South Africa is not going to align itself with both Washington or Beijing in AI, communications minister Solly Malatsi has advised TechCentral, rejecting the central premise of a brand new Boston Consulting Group research that argues the window for nations to hedge between the 2 AI superpowers is closing.
The Nice Divide: How the US and China Are Splitting the AI World, printed on 30 June, discovered that the 2 nations are now not constructing rival merchandise inside one market however separate and more and more incompatible expertise stacks, working from chips by way of cloud and fashions to functions. The place BCG’s 2024 evaluation discovered that nations might nonetheless combine and match throughout each, it now warns that “the 2 ecosystems have diverged to the purpose the place neutrality might quickly turn into tougher to maintain”.
South Africa will not be named within the report. However almost each situation BCG identifies as pushing a middle-income nation in the direction of one stack or the opposite is current right here, and the nation is not going to have a broadcast nationwide AI coverage earlier than subsequent 12 months.
Requested by TechCentral whether or not South Africa’s membership of the China-led World Synthetic Intelligence Cooperation Organisation (Waico) carries any dedication on expertise requirements or procurement, Malatsi was unequivocal in his reply.
“South Africa’s membership, like its participation in any multilateral AI or expertise physique, carries no binding dedication on expertise requirements or procurement,” he stated in a written response to questions. “South Africa engages with all such organisations, whether or not led by the US, China, the EU, or some other bloc, on the identical foundation: to share data and advance world cooperation, to not align our state expertise decisions with any single geopolitical camp.”
State shopping for, he stated, stays ruled by current procurement regulation and follow, “together with value-for-money, interoperability, safety and fit-for-purpose assessments”, with an method that “has persistently emphasised open requirements, interoperability and avoiding vendor lock-in, rules that apply no matter a vendor’s nation of origin”.
‘Not selecting sides’
“To be clear: no membership of Waico, or of any comparable physique aligned with some other nation, will ever decide South Africa’s procurement selections primarily based on the nationality of an OEM or service supplier,” Malatsi stated. “South Africa will not be selecting sides within the divide the referenced report describes. We intend to stay capable of work with one of the best accessible expertise, wherever it’s developed.”
He didn’t reply a second query on whether or not the redrafted nationwide AI coverage will embrace steerage on the acquisition of AI {hardware} and software program stacks.
Learn: China weighs blocking the West from its greatest AI
South Africa has signed the settlement establishing Waico, appearing deputy director-general Jeanette Morwane advised TechCentral final week. The physique, proposed by Chinese language President Xi Jinping and established in Shanghai in July, will “deal with creating native AI improvements and instruments, moderately than simply utilizing instruments from different nations”, she stated.
Each ecosystems are promoting arduous into South Africa. Huawei has spent 2026 pitching an built-in AI providing to authorities and enterprise patrons, most just lately at its Join occasion in July, and its cloud platform presents DeepSeek fashions to African builders. DeepSeek’s V4, launched in April, was constructed to run on Huawei’s Ascend silicon.
The American facet is additional alongside. Microsoft has dedicated R5.4-billion to AI and cloud infrastructure right here, on prime of greater than R20-billion already spent. Amazon Net Providers, Google and Oracle all run native cloud areas. Altron’s Nvidia-powered AI manufacturing facility is reside, and Cassava Applied sciences is constructing its personal.
The lock-in is technical in addition to political. Code written for Nvidia’s Cuda software program can not merely be moved onto Huawei’s Ascend chips, BCG famous in its report, as a result of most manufacturing AI code would want rewriting for Huawei’s Cann atmosphere.
Arguably the most important take a look at of the minister’s place is one South Africa — and different nations all over the world — have already lived by way of: Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 on 9 June, the primary fashions in a tier it says exceeds its Opus line. Fable 5 was the overall launch, carrying safeguards; Mythos 5, with fewer, went solely to a small group of companions within the firm’s Mission Glasswing for defensive cybersecurity work. Three days later each had been gone.
On 12 June, after Amazon researchers discovered a option to immediate Fable 5 into figuring out software program vulnerabilities, the US commerce division directed Anthropic to droop all entry by any international nationwide, inside or exterior the US. As a result of the order took impact instantly and the corporate had no option to confirm nationality in actual time, it withdrew each fashions from each consumer worldwide. South African customers misplaced entry in a single day.
The controls had been lifted on 30 June and Fable 5 returned globally on 1 July, an outage of about three weeks. BCG learn the episode as proof that “nationwide safety issues might in some cases take priority over the worldwide diffusion of probably the most succesful AI fashions”. The choice was taken in Washington and reversed there, not by any purchaser in Pretoria making use of value-for-money and fit-for-purpose assessments.
Coverage vacuum
South Africa is making these decisions with out a coverage to information them. The draft nationwide AI coverage was withdrawn in April over fictitious references, an professional panel chaired by Wits AI researcher Benjamin Rosman is rebuilding it, and Morwane has signalled the redraft can be light-touch, offering nationwide pointers and leaving sectors to write down their very own methods. She has put the redraft at cupboard in November, with January 2027 because the fallback.
TechCentral has beforehand reported that the withdrawn draft left South Africa too depending on each superpowers. Malatsi’s reply is that dependency is a false alternative, and that open requirements and vendor neutrality are sufficient to maintain the nation’s choices open.
Learn: South Africa’s AI coverage collapse exhibits up in World Financial institution report
The World Financial institution’s World Growth Report 2026 agrees that’s the proper intuition, recommending that growing economies make “interoperability a function as an alternative of aiming for sovereignty”. The place it goes additional is on what the intuition requires: interoperability is one thing a rustic has to specify and implement, not one thing it will get by declining to decide on.
BCG’s warning is that the choices themselves are being foreclosed. “The partitions between the US and Chinese language AI expertise stacks are going up quicker than most corporations are reorganising round them,” it stated. — © 2026 NewsCentral Media
