For nineteen days this June, the United States conducted an unintended experiment in the economics of technology restriction, and the results should trouble anyone who assumes that cutting off access to a capability reliably denies it to an adversary. On 12 June, the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to bar every foreign national from its two most capable AI models. Because nationality cannot be checked inside shared cloud infrastructure, the company shut both models down worldwide. The order was lifted on 30 June. The episode is being litigated as a national-security story, but its more durable lessons are economic, and they cut against the instinct that produced the ban.
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