also joining the rival framework China launched over the summer. Sign our declaration, the draft says, and it “cannot be held alongside membership in duplicative initiatives whose expectations conflict with our own.” It does not name China. It does not have to.

The whole thing will be read, this week, as a story about a new cold war, about values and alliances and Xi Jinping's countermove. That reading is not wrong, exactly. It is just aimed one level too high. The real story is underneath, and it is a power question: the United States has decided that the AI stack is a thing it owns, and it is now, for the first time this openly, setting the terms of who else gets to use it.

What the letter is really doing

Strip away the diplomatic framing and an ultimatum is only ever as strong as the leverage behind it. You can tell a country to pick a side, but the demand means nothing unless you hold something it cannot get elsewhere. So the useful question is not “whose values will win” — it is “what, precisely, does Washington control that makes ‘pick a side’ something other than a bluff?”

The honest answer is: a great deal, at the top of the stack. The most advanced AI chips are designed by American companies. The tools that design any leading-edge chip — the electronic design automation software — are effectively an American duopoly. The single most important machine in the entire supply chain, the extreme-ultraviolet lithography system, is made by one Dutch firm operating inside an export-control regime Washington largely sets. The frontier models, the cloud platforms that serve them, the accelerators that train them — American, American, American. When the U.S. says join us and not them, it is not appealing to sentiment. It is reminding you who owns the layer you cannot build yourself.

You can tell a country to pick a side, but the demand means nothing unless you hold something it cannot get elsewhere. An ultimatum is only ever as strong as the leverage behind it. — On the difference between a coalition and a chokepoint

That is why I keep resisting the “alliance” vocabulary. An alliance is something you are invited into. A chokepoint is something you are routed through. Pax Silica is being described as the former and is being operated as the latter — and the letter, with its flat refusal to let members “be part of everything,” is the moment the operating model stops pretending. This is control of the compute, being converted into control of the map.

The strongest version of the other side

Let me concede the best case for doing exactly this, because it nearly moves me, and any argument that skips it is not serious. Advanced AI is genuinely dual-use; the same models that write code write cyberweapons, and the same compute that runs a chatbot runs a targeting system. A country does not have an obligation to help a strategic rival close the gap on a technology with military consequences, and “interdependence is always good” is a slogan, not a policy. If you accept — as I mostly do — that concentrated frontier capability in an adversary's hands is a real risk, then some version of “you cannot take our most sensitive technology and hand its benefits to the people we are guarding against” is not imperial. It is prudent. China, for its part, would run precisely this play if it held the cards, and in the layers where it does hold them, it already does.

I have had to update on this. For years I wrote that open ecosystems and interdependence were the natural check on any one country's dominance — that the technology would route around control the way it always had. I was too sanguine about that. The AI stack turned out to be more concentrated, and more physically bottlenecked, than the open-internet analogy suggested. When I look at where the money is actually committed — multi-year contracts for power, silicon and fab capacity — I see states and companies betting with their balance sheets that capital and control win this round, not openness. So I take the security case seriously. The problem is not that the leverage is illegitimate. The problem is that it is partial, and the letter is written as though it were total.

The tell is in the minerals

Here is where the strategy gets interesting, and where I think Washington may be misreading its own hand. Look at which country the coverage keeps circling back to as the awkward case: Kazakhstan, which has signed up to Pax Silica and to China's framework at the same time. Kazakhstan is not a swing vote because it wants advanced chips. It is a swing vote because it has critical minerals — and critical minerals are the one layer of the AI stack where the United States does not hold the chokepoint. China does.

This is the structural fact the ultimatum has to survive, and I am not sure it can. America controls the top of the stack: the chips, the tools, the models. China controls the bottom: the rare-earth mining and, more decisively, roughly 90 percent of the processing that turns ore into the magnets and materials the physical AI build-out runs on. An ultimatum is a fine instrument when you own every layer a partner needs. It is a dangerous one when you own the top and your rival owns the floor, because you are forcing a binary choice onto exactly the countries that sit on the inputs you cannot replace. Tell a mineral-rich state to pick a side, and you have handed it a reason to weigh which side actually controls the thing it sells — and to notice that on that question, the answer is not you.

• Where the U.S. holds the chokepoint — advanced logic chips, EDA software, lithography, frontier models — “pick a side” is leverage, and most partners will comply because the alternative is doing without.
• Where China holds the chokepoint — rare-earth refining, magnets, large stretches of the materials layer — the same demand reads as a liability, because you are asking a country to antagonize the supplier of an input the U.S. cannot currently provide.
• The swing states are precisely the ones that sit on the second list. That is not a coincidence; it is the whole game.

Coercion has a cost the coercer pays too

There is a further problem, and it is the one empires have always underestimated. Leverage that is never invoked is more powerful than leverage that is cashed in, because the moment you force the choice, you also teach everyone the price of depending on you. Every partner that receives this letter learns the same lesson at once: access to the American AI stack is now explicitly conditional, revocable, and political. Some will comply and resent it. Some will hedge harder in the layers where they can. And every serious government on the list will accelerate the one project this letter makes rational — reducing its dependence on the country that just proved it will use dependence as a lever.

That is the paradox of naming your chokepoint out loud. Pax Silica worked, quietly, as long as membership felt like opportunity. The instant it becomes an exclusivity clause enforced by threat of exclusion, it converts from a gravitational pull into a demand — and demands invite counter-coalitions. Xi's cooperation organization was a weak instrument in July. A blunt American ultimatum in August is the best recruiting material it could have asked for.

The real question this raises

So strip it all back to the thing I actually care about, which is who ends up setting the terms of the AI world. For a decade the honest answer was: whoever owns the compute. This letter is the United States acting on exactly that belief — treating the stack as an asset and the coalition as a way to fence it. On its own terms, it is a rational move by the country that, for now, holds the most valuable layers.

But “for now” and “the most valuable layers” are doing enormous work in that sentence. The AI race is passing out of the phase where it was about models and into the phase where it is about empire — about who controls inputs, who can deny them, and who is willing to say the quiet part in a diplomatic cable. The United States is making that turn from a position of real strength at the top of the stack and real weakness at the bottom of it. “To be part of everything is to be part of nothing” is a good line. It is also a bet that America's leverage is total when it is only partial — and the countries it is aimed at are the ones best placed to find out. The terms are being set this week. Whether they hold depends on a layer of the stack the letter is careful not to mention.