Gulf states join US Pax Silica against China — but Saudi Arabia is holding back

The US is corralling its allies into an AI supply chain that routes around China — just as China’s own open-weight models catch up to models made by US-based frontier companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Most of the Gulf has signed on, but Saudi Arabia — perhaps tellingly — has not.

What happened? At the second Pax Silica summit in Washington, which ended this past Friday, the UAE, Qatar and Bahrain put their names to a new Joint Statement on AI Opportunity, a pledge drafted by the State Department that reads like something cooked up by a lobbyist for a frontier model maker. With 35 countries now signed on, the aim is to keep cutting-edge AI chips as well as minerals and energy moving among trusted partners and away from Beijing.

The UAE and Qatar were already among the 24 members of the Pax Silica Declaration itself, while Bahrain has signed only the new joint statement. Saudi Arabia signed neither.

The timing is interesting: The Gulf signed on in the same fortnight that Washington hobbled its own best models — forcing Anthropic to cut off Fable 5 and Mythos two weeks ago (it restored only partial access to Mythos 5 on Friday) while OpenAI is sharply limiting access to its newest model, GPT-5.6, to keep the White House happy.

Then Z.ai shipped GLM-5.2. The open-weights model is nearly as capable as Anthropic’s best in many respects — but costs maybe an eighth of Claude Opus 4.8’s on some tasks. Anyone, anywhere, can use GLM 5.2. The LLM is strongest at code and agents — the Wall Street Journal found it matched Mythos on cybersecurity — but still trails top US models elsewhere. Experts put China six months behind, or less; six of of the 10 most-used models on OpenRouter, a key provider, are now Chinese.

SOUND SMART- What does “open-weights” mean? A model’s “weights” are the bns of values it learns in training — they are the model. “Open-weight” means the maker publishes them, so anyone can download the model, run it on their own hardware, fine-tune it, and use it with no gatekeeper and no off-switch the maker can pull. That’s the opposite of the closed, rent-by-the-API models from OpenAI and Anthropic, where the provider — or its government — can cut you off, as Washington just did.

Why that matters: For a Gulf (or European or Asian or African…) buyer chasing sovereignty and lower cost, ownership is the whole appeal. For Washington, it’s the danger: An open model, once released, can’t be recalled — and the best open ones now come out of China.

This is the bind the Gulf faces. The region’s whole AI play — predicated on sovereign compute, cheap inference, abundant (cheap) energy, and local champions — has every reason to run the cheapest capable open-weights models it can find. The best of those are increasingly Chinese. Washington’s own statement blesses “open and closed-source models,” just … not China’s.

That’s why Saudi Arabia’s absence is particularly interesting. The UAE bought its place in the US camp the hard way: To secure the Nvidia chips its data-center ambitions depend on, G42 agreed to rip out its Chinese technology, Huawei gear included, as the price of a USD 1.5 bn Microsoft deal in 2024 and continued access to American silicon.

Saudi Arabia has made no such clean break. Humain is pouring bns of USD into compute, and Aramco’s venture arm, Prosperity7, was the first foreign firm to back a major Chinese AI champion when it joined a USD 400 mn round for Z.ai — then called Zhipu AI — in 2024. (Saudi has also taken stakes in OpenAi, Anthropic, and SpaceX.)

The UAE has tied itself to American hardware and cut China loose. Saudi is buying US chips while keeping a stake in China’s frontier, setting up the question that Pax Silica hasn’t yet answered: What happens to a tech alliance when the cheapest, fastest-improving models come from the country that alliance was built to shut out?