The US believes a 10x increase in training compute will make its proprietary models 'twice as capable.' This widening performance gap is a strategic lever intended to make aligning with the American AI stack an unavoidable choice for nations seeking competitive advantages, forcing them to overlook sovereignty concerns.

The US focus on exporting hardware (chips, data centers) over proprietary models suggests a strategic belief that open-source AI will eventually dominate. If models become a free commodity, the most valuable and defensible part of the AI stack becomes the underlying compute infrastructure.

Dario Amodei frames AI chip export controls not as a permanent blockade, but as a strategic play for leverage. The goal is to ensure that when the world eventually negotiates the "rules of the road" for the post-AGI era, democratic nations are in a stronger bargaining position relative to authoritarian states like China.

By limiting access to top-tier proprietary models, U.S. policy may have ironically forced China to develop more efficient, open-source alternatives. This strategy is more effective for global adoption, as other countries can freely adapt these models without API limits or vendor lock-in.

China isn't giving away its AI models out of generosity. By making them open source, it encourages widespread adoption and dependency. Once users are locked into the ecosystem, China can monetize it, introduce ads, or simply lock down future, more advanced versions, giving it significant strategic leverage.

The U.S. strategy treats AI not just as technology, but as a foundational tool for global influence. By creating a dominant 'tech umbrella,' it aims to forge alliances and exert power in a way analogous to how its military has secured its global standing since WWII, making AI the new core of its national power.

The open vs. closed source debate is a matter of strategic control. As AI becomes as critical as electricity, enterprises and nations will use open source models to avoid dependency on a single vendor who could throttle or cut off their "intelligence supply," thereby ensuring operational and geopolitical sovereignty.

A zero-tolerance policy on selling advanced AI chips to China might be strategically shortsighted. Allowing some sales could build a degree of dependence within China's ecosystem. This dependence then becomes a powerful point of leverage that the U.S. could exploit in a future crisis, a weapon it wouldn't have if China were forced into total self-sufficiency from the start.

The new "American AI Exports Program" and "Tech Corps" initiative mirror the strategy used to compete with Huawei's 5G dominance. By offering attractive financing and on-the-ground training, the US aims to provide developing nations a complete solution to build AI capabilities with American technology.