Last week, shortly after Anthropic launched its most powerful AI models, the U.S. government imposed export controls restricting foreign nationals from accessing them – and rather than try to verify the citizenship of every user on the planet within ninety minutes, Anthropic shut the models down for everyone. In this video we look at what actually happened: the Commerce Department’s “is informed” letter, the deemed-export rules that locked Anthropic’s own engineers out of their work, the claim that the “national security threat” was essentially an AI fixing software bugs, and the awkward detail that the partner who reported it was Amazon – Anthropic’s largest backer and a direct competitor. We also dig into why all of this matters for Anthropic’s near-trillion-dollar valuation, the winner-takes-all assumptions behind frontier AI, the rise of cheap open-source Chinese models, and whether there’s really any such thing as a monopoly on math.
It's Just Technology