AI Just Got a Passport

This week the best AI on Earth got a border.

Not a paywall. A border. You need the right birth certificate now.

Here's what happened.

The U.S. government told Anthropic: the frontier models, the Mythos-class ones, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, are off-limits to foreign nationals. National security. A jailbreak they couldn't contain.

So overnight, the most powerful tools humanity has built got a wall around them. By nationality.

Now sit with the absurdity.

The people who build these models, researchers born in Canada, the UK, wherever, might not be allowed to use the thing they made.

A co-founder of Anthropic, born outside the U.S. Their own researchers, born in other countries. The company exists because of them.

And now they might have to flash a passport to touch the thing they built.

You can write the brain. You're just not American enough to be in the room with it.

That's the "security risk." The person who wrote the mind is too dangerous to use the mind. Because of where his mother gave birth.

Read that back and tell me it makes sense.

And remember the original promise.

OpenAI, it's literally in the name, started as a non-profit. Open. For everyone. If we ever cracked intelligence, it was supposed to belong to all of us. That was the pitch.

The people who built Anthropic came out of that house. And to be straight, they didn't leave chasing some non-profit dream. They left over a clash of vision. They thought OpenAI was shipping too fast and not taking safety seriously enough. So they built their own lab. For-profit from day one. No "open" in the name, no pretense.

But here's what nobody did. Stay open.

The non-profit became a juggernaut. The breakaway became a kingmaker with a flag on the gate.

Whatever the founding story was, open, or safe, or for-everyone, this isn't it.

And the rest of us are tenants.

So let's call it what it is.

AI stopped being software. It became a resource. Oil. Lithium. A port.

And resources don't stay neutral. Countries hoard them. Fence them. Eventually fight over them.

We've seen this movie. It's old.

If you weren't born in the right empire, you got locked out of the last few centuries by default.

Pre-colonial logic. New coat of paint. Same gate, same guards, same people standing outside it.

So here's where I land.

Either AI goes actually open, same access for everyone, everywhere, or it becomes the thing nations knife each other over for the next fifty years.

There's no soft middle. Something this powerful, owned by one flag, doesn't stay one flag's for long.

And I live in France. So let me be specific.

France still has a shot. It has some of the pieces, and more importantly, it has the appetite. The desire to stay relevant in a century that's trying to leave it behind. And I think it should be willing to sacrifice for it.

Because this is no longer a political endeavor.

This is a survival endeavor. Survival. Sovereignty. Relevance.

For forty years the pattern has been the same. The country that wins the technology wins, full stop. Resources stopped being the lever a long time ago. Compute is the new oil, and we don't pump it here yet.

So if I ran France, I'd make the offer of the decade.

Anthropic, move your headquarters here.

Then actually make it survivable.

France taxes ambition into the ground. You can't pay frontier-lab salaries through these social charges and live. So stop forcing the future through laws written for the past.

Write a new category. Innovative infrastructure. Different rules. Build the law for the thing you're trying to attract, not the thing you're trying to bleed.

And use the card nobody plays.

ASML. Dutch. European. The only company on Earth that makes the machines that make the chips. The entire planet's silicon runs through one building on this continent.

America wants to wall off models? Europe holds the wall that makes the wafers.

That's not a small card. That's the whole table.

And the Nvidia dependency is on a timer anyway.

China is already training on its own chips. The "you need American GPUs" era has an expiry date. Betting the next decade on Nvidia staying king is a bad bet.

Yeah, it costs.

A few hundred billion, cash, to build it. Same again every year to grow it.

That's the price of not renting someone else's century.

And here's the part France keeps forgetting it already won.

Frontier AI doesn't run on code. It runs on electricity. Oceans of it. The biggest line item in a data center isn't the chips. It's the power bill that never stops.

France has the cheapest clean power on the continent. Fifty-six reactors, already built, already paid for. The capital, the construction, the decades, that bill was settled years ago. What's left is fuel and upkeep. Under a cent a kilowatt-hour for the fuel of the next unit, and even all-in, run at cost with no profit, under eight. The plants are sunk cost. The power coming out of them is nearly free to make.

And right now France sells that power into the European market at European prices. It exports its own advantage. It hands the discount to everyone else.

So flip it. Stop shipping hundreds of billions abroad, to other people's wars and other people's recovery. Spend it here. Build new reactors aimed at one job, feeding compute. Point the cheapest electricity on Earth at the most valuable machines on Earth, on the same soil.

It's not a subsidy. It's a moat nobody else has.

Because here's the real stake.

If everyone holds the best model, no one can be hit with it. Equal footing. Mutual defense by default.

The danger was never powerful AI.

The danger is powerful AI that only some people are allowed to hold.

This week we learned that intelligence, the most human thing there is, can be issued by nationality.

That should scare you more than the machine ever did.