The competition between the United States and China over artificial intelligence has acquired the structure of a bloc system, and the countries in between are running out of room to pretend otherwise. Washington has assembled 35 countries behind its AI Opportunity Statement and its Pax Silica initiative, according to Chinese state reporting; Beijing's World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, or WAICO, lists 28 founding members, among them Pakistan and Russia.

The two offers are not symmetrical, and that is the point. Pax Silica is about access to the most advanced chips, to supply chains and to technology partnerships — an industrial offer with security conditions attached. WAICO is about influence over standards and, in practice, access to Chinese open-weight models that a finance ministry can actually afford to deploy.

The US State Department has made the exclusivity explicit. "Countries can't be trusted partners in Pax Silica while substantively engaging in initiatives that advance a competing vision for super intelligence," a spokesperson said, using the administration's preferred term. Beijing's embassy in Washington answered that "AI should not be owned by major countries" and that the two should leverage their respective strengths rather than guard against each other.

Kazakhstan has become the test case for what hedging looks like. Its AI minister, Zhaslan Madiyev, went to Washington in June to join the US group working on AI supply chains. Three weeks later he was in Shanghai for a signing ceremony making the Central Asian country a founding member of WAICO. Astana is not being incoherent: it has critical minerals and cheap electricity, it signed an investment deal worth up to $10 billion involving Nvidia for a "data center valley", and Chinese foreign direct investment reached a record $2.8 billion in 2025. It wants capital and technology from both sides, and a voice in the rules.

"Everyone is hedging," Dana Masalimova, a former Kazakh diplomat now at Harvard's Davis Center, told the Associated Press. "We don't want this binary choice." She described Kazakhstan's position as "very precarious".

Others are trying the same manoeuvre with different leverage. Indonesia, which joined WAICO, has nickel and copper and wants to be "part of both", in the words of Mari Pangestu of its National Economic Council. Singapore hosts Anthropic's newest Asia office and is reportedly considering joining the Chinese organisation. Saudi Arabia has an Nvidia computing deal and a platform from its Humain startup built on an open model from a Chinese company. Japan is closely aligned with Washington on chips and standards but will not reject cheaper Chinese models for "lower-risk applications", according to Kyoto University of Foreign Studies professor Takahiro Tsuchiya. France, with Mistral, is the rare middle power attempting to go its own way.

The structural asymmetry is what gives "swing countries" their leverage, argues Kyle Chan of Brookings: Beijing has to court third countries to build an alternative coalition, while Washington already has an alliance network. China's material offer is real — AidData at William & Mary counts official-sector grants and loans for AI-related projects in at least 77 low- and middle-income countries, with Nigeria, Zambia, Ghana, Bangladesh, Senegal, Cameroon and Kenya among the largest recipients. Pew research also finds publics in middle-income countries growing more positive about China's role in AI.

For countries without frontier ambitions, the choice has a narrow, practical shape. Carnegie's Anton Leicht and Sam Winter-Levy note that for the UK and Germany, alignment with Washington may be the price of access to data centres and chip deals — meaning their access to advanced AI "depends on the whims of policymakers in Washington and Beijing". Aalok Mehta of CSIS puts the dilemma plainly: most countries cannot compete on building frontier models, but "every country in the world in some way or another is thinking about AI sovereignty".

The consequence for technology buyers is immediate. Procurement decisions that look technical — which model API, which cloud region, which chip supply — now carry an alignment signal that the other bloc reads. That is how a bloc system hardens: not through a treaty, but through the accumulated paperwork of hundreds of national AI strategies, each quietly checking which side its data centre deal came from. The window in which a country could take the best of both without comment is narrowing, and the countries that have already signed with both are the ones with the clearest view of how narrow it has become.

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