Pax Silica: Trade Diplomacy at the Heart of the United States’ AI Strategy
At the conference that officially gave birth to Pax Silica in Washington on December 13, 2025, it was presented as a coalition of partners seeking to ensure the security of the supply chains that enable AI to function. The supply chain is considered a national sovereignty priority for the United States and its allies. The architect of this diplomatic initiative, Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth Jacob Helberg, drew a parallel between supply chain and territory: “Sovereignty is no longer just about protecting your borders. It’s about ensuring the reliability of the AI-era supply chains.”
The Supply Chain, a Weapon of (Economic) War
The importance of this issue is confirmed by the obstacles — shortages, export freezes — present at every stage of these supply chains. These obstacles give rise to commercial advantages for suppliers over buyers. These imbalances are visible from the outset, at the raw materials extraction stage. Rare earths, used in the production of semiconductors and other components, are under Chinese control. 70% of deposits and 90% of the sites where these minerals are processed and refined are located on Chinese territory. In April 2025, China’s Ministry of Commerce introduced, for seven of these minerals (two more were added in October), an export licensing system requiring precise information about the profile of foreign buyers of rare earths and the intended use of the materials. Any refusal or failure to comply on the part of buyers results in the goods being held at customs.
This export control also applies to components. The example of Nexperia, a former Philips subsidiary that produced electronic chips used in the automotive industry, illustrates this. After an attempt by the Dutch state to regain control of the company, the Chinese government, acting through Wingtech, which holds 75% of Nexperia’s shares, canceled chip exports to Europe in October 2025. This caused a component shortage that halted production at European manufacturers’ sites. Another near-monopoly threatens the balance of this value chain: Taiwanese foundry TSMC, which controls the advanced technologies needed to produce the GPUs designed by Nvidia, Qualcomm, AMD, and Intel. About 97% of the latest-generation of these processors are manufactured in its Taiwanese factories. Yet the island lives under the threat of a Chinese invasion. This scenario, deemed credible by American intelligence services to be possible by 2027, would halt a chip production chain that is already under strain. TSMC has agreed to build new plants in the United States as a preventive measure, but Taiwanese law requires it to keep on its home territory the production units where its manufacturing process secrets are held.
This economic war calls for a different kind of diplomacy. The goal is no longer to secure the support or non-aggression of a sovereign state, but to bring about the conditions under which private companies scattered across several countries can develop jointly. Their interests must therefore be shared. In concrete terms, this means ensuring the unhindered, uninterrupted flow of goods, capital, and data. These flows must also be resilient — that is, able to reconstitute themselves in the event of a disruption. Achieving this requires treating as objects of strategic thinking the elements — raw materials, components, data — that make up these flows. These are referred to by the term “stack”: the layers (components, technological models, software, application interfaces, and standards) through which exchanges take place among the actors that ultimately make AI models function. Identifying the full set of flows involved in this stack makes it possible to spot potential bottlenecks and route around them.
Pax Silica, an Instrument of America’s AI Strategy
Economic dependency, international relations… AI, and the elements of the stack, sit at the intersection of numerous American strategic priorities. Their importance made an action plan necessary, and one was unveiled in the summer of 2025. It sums up the economic, technological, and political stakes that AI poses for American power, and sets out the objectives to be achieved on this front in order to maintain the prosperity and economic independence of the United States.
Exporting technology solutions originating in the United States serves both economic objectives (boosting the revenues of America’s Tech champions) and diplomatic ones (getting states through which the stack’s supply chains pass to collaborate). This is why the first step of Pax Silica is a trade strategy called the AI Export Program. It was the subject of a presidential executive order signed on July 23, 2025, which tasked the U.S. Department of Commerce with designing a strategy to promote what constitutes “the American AI technology stack.” What this initiative seeks to export is not products — smartphones or semiconductors — nor software, but an international logistics ecosystem run by American companies: from Nvidia to OpenAI, by way of Amazon.
Together, these players cover the entire chain, from the production and operation of the technology stack’s components through to the solutions available to the general public.
Once designed, the AI Export Program was unveiled at the end of 2025. It led to a call for tenders launched between April 1 and June 30, 2026 by the U.S. Department of Commerce, aimed at American companies specializing in new technologies. Participating companies must form themselves into a consortium that will draw up a technical and commercial proposal enabling AI models to function in specific target markets. The rules of this tender specify that proposals must be built around the stack model, so as to guarantee that American organizations effectively control the value chain at every one of its stages. Foreign companies may be part of the consortia, but for each proposal, more than half of the components must be produced by American companies. Intellectual property over the learning systems (patents, source code) must remain under their control. Each commercial proposal must also specify the country or region of the world it is intended for, identifying the economic actors present there.
