No. 1 · November 2026
Three offers and a deadline
A country that is neither the United States nor China now has three tables it can sit at. Washington's is Pax Silica: a supply-chain club running from minerals to chips to compute, with 26 signatories by October. Beijing's is the World AI Cooperation Organization, founded in Shanghai in July by 29 states, with no G7 member among them.
The third table is the one middle powers are building for themselves, and it is the least finished. It has no secretariat and no single text. What it has is a cluster of overlapping moves in ten weeks: the Finnish-Norwegian call for control of frontier models in September, the renewed UK–Canada security pact in October, the Canada–EU alliance at Montreal, and the Paris Call in November.
Membership overlaps more than the rhetoric suggests. Germany signed Pax Silica in June and the frontier-model call in September. Kazakhstan has signed both of those and is a founding member of the Shanghai organization too. Hedging across tables is the common strategy.
The date that turns this into a test is 21 June 2027, when the fifth AI summit opens in Geneva. Whether the third table arrives there with one shared ask, or several competing ones, is the thing to watch.