More than 30 diplomats, State officials and staffers crowded into the State Department’s Treaty Room in early May as Jacob Helberg and Norway’s ambassador to the U.S., Anniken Huitfeldt, signed Norway onto his Pax Silica Declaration. The scene said plenty. A room full of officials, a signature on paper, and a new coalition built to pull countries into the orbit of U.S. technological power.
Helberg, the Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, has become one of the Trump administration’s most visible champions of U.S. technological dominance over China. So far, he has landed 24 country members, including the European Union and critical mineral resource powerhouses Chile and Kazakhstan, to sign the declaration. The pitch is simple enough to fit on a podium and broad enough to cover a lot of empire: link arms quickly with the U.S. or risk losing control of tech infrastructure to “people who don’t have our best interests at heart.”
Who Holds the Levers
Helberg says, “Technology is the whole game. Whoever leads the world technologically will likely also lead economically and militarily.” That’s the logic driving Pax Silica, a coalition that is currently more symbolic than substantive and does not commit signers to specific deliverables. Even so, Helberg hopes it will become a platform for joint research and development, manufacturing and infrastructure investment projects intended to rival China’s Belt and Road initiative.
His role at State comes as public sentiment has soured over data centers and as fear has grown that a super intelligent AI system could plot the extinction of the human race. Beijing has also weaponized its dominance in rare earth minerals through export restrictions that have starved U.S. defense and civilian manufacturing of essential production materials. Helberg says he wants to end that dependency and spur joint high tech research, development and manufacturing among the U.S. and its allies and partners. He says his job is to ensure supply chains deliver reliable inputs at market prices, not at whatever price Beijing decides to charge in a crisis.
The rise of tech executives inside the Trump administration runs through Helberg’s story. Other tech figures with power in the White House include recently departed White House senior policy adviser for AI Sriram Krishnan and David Sacks, who served as President Donald Trump’s special adviser on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency and is now co-chair of his President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Rick Claypool, a research director at the left-leaning nonprofit Public Citizen, said, “There’s a synergy between this fully unrestrained Trump White House and big tech and big tech billionaires who have real policy preferences in blocking AI regulation and the retreat from crypto and financial sector regulatory enforcement.” He added, “The default position has become what’s good for big tech billionaires is what’s good for America.”
The Elite Network Behind the Curtain
Helberg literally married into the ranks of U.S. tech titans when he wed venture capitalist Keith Rabois in 2018 in a ceremony officiated by Altman and attended by a who’s-who of Silicon Valley elite. Rabois is a member of the so-called PayPal mafia, a grouping of early tech investors that included Sacks, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Helberg also had personal financial skin in the game, and POLITICO accessed a 70-page financial transaction disclosure report showing he sold millions of dollars of investments in tech companies including OpenAI, Palantir, Tesla and Meta in December 2025 and January 2026. The U.S. Office of Government Ethics said Helberg “is in compliance with applicable laws and regulations.”
Helberg says the prominence of tech sector elites in the Trump administration is an overdue recognition that Washington’s old arms-length relationship with Silicon Valley created a “translation gap” that hurt U.S. competitiveness with Beijing. “For years, Washington’s default was that anyone who actually understood technology was disqualified from governing it,” he said. “So we got a government that regulated what it didn’t understand and missed what it couldn’t see — while Beijing fused its tech sector and its state into one weapon.”
Helberg was born in 1989 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a western Parisian suburb with a population of about 40,000, within hours of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the end of the Cold War. He is the son of a French mother and an American father, spent formative years in Europe, first in France and later in Belgium, and spent summers in Ohio with his father’s side of the family. He moved to the U.S. at 18 in 2008 to attend college. He says his family smuggled American food into France before Amazon and got a satellite dish to receive American TV against French media quotas on American movies. He says he felt like an outsider in Europe, identified more with America than Europe, and is the grandson of two Holocaust survivors.
From Silicon Valley to State Power
After the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Helberg says he became a target of anti-Americanism among French teachers and classmates. He says he often defended the Bush administration and landed in the principal’s office more than once. He later criticized Europe’s politics and bureaucracy, calling the European Union’s “Caligulan bureaucracy” and describing a “civilizational emergency” in Europe over its failure to embrace digital technology in the 2010s. A friend who has known him since he was a teenager said Helberg’s criticism of Europe reflects a “tough friend” approach and that he believes Europe needs to take a harsher stance on issues like immigration.
Helberg attended The George Washington University, graduated with a degree in international relations, and after a one-semester detour to study law at Sciences Po Law School in Paris, joined his sister in California and connected with Silicon Valley. He worked at start-ups including GeoQuant and by 2016 was leading Google’s global search policy team, where he says he learned tech foreign diplomacy under a “take nothing down unless it’s illegal” policy. He later went back to school in 2019 for a master’s degree in cybersecurity risk and strategy at New York University while continuing to work at Google. He left Google in 2020 after what he called “militant” staff protests against Project Maven and an abortive effort to re-enter the Chinese market.
