orchestration is no longer just a technical optimization; it has become a geopolitical and operational imperative.

The AI arms race between China and the US has researchers on both sides worried about a "Chernobyl moment."

The AI arms race between China and the US has researchers on both sides worried about a "Chernobyl moment."

He likened the pullback of Anthropic's models to Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, with access to AI now a strategic chokepoint for which France must prepare.

The geography of this work matters. Frontier RSI is being attempted, almost exclusively, inside the world's two largest compute clusters.

Chinese open-weight models accounted for 17.1% of global AI model downloads over the year ending in August 2025. That narrowly surpassed the US share of 15.86%—the first time China had led in this metric.

Chinese models overtook their counterparts built in the U.S. in the summer of 2025 and subsequently widened the gap over their western counterparts.

The U.S.-China AI model performance gap has effectively closed.

Political economy and power. The book largely brackets capital concentration, platform dynamics, and geopolitical competition. Today, these are central to any serious discussion of AI, not because the technology changed direction, but because it scaled fast enough to collide with real institutions and entrenched interests.