The world's two artificial intelligence superpowers are hardening into rival blocs, and the governments caught between them are racing to secure the advantages of both before the door to a free choice closes.

As the U.S.-China AI competition intensifies, experts say the window for countries to move freely between the two camps is narrowing. Sooner or later, many will have to commit to either the U.S.-led Pax Silica or the China-inspired World AI Cooperation Organization — a choice that boils down to a stark trade-off: Washington's most advanced chips and AI technologies, or Beijing's more affordable, open-source systems. The stakes reach beyond diplomacy: the choice shapes which chips, models, and technical standards governments and companies will be able to build on.

Kazakhstan, a Central Asian nation of about 21 million people, is a rare example of a country that has tried to straddle both groupings.

In June, the country's AI minister, Zhaslan Madiyev, traveled to Washington to join the U.S. working to strengthen AI supply chains. Just three weeks later, he was in Shanghai for a signing ceremony that made the Central Asian country a founding member of China's initiative to shape the global AI agenda.

Membership in Pax Silica brings technological partnerships, high-tech manufacturing jobs and a place in global AI supply chains. At the same time, by joining the World AI Cooperation Organization alongside 28 other initial founding countries — including Pakistan and Russia — Kazakhstan hopes to gain a voice in setting regional and global AI standards.

"Everyone is hedging," said Dana Masalimova, a former Kazakh diplomat, independent scholar and center associate at Harvard University's Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

"We don't want this binary choice," she said.

Kazakhstan is drawing investment from both the U.S. and China, but Masalimova said the country occupies a "very precarious spot." It holds rich critical mineral resources essential to AI development and cheap electricity to power data centers — an asset that has become politically fraught inside the United States.

Earlier this year, Kazakhstan's government signed an investment deal worth up to $10 billion involving Nvidia to build a "data center valley" in the country. Chinese companies, meanwhile, are expanding their presence: local officials say Chinese foreign direct investment in Kazakhstan reached a record $2.8 billion in 2025. In July, Chinese leader Xi Jinping met with Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to expand cooperation under China's global Belt and Road infrastructure initiative. The hedging, in other words, is playing out over physical assets — minerals, electricity, and data centers — as much as over diplomatic signaling.

Two blocs, two pitches

Both Washington and Beijing are leveraging access to AI to extend their global influence. President Donald Trump insisted last month that "whoever wins AI, wins." U.S. officials and AI companies have accused China of large-scale "distillation" — the extraction of capabilities from frontier American models.

Beijing has rejected those claims and says the U.S. is pursuing an AI monopoly while restricting China's access to some of the world's most cutting-edge AI chips and chipmaking machinery.

Washington has signaled that Pax Silica — with China as its implicit target — is reserved for the trusted. "Countries can't be trusted partners in Pax Silica while substantively engaging in initiatives that advance a competing vision for super intelligence," the U.S. State Department said, using the Trump administration's new preferred term for AI. That standard poses a direct question for countries such as Kazakhstan, which has signed onto both groupings: whether hedging between the camps remains compatible with trusted-partner status.

Beijing, for its part, touts the openness and inclusiveness of its World AI Cooperation Organization. "As both major countries in AI, China and the United States should leverage respective strengths in AI rather than guarding against each other," the Chinese embassy in Washington said in a statement. "AI should not be owned by major countries."

The divergent messaging largely reflects different starting points, said Kyle Chan, a fellow at The Brookings Institution's John L. Thornton China Center. Beijing needs to court third countries as it builds an alternative coalition, whereas Washington already commands a powerful network of allies. That dynamic lends power to what he described as "swing countries."

From Jakarta to Riyadh

Indonesia, like Kazakhstan, holds resources vital to AI and other technologies — notably nickel and copper — and it has joined China's World AI Cooperation Organization while seeking to profit from ties with both powers. "We should be able to be part of both, put it that way. And choose the best system," Mari Pangestu, vice chair of Indonesia's National Economic Council, reporters at a University of Hong Kong Business School event.

U.S. AI firms are carrying their investments elsewhere, too. Anthropic is setting up its latest Asia office in Singapore, a city-state that says it is also weighing membership in China's AI organization.

In Saudi Arabia, the AI startup Humain unveiled a platform in September built on an open model from a Chinese AI company. The kingdom also has a deal with Nvidia to expand AI computing with its advanced chips.

France, one of the most ambitious AI developers outside the U.S. and China, is attempting to chart its own course through its startup Mistral, whose newly released model outperforms some advanced Chinese models.

Japan is closely aligned with the U.S. on strategic and security issues, including advanced semiconductors, trusted AI and standards. Still, it will not reject more affordable Chinese AI models for "lower-risk applications," said Takahiro Tsuchiya, a professor at Kyoto's University of Foreign Studies.

For countries like the U.K. and Germany — which have substantial economic and military capacity but no self-developed powerful frontier AI models — aligning with the U.S. may be vital for access to data centers and chip deals with U.S. companies, said Anton Leicht and Sam Winter-Levy of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Their access to advanced AI systems "depends on the whims of policymakers in Washington and Beijing," the two analysts said, leaving those countries with limited influence over AI's future.

China's widening appeal

China has been closing the technology gap with the U.S. in chipmaking and advanced AI capabilities, though it still trails top U.S. technological capabilities, at least for now. Beijing's open-source approach also allows countries to reduce their reliance on the U.S., and China has been funding developing countries' efforts to build their own AI ecosystems, said Alberto Lemma, a research fellow at the think tank ODI Global.

To date, China has provided official sector grants and loans for projects and activities that use or enable AI technologies in at least 77 low- and middle-income countries, according to the AidData research lab at William & Mary, a public university in Virginia. Top recipients include Nigeria, Zambia, Ghana, Bangladesh, Senegal, Cameroon and Kenya.

Public perceptions are shifting as well. Recent study results from the Pew Research Center show that people in middle-income countries are becoming more positive toward, and trusting of, China when it comes to AI and the technology's regulation.

All things considered, many countries "don't want to pick a side … because there are advantages and disadvantages to each technology stack," said Aalok Mehta, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Most countries may eventually lack a good option, since they cannot compete on building frontier AI models — but "every country in the world in some way or another is thinking about AI sovereignty," he said. After all, "maybe no other country than the U.S. and China can really build these very large, powerful models."

The questions to watch from here: whether Washington applies its trust standard to countries that have joined both camps, whether the World AI Cooperation Organization grows beyond its founding membership, and whether Chinese-funded AI projects and open-source models continue to move public opinion in middle-income countries. How those resolve will say much about whether the era of hedging lasts.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.