Pax Silica allies agree a joint list of AI tech to shield from China
The coalition spent a year signing declarations. On Sunday it agreed to start naming the things it will actually defend.
The United States and eight allies agreed to build a joint list of AI technologies and supply chains that need protecting from China, signing the San Francisco Declaration on the Secure Foundations of Enduring Prosperity, the Financial Times reported. Japan, Australia, Israel and the United Kingdom signed, and South Korea, India, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates did too. Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and the European Commission are expected to sign next week, according to Jacob Helberg, the State Department's under secretary for economic affairs, who negotiated the pact and briefed the FT.
The substance is thinner than the headline and more consequential than it looks. Per the FT's account, the declaration commits the signatories to identify sensitive technologies and critical infrastructure needed to build what President Trump has called "super intelligence," to share information on where supply chains should be diversified, to stand up working groups on AI supply-chain vulnerabilities, and to develop "economic hubs" meant to pull investment into the industries involved. Its framing sentence — that economic security is national security — is the same one the State Department has used since December. What is new is the promise of a list: a named set of technologies the group agrees deserve protection from theft or unauthorized transfer to actors who could use them for military or intelligence advantage.
That distinction matters because a list, not a communiqué, is the thing export controls actually run on. Washington already maintains the Commerce Department's Entity List and coordinates dual-use controls through the Wassenaar Arrangement; what it has never had is an allied roster of AI-specific chokepoints that smaller partners can act on without building their own intelligence apparatus. If the list eventually names high-bandwidth memory, advanced packaging, lithography servicing, or the data-center power gear that frontier training depends on, a mid-sized member state can point to it when a domestic company asks why it cannot sell to a Chinese buyer. That is the mechanism the coalition has been missing.
The membership math is worth keeping straight, because the new signature is narrower than the bloc. The State Department's Pax Silica page lists 25 signatories to the original declaration — 24 countries plus the European Union — with Taiwan participating without signing. Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and the European Commission are already on that list, which tells you the San Francisco Declaration is a second, tighter instrument layered on top, not a fresh accession round. The core group that signed on Sunday is the one with chipmaking, model labs or Gulf capital: exactly the members whose cooperation would make a protected-technologies list enforceable rather than aspirational.
The timing is the tell. The pact lands ahead of Trump's meeting with Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, which opens on November 18, per The Guardian. Washington has accused Beijing of failing to honor commitments under the trade truce the two leaders struck late last year, the FT reports, and arriving at the summit with eight allies signed onto a joint protection list is a way of putting a floor under the American position before the meeting starts. It also gives Beijing something concrete to object to: a list implies future restrictions, and restrictions announced by a bloc are harder to pick off one capital at a time than restrictions announced by Washington alone.
The domestic backdrop is doing half the work. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spent Sunday demanding that Nvidia explain whether it pushed "seemingly illicit" chip sales to China and urging the company to hire an outside chief executive after Jensen Huang's ouster, Reuters reported. That scandal has already made the enforcement question live: as we reported on November 13, Commerce had gone more than a year without adding a single firm to the Entity List — the longest gap in a decade — while the hardware kept moving through intermediaries. A joint allied list is one answer to that gap that does not require Congress to pass anything.
The counter-case is that lists are cheap. Signatories keep their own export-control regimes, and nothing in a declaration binds a member to act; the group includes India, which wants Pax Silica's manufacturing and talent pipeline far more than it wants a licensing regime aimed at its own trading partners, and Gulf states that have spent two years buying Chinese as well as American technology. The document, per the FT's summary, is language about intent — coordinate, identify, share, protect — with working groups to fill in the content. If the roster of protected technologies lands as a broad description of "AI infrastructure" rather than a schedule of specific items, it will function as a press release with a mailing list.
There is a second, quieter risk: the more the coalition formalizes a protected list, the more it gives China's rival framework — the World AI Cooperation Organization it has been assembling — a reason to formalize its own. We covered the first phase of that contest in August, when Washington told 35 partner countries to pick Pax Silica or Beijing's bloc, not both. A joint list turns that pressure from a demand into a document.
What to watch: whether the declaration text and the technology list are published at all, and in what detail; whether the European Commission's signature actually arrives next week given how queasy Brussels has been about Pax Silica's industrial-policy terms; whether the list names memory and packaging rather than only finished accelerators; and whether Beijing answers at APEC with an expansion of its own bloc rather than with a complaint. The State Department's Pax Silica release feed had not published the new declaration as of Sunday evening — the most recent entry was still Paraguay's accession on October 23 — so for now the only account of what was signed is the FT's.
If your country had to choose between an American list of protected technologies and a Chinese market, which would you sign — and what would you want in exchange? Write to us via our contact page.
