The US spent years telling China it couldn’t have advanced chips. Now China is returning the favor, except this time the weapon isn’t semiconductors. It’s AI models themselves.
China’s Ministry of Commerce held meetings with major tech firms including Alibaba and ByteDance as of July 7 to discuss restricting overseas access to China’s most advanced AI models. The talks also covered potential penalties for AI theft and limitations on foreign investments in domestic AI startups.
The Anthropic precedent that started it all
On June 12, the US Commerce Department imposed strict export controls on Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, citing national security concerns. The directive required a suspension of access for foreign nationals, which sounds surgical in theory but turned out to be a blunt instrument in practice.
Anthropic couldn’t instantly verify the nationality of every user on its platform. So the company did the only thing it could: temporarily cut off global access entirely. For roughly two and a half weeks, users outside the US found themselves locked out of some of the most capable AI systems on the planet.
