America’s governance of AI is proving whimsical, much like the Donald Trump administration’s approach to most other aspects of geopolitics. But its more recent efforts to wall off access to advanced American AI models could end up being counterproductive. Policies designed to further America’s lead could encourage foundational AI model developers worldwide to build on Beijing’s largely open-source model push and unintentionally catalyse China’s rise in AI, while also forcing more cooperation across other jurisdictions such as the EU or Japan. While Trump’s increasingly transactional approach has now been legitimised as state policy, its willingness to treat AI as a new source of extraordinary leverage comes with pitfalls in the long term.

So, how fickle is this new US regulatory stance on AI? A departure from its traditional light-touch regulatory strategy, the new American policy seems to be adjusting and improvising, quite like a saxophone player in a jazz quartet, to the arrival of increasingly powerful models with national-security implications. On June 12, three days after Claude Fable 5 was launched, the Trump administration directed Anthropic to exclude foreigners from accessing its latest and most capable frontier AI model. On Wednesday, after an over two-week ban, the US government allowed Anthropic to restore customer access.

Despite this, the........

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