Has India Walked Into a Trap by Joining a US-Led AI Alliance?

On 20 February, India formally joined an America-led strategic alliance on Artificial Intelligence (AI) supply chain security, known as ‘Pax Silica’, at the ongoing AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.

The alliance sounds curiously similar to ‘Pax Sinica’, a historically-rooted term for a Chinese-led era of global peace. But, that’s a discussion for another day.

Until India joined, the alliance had nine signatories – two NATO allies (UK and Greece), five Major Non-NATO Allies or ‘MNNAs’ (Israel, Japan, South Korea, Qatar and Australia) and two very close strategic US partners that host American military assets on their soil (UAE and Singapore).

So, India is a bit of an odd one out in this group. While it has a comprehensive strategic partnership with the US, it is neither an MNNA nor does it host American military assets. Notably, it is also the only BRICS member to join the alliance.

This makes India’s participation in Pax Silica somewhat geopolitically unwieldy. Particularly concerning is the Narendra Modi government’s decision to enter – some would say, be co-opted into – a narrow America-centric technological alliance pushed by an administration that has begun to sound more and more like a proper neo-colonial empire.

Whether this choice is an outcome of measured decision-making by New Delhi or coercion by the Donald Trump administration is not yet clear. But, because this decision comes just days after New Delhi signed a questionable trade deal with the US, it all looks a bit suspect. But, for now, let’s avoid analysis by vibes.

Instead, let’s focus a bit on what this alliance is designed to achieve. In its public release, the Trump administration has pitched Pax Silica as a:

“shared vision to deepen our [US’] economic partnership through shared efforts on investment security practices, infrastructure, and incentives.”

But, can we take this at face value? By now, it is clear that Trump and his like-minded advisers do things differently. Congeniality and consensus-building aren’t their forte. Instead, they have made it amply clear that they want a world that bends to American political and material interests.

And they want their allies to fall in line with this imperial vision or face consequences. Unipolarity with a new set of vampire-like fangs.

So, the moot question is: is Pax Silica really a shared vision or just another MAGA ruse to build an America-centric global AI supply chain using a set of pliable allies?

Interestingly, the US State Department recently announced a ‘concierge service’ to sell American AI semiconductors to its partners (yes, that’s what happens when a hotelier takes over the White House). According Jacob Helberg, the US Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, the service is designed to turn American diplomats into “business development officers for American AI, ensuring that American technology wins contracts over alternatives by making the buying process easier for our allies.”

“This is really part of our strategy to win the AI race,” Helberg added.

And during the freshly-concluded AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Sriram Krishnan, a policy adviser on AI to the Trump administration, suggested that India (and other allies) should use the American AI stack and infrastructure.

None of this sounds like part of a “shared vision”. Rather, it looks like the blueprint for a Trump-style global business venture to sell American AI platforms and technologies to willing buyers and in the process, outpace, not help, its global allies.

And here, the seller is hardly a benign one – it is a coercive military superpower with overwhelming leverage over the global economy and a sadistic fetish to dominate the weak.

Because Pax Silica is not based on mutually-agreed treaty commitments, it leaves the participating countries even more exposed to the Trump administration’s coercive whims. In fact, its clear that Trump cares little about legal safeguards, and is even willing to ride roughshod over his own country’s Supreme Court rulings to continue his global economic warfare.

In such a context, one wonders how Pax Silica will advance India’s tech sovereignty journey. A lot depends on the success of indigenous desi AI companies and whether they are able to innovate new platforms, instead of just serving as local service providers or supply chain nodes for American AI super-companies.

As Armaan Agarwal, tech journalist at India Today, has warned, if India accepts America’s AI regimes without thought, it could end up replicating the lopsided dynamics of the 1990s Indian IT revolution that reduced Indian firms to mere service providers for American tech companies.

There is another set of concerns over India’s participation in Pax Silica – extraction of critical minerals. The global AI industry is dependent on a sustained supply of critical minerals. Whoever dominates access, wins the so-called “AI race” (a bit like the race to secure radioactive raw materials during the Cold War).

Thus, Trump’s America would naturally want to monopolise procurement pathways for critical minerals – particularly to outcompete China, which currently dominates the global critical minerals ecosystem. This is probably why the alliance is called ‘Pax Silica’ in the first place as a subtle yet unmistakable expression of its key intent – that is, confront Pax Sinica.

A great deal of the Sino-American critical mineral rush is centred in Africa, and is framed by exploitative conditions that echo the global imperialist projects of the 19th and 20th centuries.

One wonders then if Pax Silica is Trump’s way to force its partners to run a global conveyor belt of critical minerals for America. And by joining forces, has India signed up to a neo-imperialist extraction project of epic proportions, which risks destabilising already-fragile geographies and worsening working conditions across the global south?

I am not drawing a casual or even a correlational link here, but something stands out in the timing of India’s Pax Silica decision.

In September 2025, Reuters revealed that India was in talks with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) to procure rare earths from certain areas in northern Myanmar that are controlled by the powerful ethnic armed organisation (see the full report for some of my own comments on the development). The KIA also reportedly collected some samples for India to test.

Simultaneously, New Delhi has discussed similar proposals with the Myanmar junta at the highest levels. These moves are widely seen as India’s attempt to reduce its over-dependence on China for rare earths – an objective that aligns with broader US objectives.

What is particularly intriguing is that just months before India reportedly got in touch with the KIA, the Trump administration also reportedly began exploring similar “competing proposals” to access rare earths in northern Myanmar.

It is very likely that Washington DC sees these proposals as logistically impractical. It might then want willing (and more geographically proximate) partners – like India – to procure the rare earths from northern Myanmar on its behalf. One wonders if Pax Silica formalises these plans.

Most of the above, as you can see, is speculative analysis. But, the bottomline here is that by joining an America-centric technological clique led by a bellicose, irreverent, colonialist-minded administration, India might not only be axing its own grand AI vision, but also picking sides in the larger US-China trade war.

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