Security quote of the week

If we start thinking of AI as a national asset, countries may want to start developing their own capabilities fast. Or we could encounter a future of research blocks, much like the Cold War (I propose Oceania and Eurasia, just for the heck of it).

The above would lead to a situation of considerable inequality. A handful of countries would have access to the best models while everyone else makes do with whatever is permitted to cross the border, and the gap between the two would compound exactly as fast as the models improve. The first casualty of a national-security framing is openness. Open weights are, almost by definition, incompatible with a regime in which models are strategic assets, because you cannot export-control something you have released to the world. For those of us who have spent a long time arguing for open source, the Commons, and a right to tinker, this is the part that should worry us most. It is one thing to lose access to a proprietary model behind a paywall; it is quite another to have open release reframed as a national security liability, with the entire ethos of open development treated as a loophole to be closed. The chip war gave us a fragmented supply chain, and the new model war threatens to give us a fragmented world, in which the model you can use depends on your passport.