The Limits of AI as an Economic Weapon

The author argues that the rise of commoditized, open-weight Chinese AI models is creating a divided market that will undermine the United States' ability to use AI as an economic and geopolitical weapon. While U.S. frontier labs and policymakers focus on retaining a monopoly on advanced closed models to preserve coercive leverage, the author contends that Washington should instead secure downstream chokepoints like cloud hosting and semiconductor exports. Open article →