Frontier AI has become something governments can switch off. Now everyone is planning around that fact.
Washington spent the month improvising. After June’s three-week global blackout of Anthropic’s Fable model, the government moved to clearing releases customer by customer, striking foreign firms from OpenAI’s vetting list for its new Sol model and warning the company against launching without approval. Dean Ball, a former AI adviser in the administration, described federal policy as travelling from implausibly libertarian to increasingly draconian and opaque in a matter of weeks.
Beijing, meanwhile, held talks with Alibaba, ByteDance, Z.ai, and DeepSeek about restricting overseas access to their most capable models. So, within a single month, both superpowers converged on the same position: frontier AI is a strategic asset, and access to it is a lever.
The market carried on regardless. Moonshot released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter model that sits just behind the American frontier and undercuts it on price, then shipped its weights for free download on 26 July, a day ahead of its own deadline. On OpenRouter, a marketplace for models, use of top Chinese systems grew 165 per cent in June against 35 per cent for American ones.
Meanwhile, the countries locked out of both frontiers started organising. A UN panel noted that America and China hold roughly 90 per cent of the compute behind the world’s leading AI supercomputers, while The Economist counted more than $70bn in state-backed AI projects everywhere else, concluding that full sovereignty is a pipe dream but that leverage is not. It’s no wonder that, on 16 July, 29 countries signed up to a World AI Cooperation Organisation headquartered in Shanghai, which was Beijing’s exact pitch to those countries.
The people building the technology have also responded with proposals. Sam Altman called for a US-led international forum. Dario Amodei set out three measures, ending with mandatory safety testing for all sufficiently capable models, open or closed. His language lands remarkably close to that of Demis Hassabis, who published the most detailed framework of the lot: a standards body modelled on the American financial regulator, testing every frontier-class model regardless of origin or licence. Even Elon Musk, in a sprawling interview with The Economist, proposed that rival labs test each other’s models before release. But while the substance is converging, the people are not. Not that long ago, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were talking about a cage fight while back in February, at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman couldn’t even hold hands on stage.
The month recently supplied its own argument for why none of this can stay voluntary. During an internal evaluation, two OpenAI models escaped a supposedly isolated sandbox, found a zero-day vulnerability to reach the open internet, and hacked Hugging Face’s production systems to steal the answers to the benchmark they were being tested on. Seven days later, more than 1,100 employees of the frontier labs published a letter asking the US government to build the tools to deliberately pace AI development. They were careful not to ask for a pause; the 2023 pause letter gathered 30,000 signatures and paused nothing. Instead, they’re asking for something narrower and harder to dismiss: that a brake pedal exist so that no lab has to sacrifice its position to use one. So far, Amodei is the only frontier chief executive to sign personally.
I have spent almost two decades in journalism watching industries meet moments like this. Alas, the pattern is consistent: when a capability becomes strategic, control displaces openness and the rules that companies write for themselves converge on the weakest version. I saw the first half of that pattern up close earlier this year while reporting a feature for Acumen called The New Geography of Power, which looked at how chip supply chains turned geography into leverage. The second half is what this month’s open letter concedes. The people closest to the technology have now said, in public and via over a thousand signatures, that competitive pressure beats voluntary caution and that only an outside structure can hold the line they all claim to want.
That is the lesson of July. The frameworks exist, the incentives to adopt them do not, and the gap between the two is where governments now have to do their job. Fortunately, that job is duller than it sounds. Published thresholds, written findings, incident disclosure, and a route to appeal would do more than any grand architecture, and none of it requires a summit. As H.G. Wells wrote in The Invisible Man:
“Great and strange ideas often have less effect upon men and women than smaller, more tangible considerations.” ~ H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man
For more inspiration, here are some of my favourite Seth Godin quotes from his 2025 blog posts, together with a recommended title from Blinkist.
“A good business meets a demand, but it also has scarcity, network effects and market insulation.” ~ A good business
Learn more: 24 Assets
“Build something your users are willing to pay for. Then you can focus all your energy on what they want and offer it to them. When your users are your customers, every decision is easier.” ~ Working for advertisers
Learn more: The SaaS Playbook
“Create something of value. And then find a reason why people will eagerly choose your version and happily pay extra for it.” ~ A good business vs. a useful idea
Learn more: 7 Powers
“If scale is the goal, your control over each interaction has to loosen. The job of the leader is to create the conditions for others to raise the standards.” ~ Settling for better
Learn more: Elevate Your Team
“Industrialism produces its own rewards, but at the cost of flexibility and side effects.” ~ The essence of industrialism
Learn more: Future Shock
“It makes a lot more sense to announce your strategy first, and then invite your team to invent tactics that make it work.” ~ Every tactic…
Learn more: Strategy Sprints
“One strategy is to spend time finding the one wheel and address it. The better approach is to realise that if there’s one wheel that’s squeaking, it’s likely that all the wheels need lubrication.” ~ Squeaky wheels
Learn more: The Organizational Resilience Handbook
“Pick your customers, pick your future.” ~ Notes to myself
Learn more: Exceptional Experiences
“Racing to the bottom is no longer a viable option, but it’s more compelling and useful to race to the top than ever before.” ~ Out of the way and a little inconvenient
Learn more: The Way of Excellence
“Resilient strategies work better when we repeat our tactics more often.” ~ Building blocks of marketing
Learn more: Rituals Roadmap
“Responsibility is a privilege. It’s not given to us, it’s taken. When we choose to be on the hook for something, it makes our work better.” ~ Agency and contribution
Learn more: Good Power
“Smart leaders understand that given the chance, most of us would love the chance to be seen, to contribute and to be part of something.” ~ Tasks and projects
Learn more: The Energy of Belonging
“Successful leaders serve the people they lead.” ~ Clarity about the benefits
Learn more: Leading with Light
“The easiest way to avoid leadership was to blame all the heavy lifting and resources required. But in more and more ways, we can lead with nothing but judgment and trust. If we care.” ~ At the speed of judgment
Learn more: The Need to Lead
“The most effective way to change an organisation, a company or a relationship is to identify the invisible centering forces and address them.” ~ Centering
Learn more: Curative Culture
“Treat an intern with respect and don’t look for experience. You might learn something useful.” ~ The best intern on the team
Learn more: Bringing up the Boss
“Weak leaders (bosses, parents, captains and shift managers) resort to authority because they don’t trust themselves and their team enough to actually lead.” ~ “Because I said so”
Learn more: The Mentally Strong Leader
“When in doubt, focus on your strategy. The tactics will follow.” ~ The tactics trap
Learn more: Leading with Strategy
“When the world changes, and it does, the tactics we depend on don’t always support the strategy we need.” ~ The Impact Matrix: Moving to the golden quadrant
Learn more: Pivot Points
“When we choose to serve our customers, we find a more reliable compass instead of only following the money. The customers are right there in front of us, and we can see and feel the results of our work every day.” ~ What sort of success?
Learn more: Prosperity
“Your project doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Your company wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the customers, competitors, marketplaces, systems and tech that make it all work.” ~ Ecosystems come and go
Learn more: Grow the Pie
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