Israel will be among a select group of countries participating in the Pax Silica artificial intelligence summit at the White House on Dec. 12.
Pax Silica is a “strategic economic security coalition-building effort for the AI era that unites countries whose interests converge around securing the entire silicon to compute supply chain,” Jacob Helberg, under secretary of state for economic affairs, told reporters.
“It establishes a new strategic reality that economic security is national security, and ultimately, it is going to bring together nations that share a common vision for technological leadership, safe and secure supply chain, predictable access to energy, silicon and compute,” he added.
The United States and Israel will be joined at the summit by Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates, which Helberg described as “a high-performance grouping of countries covering critical modes of the AI economy.”
Israel, Helberg told reporters, “is a leader in frontier AI cyber security and specialized chip design.”
The Trump administration is looking for the summit to deliver “concrete cooperation across minerals fabrication and computing clusters and having a full stack approach to AI power,” along with the establishment of investment pipelines for new projects, including in minerals and next-generation computing centers.
Additionally, Helberg said the administration is “looking to adopt a coordinated framework to reduce single points of failure to prevent coercive dependencies in our supply chains” through private sector mobilization.”
Helberg told JNS that Erez Askal, the head of Israel’s national AI directorate, will lead the Israeli delegation to the summit. He operates in the auspices of the Israeli prime minister’s office.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration approved the sale of 70,000 coveted, export-controlled AI chips to the UAE, along with Saudi Arabia, even as fears linger among some officials and analysts that the technology will find its way to China, an ally of both Gulf States.
Asked what safeguards were put into place to avoid such circumstances, Helberg told reporters that he wasn’t at liberty to discuss confidential terms of the U.S.-Saudi agreement, but that security “was very much accounted for during the negotiations, as well as in the final agreement, and there are a number of remedy measures.”
He said those deals took as long as they did to complete “because the administration has done a very good job at being thoughtful about balancing the competing objectives of wanting to export the stack and our chips, with security concerns.”
A China hawk, Helberg is a former adviser to the senior adviser of Alex Carp, CEO of Palantir Technologies. Palantir, a software company specializing in data analysis platforms for government and commercial clients, has a strategic partnership with the Israeli Defense Ministry.
Helberg, who is Jewish, is a former Democrat who switched to the Republican Party in part over concerns about Democrats’ handling of Israel issues.
