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The EU has not joined a US-led alliance to ensure access to the technologies that power artificial intelligence, a further sign of the transatlantic rift over security and technology that has emerged under Donald Trump.
The Pax Silica declaration, announced in December 2025 by Washington, has so far been signed by Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Israel, Qatar, the UK and the United Arab Emirates. India is expected to join next month.
Although China is not explicitly mentioned, the pact appears to be an attempt to make sure Beijing can’t control bottlenecks in the AI supply chain, including raw materials, energy, logistics, semiconductors and AI software.
But the big omission is the EU, and specifically the Netherlands, home to ASML, the only company in the world able to make the lithography systems needed to produce the most advanced chips.
It’s unclear whether the US has deliberately excluded the EU from the alliance or if the EU refused to sign up to a Washington-led project, or a mixture of both.
Jacob Helsberg, the US official leading Pax Silica, said last week that there are “some real material policy and philosophical differences” between the US and EU “on how to approach cutting-edge technologies, particularly software and artificial intelligence.”
This hints at stark transatlantic divisions over whether to regulate AI. Brussels has passed a sweeping AI Act, but Washington is baulking at any form of restrictions on the technology.
“The US is basically exerting pressure on the EU to relax regulatory constraints in order to qualify for inclusion in this elite group,” said Julia Hess, who researches the semiconductor industry and AI at the Berlin-based think tank Interface.
Helsberg, who is under-secretary of economic affairs at the US State Department, has also said that to join Pax Silica, countries must be “fundamentally aligned with the United States on broader geopolitical issues.” With the EU pushing back against US threats to take over Greenland, possibly by force, transatlantic relations are at a historic low.
Imperial-coded
However, Dutch and EU officials did attend Pax Silica’s launch in December, and Helsberg has acknowledged ASML’s importance to semiconductor supply chains. “We want Europe to have a seat at the AI table,” he said in last week’s briefing.
It’s also possible that EU officials are wary of joining a US-led initiative, with wider relations so fraught.
“I can see a lot of reasons why the EU might be cautious about such an initiative, particularly given the imperial-coded language of the initiative, other major EU foreign policy developments such as Mercosur [a trade pact with South America], and the general posture of the US government toward Europe,” said Cole Donovan, a former US science diplomat, and now associate director at the Federation of American Scientists.
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Asked about Pax Silica, the European Commission did not respond on the record. The US State Department, asked whether it had excluded EU states, merely pointed to Helsberg’s previous public statements.
The Dutch government did not respond to a request for comment before Science|Business’s deadline. An ASML spokesman also declined to comment.
Symbolic gesture
Despite the fanfare around Pax Silica last month, observers are sceptical that it will amount to anything concrete, at least in the near term.
Pressed during a briefing in December on what obligations signatory countries would have, Helsberg gave few details, although he did mention information sharing. “We’re still in the process of mapping different lines of efforts,” he said.
Asked by an Australian journalist whether Pax Silica would mean curtailing exports to China, he didn’t directly respond.
“The more I review the underlying documents, the more this appears to be a largely symbolic gesture,” said Hess. Even if Pax Silica signatories take it “seriously,” investments would only bear fruit in five or realistically ten years’ time, well beyond the current Trump administration, she said.
Donovan agrees. Japan’s Pax Silica declaration, for example, is “relatively high level with very loose specificity,” he said.
The EU, meanwhile, needs to develop new technological strengths over the medium and long-term that give it “genuine geopolitical leverage,” said Hess. It should not focus on replicating existing technologies already dominated by the US, such as large language models, she added.