South Africa's communications minister Solly Malatsi has declared the country will not align with either the US or China on AI, rejecting the premise of a Boston Consulting Group report warning that neutrality between the two AI superpowers is becoming harder to sustain. Malatsi insists membership in China's Waico body carries no binding procurement commitments, and that South Africa will pursue open standards and vendor neutrality. The piece highlights the practical challenges to this stance: US cloud and AI infrastructure investment dwarfs China's presence, technical lock-in exists between Nvidia/CUDA and Huawei/Ascend ecosystems, and the Anthropic Claude Fable 5 incident showed Washington can unilaterally cut off AI access to foreign users overnight. South Africa is navigating these choices without a national AI policy, after its draft was withdrawn in April over fictitious references, with a redraft not expected before early 2027.