Over the next three years, Helberg sharpened his credentials on the intersection of tech and China’s national security threat as a senior advisor at the Stanford University Center on Geopolitics and Technology, co-chair of the Brookings Institution China Strategy Working Group and the U.S.-France Working Group on China. In 2022, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy appointed him to a two-year term on the congressionally funded U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Some fellow commissioners bristled at what they saw as Helberg’s relative lack of knowledge and experience on China issues and his emphasis on tech sector approaches rather than the commission’s traditional focus on trade issues. One person familiar with his tenure said, “From the beginning, it was, ‘You people don’t know anything about tech. I am here to teach you about tech, and pretty much to represent tech.’” Another said, “There was a point when he said, ‘We’re going to war with China.’ But it wasn’t some dispassionate military analysis. It struck me as something that was in line with particular tech industry interests — companies like Palantir — that were trying to sell new technologies to the Pentagon.” Michael Wessel, who served on the commission from 2001 to 2024, defended Helberg, saying, “No other commissioner had the depth of knowledge and awareness of the industry realities on these issues.”
Helberg and his allies also launched the Hill & Valley Forum in 2022, a gathering of tech executives, lawmakers and administration officials focused on countering China’s national security threats. Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Founders Fund and a Hill & Valley co-founder along with Christian Garrett, said, “It’s become like a default meeting place for leaders in tech and Capitol Hill.” He said he knows of backroom conversations that turned into nuclear- and energy-related policies and of several fundraising rounds that came together because of Hill & Valley. Helberg later renewed his friendship with Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir Technologies, and joined Palantir in 2023 as Karp’s senior adviser. Helberg calls Karp “a mentor” and says he learned a lot by osmosis from how Karp thinks.
Helberg’s roles at Palantir and on the commission helped launch his campaign to ban TikTok. From 2023 to 2024 he met with dozens of members of Congress to persuade them to pass legislation that would outlaw the app. Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., said his efforts were instrumental in the bipartisan legislation passed in 2024 that required TikTok’s Beijing-based owner ByteDance to sell the app to a non-adversarial buyer or face a ban from U.S. app stores. “His engagement basically put the effort on steroids,” Cammack said. Trump delayed the ban from taking effect five times last year while a deal was negotiated to divest the app to American owners.
What Pax Silica Delivers
Since assuming his position in October, Helberg has wrangled 24 countries to join Pax Silica. The initiative is a re-invention of the Biden administration’s Minerals Security Partnership stripped of its emphasis on clean energy transition, consultation with communities and ethical business operations. Instead, Pax Silica leans hard into mutual economic security and cooperation against “non-market policies and practices.” Helberg says, “This grouping of countries will be to the AI age what the G7 was to the industrial age.” He has traveled to more than 18 countries and met with the leaders of more than 40 nations over the past year, and in May he pitched greater U.S. access to Guyana’s bauxite reserves and secured a deal with the Philippine government for a 4,000 acre economic security zone for AI-related manufacturing.
Pax Silica has support on Capitol Hill. House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Brian Mast, a Florida Republican, warned at a July hearing that a Chinese victory in the AI development race could give Beijing capabilities with existential national security implications. He said, “I have no doubt they are waiting to release the next super Covid if that’s what they could develop. Or a Missile Defense Mythos that can get around any Golden Dome that the United States of America has.” Beijing’s state media has also criticized the effort. The Global Times reported in December that Pax Silica aims at decoupling with China in the semiconductor supply chain and would raise costs for chips and other materials.
The initiative still lacks some major members, including France and Canada, and Saudi Arabia has stayed out despite signing a Strategic Artificial Intelligence Partnership with the U.S. last year. Critics say the Trump administration’s tariffs and threats to acquire Greenland have made some prospective members wary. Eric Robinson, an expert on international supply chains who served as director of the Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital in the Biden administration, said, “You can’t put a knife to the throat of NATO and then create Pax Silica at the same time.” A Washington-based diplomat said the grouping seems mostly symbolic and that there aren’t any solid commitments linked to signing.
Helberg has responded sharply to criticism. When French tech entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand called Pax Silica “structurally neocolonial” over a proposed clause in the Philippine development contract that would apply U.S. common law rather than Philippine law, Helberg replied on X that Bertrand had an “ignorant loser mentality.” When another critic described Manila’s rejection of the common law clause as Filipinos “rising up against Pax Silica,” Helberg accused them of being part of a group of “failed-commentators-turned-paid-for-mouthpieces.”
Helberg says he wants by 2027 to make it measurably no longer true that Beijing can squeeze the tech supply chains of the U.S. and its partners at will. He says, “And I want the receipts: signed agreements, groundbreakings, dollars deployed.” Over the coming year, he plans to build out Pax Pass, a specialized cargo shipping platform aimed at ensuring fast, secure transfer of goods critical to AI development, and he wants Congress to provide an initial $50 million in development costs. He also plans to work with Stanford University to create The Foundry School, a training ground for Pax Silica member technologists in advanced manufacturing, and to expand a network of economic security zones modeled on the development in the Philippines. He says, “We are just in the infancy days of the AI revolution.”