“US weaponisation of AI and its tendency to treat allies as rivals or vassals has created tensions that are now tainting its latest gambit of trying to dragoon countries into joining the Pax Silica cartel.”
Without any public debate, Britain has bowed to US pressure and signed up to a Washington-led cartel that unashamedly aims to use AI as a geo-political weapon, writes Steve Howell
You have to be careful what you say on X these days because Big Brother might be watching. A few days ago, US Under Secretary of State Jacob S Helberg took issue with a post of mine saying that Filipinos are “rising up” against the US-led AI cartel ‘Pax Silica’. I didn’t take it personally because I think his reference to “failed-commentators-turned-paid-for-mouthpieces” was directed at Arnaud Bertrand, whose post I had quoted about the controversial possibility of the US having sovereignty over a 4,000-acre tech city it is building in The Philippines, its former colony. Nevertheless, I had clearly touched a raw nerve – and it fuelled my curiosity.
So, what is Pax Silica? I had never previously heard of it. After reading Bertrand’s post, I searched online to discover – much to my surprise – that on December 11, 2025 the UK had been one of the first 14 countries to sign up to it. As far as I can tell, this happened without prior debate in Parliament or British media coverage. My search did, however, take me to a statement by Labour Friends of Israel welcoming the UK and Israel becoming founding members of what it called an “alliance” aimed at “securing and strengthening AI and technology supply chain.” The LFI statement said that Pax Silica aimed to protect sensitive technologies and infrastructures “from access or control by hostile nations” and quoted Avi Simhon, an economic adviser to the Israeli government, saying that the partners in this alliance were “working to fortify the global AI industry.”
Fortify? Deny “hostile nations” access to AI. This is not the language of a benign project aimed at spreading the benefits of AI globally. Given that the US casts the net wide when dubbing nations hostile, this could mean weaponizing AI against not only the usual suspects such as Iran and China but also any country that steps out of line from, say, South Africa to Spain.
The thinking behind Pax Silica was sketched out 18 months ago by Dario Amodei, the billionaire chief executive of Anthropic, developer of the Claude chatbot. In an essay published in October 2024 he argued that it was “very important that democracies have the upper hand on the world stage when powerful AI is created (and) set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world.” He said:
“The best way to do this is via an ‘entente strategy’ in which a coalition of democracies seeks to gain a clear advantage (even just a temporary one) on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or denying adversaries’ access to key resources like chips and semiconductor equipment. This coalition would on one hand use AI to achieve robust military superiority (the stick) while at the same time offering to distribute the benefits of powerful AI (the carrot) to a wider and wider group of countries in exchange for supporting the coalition’s strategy to promote democracy.”
To be clear, for those not familiar with the US geo-political lexicon, ‘democracies’ are the Western capitalist powers and ‘promoting democracy’ is regime change. When US billionaires talk about “democracies using the stick”, it could encompass anything up to and including obliterating entire civilisations.
The hypocrisy of Amodei’s portrayal of Pax Silica as a vehicle for “democracies” to win the AI battle with states he dubs “authoritarian” is predictably laid bare by a casual glance at the list of members. Two of them, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, are sheikhdoms. Israel is hardly a democracy if you are Palestinian or Lebanese. Along with the UK and The Philippines, the other members are: Australia, Finland, Greece, India, Japan, Norway, South Korea, Singapore and Sweden.
The US wants the European Union to join Pax Silica but it is yet to decide what to do. Last week, the European Commission confirmed that it is in talks with the US to “explore EU participation in this initiative” and that it hoped to be able to join to soon. However, even the pro-Washington Atlantic Council thinks “achieving a grand strategic agreement on AI at the transatlantic level appears unfeasible” as things stand. In a briefing paper published in April, it blamed this on three factors: the unpredictability of US policy on trade and relations with China; differences between the US and the EU and within the EU on China; and the fact that the US under both Biden and Trump has given “insufficient weight to the interests” of allies.
On the latter, it said:
“The lowest point in transatlantic relations regarding AI probably occurred when the Biden administration introduced extensive export controls on AI chips from the United States, known as the ‘AI diffusion rule.’ The export controls did not only target ‘countries of concern’: namely, US geopolitical rivals like China. It also set up a tiered approach to other countries, including allies, dividing them into aligned allies who would have minimal restrictions on access to AI chips; a larger group of countries which would face stricter licensing and allocation limits for these chips; and ‘countries of concern’ which would face strict controls or denials on access to advanced AI technology. While many EU countries were designated as key allies and partners of the United States with a high level of security and trust standards, many EU member states were still subject to harsher rules.”
In a nutshell, US weaponization of AI and its tendency to treat allies as rivals or vassals has created tensions that are now tainting its latest gambit of trying to dragoon countries into joining the Pax Silica cartel.
An entirely different view of how AI should be managed has been provided the Pope. In a recently published and very long encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV said he wanted to free AI from “the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon.” Saying in paragraph 110 that he wanted “to employ the expression ‘to disarm’, which is close to my heart,” he continued:
“To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.”
The depth and humanity of the Pope’s comments are a powerful counterweight to the barbaric self-interest of Pax Silica. They also stand in stark contrast to the absence of any debate – deep or otherwise – in the British Parliament.
Feel free to correct me, but – to date – I have found only one Parliamentary reference to Pax Silica. On January 13, 2026, Labour MP Liam Byrne submitted a written question asking the government whether it plans to support and provide funding to it. The answer provided by the Foreign Office was that the UK had signed the Pax Silica Declaration but that “no financial contribution has been made.” This smacks of being a cosy box-ticking, back-covering exercise to put Pax Silica on the parliamentary record so that MPs generally can’t say they did not know.
But why hasn’t there been a proper debate? Britain throwing its lot in with Pax Silica is potentially the most consequential economic decision this government will take. It is arguably more significant than relations with the EU or fiscal rules or anything else politicians frequently get exercised about. We may not have yet made a financial contribution to Pax Silica but the ramifications of being locked into a US-dominated AI cartel are mind boggling and could shape our lives and living standards for decades to come.
One possible reason for the deafening silence is that the government is already facing growing controversy about its dealings with Palantir – and it must know we are all only one or two clicks away from discovering that Helberg is a former employee of that very company. From 2023 to 2025, the man in charge of Pax Silica was senior adviser on national security to Alex Karp – the CEO of Palantir, who boasted that “occasionally we kill people.” One of Helberg’s qualifications for that, presumably, was that he is the author of a book published in 2021 called The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power. His own power base is a lobby group he set up in 2023 called the Hill and Valley Forum, which is sponsored by Palantir, Google, Nvidia and most of the other tech corporations.
It is clearly well past time for more searching questions in Parliament than the one asked by Byrne.
- Steve Howell is a journalist, author and former political adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. You can follow him on Twitter/X and subscribe to The Rest is Bullshit for regular updates and analysis from Steve.
- This article was originally published by The Rest is Bullshit on 28 May 2026.
