The U.S. State Department is reportedly preparing a letter telling the 35 signatories of its AI Opportunity Statement—including allies like Japan, Australia, and South Korea—that they must choose between Washington’s Pax Silica coalition and Beijing’s competing AI framework. The draft, according to Reuters, warns that countries will be excluded from the U.S.-led group if they hedge. The move is explicitly designed to starve China of the chips, AI models, and critical minerals it needs to compete. Meanwhile, Alibaba’s open-weight Qwen models have racked up more than 3 billion downloads in six months, blowing past Meta’s 227 million and Google’s 418 million, cementing Alibaba as the dominant force in open-source AI.
Source: Read the original article