Winners will be selected according to their ability to serve American interests. They will receive active state support in two forms: introductions to buyers in third countries at international events — state visits, diplomatic summits — and administrative support to facilitate obtaining subsidies and export authorizations. Such support is far from incidental, given how invested the American authorities are in ensuring the success of the Tech sector. They have oversight of trade agreements concluded with strategic partners. The Washington Accords signed in December 2025 between the United States and the Democratic Republic of Congo provide an example. This agreement stipulates that reserves of strategic assets — in this case cobalt ore deposits — must be made available first to American investors. Investors from third countries may only gain access after clearance from American authorities. In addition, a “concierge” service designed to facilitate the acquisition of solutions and components from the United States was set up in spring 2026 across 270 American embassies and consulates. This offering is primarily intended for Pax Silica member countries.
What Digital Aqueducts for Pax Silica?
Pax Silica and the AI Export Program aim at the same outcome: building and supplying a production network from which every member benefits and which reliably powers an AI model. The Washington Declaration of December 2025 states that all signatories will invest, through joint ventures or public infrastructure projects, in building technical facilities (data centers, undersea cables) shielded from interference attempts by rival powers. These investments are ultimately meant to produce AI systems that are trustworthy.
As a result, each new member’s accession (see Illustration 2) is followed by the signing of a cooperation agreement to build physical facilities or develop security mechanisms. The Philippines’ accession was the occasion for announcing the construction of a component production hub covering a total area of 1,620 hectares — ten times the size of the Stellantis plant in Poissy — which would have a special territorial status. Another major project formed as Pax Silica expanded is the America-India Connect Initiative. Unveiled on February 23, 2026 at the New Delhi AI summit by Google CEO Sundar Pichai — whose parent company Alphabet will bear its $15 billion cost — the project involves laying undersea cables linking India to South Africa, Singapore, and Australia. It signals India’s accession to a group of states whose members have the means to build a high-performing, sovereign AI ecosystem.
Once fully formed, Pax Silica would resemble a demilitarized zone more than a free-trade area. Its members are meant to benefit from additional security measures against threats that use AI as a vector. AI is being put to malicious use in multiple ways — creating deepfakes, hunting for technological vulnerabilities — including by state actors. OpenAI announced in early June that it had identified disinformation campaigns seeking to sow discord within American society using false claims and fabricated visuals about measures taken by the Trump administration, such as the imposition of tariffs and the construction of data centers. The report states that those behind these campaigns used ChatGPT from within China, where the chatbot is inaccessible without a VPN. This detail implies that Chinese authorities necessarily detected the encrypted data channels used by these networks.
Another threat affecting agentic AI models has emerged. If such a model is connected both to a company’s confidential information systems and to an uncontrolled network such as the internet, an attacker can expose it to hidden malicious instructions — prompt injections — capable of hijacking its behavior.
To counter these threats, one member, the United Arab Emirates, has committed to researching protective technologies. The Gulf state is seeking to diversify its hydrocarbon-based economy by hosting cutting-edge cloud computing and artificial intelligence companies on its territory. One of them, G24, unveiled in February 2026 a project to regulate foundation AI models by monitoring electronic chips. The project seeks to develop what American military personnel call a “common operating picture” — a unified representation allowing real-time tracking of an unfolding incident, such as a battle, from a command post. What the Emirati company is seeking to represent is the activity of the computing environment it controls, based on the operation of American-made electronic chips. This technological compliance system would report, in real time, the location and frequency of use of these chips. Controllers at the command post would be able to identify the organization operating a given AI system. The project is not yet complete, but if successful, it would serve as a model ready to be replicated in the other systems — such as those promoted by the AI Export Program — present in Pax Silica member countries.
If You Want Peace, Prepare the Tech
Pax Silica marks a shift in how trade and security are linked. The pursuit of efficiency at any cost by private actors setting up wherever costs are lowest has given way to a consideration of economic security imperatives. This initiative also reflects the growing importance of American companies in achieving the state’s economic, technological, and diplomatic objectives. Their role was the subject of a conference attended by Jacob Helberg. American companies, and Tech companies in particular, contribute to American economic power. The amounts they devote to R&D far exceed the public budget allocated to research. Their market research enriches the work of intelligence services in identifying private or public actors to monitor. And by welcoming talent from around the world into their teams, they practice, in effect, a new form of diplomacy.
The state’s role is limited to the physical and digital protection of facilities and models against threats from outside, much like the limes that protected the Roman Empire. It also oversees the maintenance of order by eliminating anything that could threaten it. The standoff between the U.S. Department of Defense and Anthropic illustrates this policy. By refusing to allow the Pentagon to make military use of its AI models, Anthropic was subjected to the same treatment as companies suspected of enabling espionage and sabotage operations, such as Huawei. It was placed in a category of organizations designated as a “supply chain risk.”