Oman to Shanghai, the UAE and Qatar to Washington: the Gulf splits its loyalty between two competing AI frameworks

Three Gulf states placed their names under two competing international AI frameworks, and did not sign the same list. Oman joined the World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO), the body proposed by China and based in Shanghai. The UAE and Qatar joined Pax Silica, the U.S. initiative to build an AI supply chain, from critical minerals to chips, excluding China.

The split is not symbolicThe Chinese initiative (WAICO) was founded in Shanghai in July with 29 founding members, including Russia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Laos and Kazakhstan, and Oman is the only Gulf state on the founding list. Its stated purpose: an international AI governance framework aimed at the “global south,” i.e., a rules game rather than a hardware game. Pax Silica sits on the opposite side of the technical stack: a U.S. State Department initiative concerned with where the material inputs for AI come from, linked to aligning export controls and joint investment in infrastructure. Mohamed Suleiman of the Middle East Institute described them to AGBI as “competing geo-technical architectures”: one Chinese-led, open-membership, standards-oriented; the other U.S.-led, exclusive, built around trusted security partners. The overlap, in his words, is “narrow to the point of vanishing.”

What each capital buys differs fundamentallyPax Silica is a supplier relationship: it promises access to advanced fabs, manufacturing capacity, and joint-investment mechanisms that follow U.S. infrastructure commitments. For the UAE, which linked a large part of its compute plan to U.S. hardware and partnerships with the major American cloud providers, this access is the operational asset: nothing in the announced Gulf data-center pipeline works without it. WAICO, by contrast, is a rules-crafting relationship: it offers a seat in a body intending to write AI governance standards outside the OECD and G7 tracks, with membership leaning toward countries that lack a realistic path to a local border model. For Oman, which does not compete for border-level computing and positions itself as a neutral logistics and energy corridor, the standards seat is cheap and the diplomatic cost low. This imbalance explains the pattern better than any narrative of “choosing a side”: Abu Dhabi and Doha buy inputs, while Muscat buys influence over rules that they will inherit in any case.

Hedging price rose in AugustThe U.S. State Department drafted a letter to the sites of Pax Silica and other governments that have funded AI with Washington, warning them about WAICO: Reuters broke the story first and AGBI followed with a confirmation from a department official who declined to comment on leaked internal documents. Ryan Vidasek of the American Enterprise Institute placed the U.S. stance in a state of “continuous shaping,” where the mix of carrots and sticks will determine whether the initiative endures. But the core demands are clearer than the enforcement mechanism: Washington sells an end-to-end AI stack independent of China, and will not allow a country to contribute to that stack while drawing capital and models from China. Sam Winter-Levy of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace expects pressure to focus on countries that want the best U.S. infrastructure, which points directly at the UAE. He is less convinced of the United States’ ability to control the broader field: a country that does not aspire to American fabs has no strong reason to avoid China’s open-weight models, and its exposure is limited if it does.

Three indicators the region monitors in the coming quarterFirst: Saudi Arabia, absent from both founding lists and the region’s largest announced compute programme; its ongoing choice or refusal will say more about hedging robustness than any statement from Muscat or Abu Dhabi. Second: tender language; watch whether national AI infrastructure bids start to include “origin of supply” clauses, because that is where a statement shifts from a political declaration to a contractual condition. Third: the open-weight model question; Gulf ministries and banks already run Chinese open-weight models in evaluation environments because they are cheap and effective in Arabic. If Pax Silica membership begins to restrict that, the cost of alignment moves from diplomacy to engineering roadmaps, becoming visible in what regional institutions can actually deploy.