Over the past few weeks, two governments showed us how they are thinking about AI. Beijing restricted overseas travel for top AI engineers from private firms like DeepSeek and Alibaba. Washington issued a directive to Anthropic to suspend its frontier models for foreign nationals, including its own employees. A commercial product used by millions of people was pulled off the shelf. One country treated software engineers like nuclear physicists, and the other treated a software product like a munition. Both policy actions flow from the same story about what AI is.

National security thinking in the US and China treats AI as a zero-sum arms race or a weapon of mass destruction to be contained through non-proliferation. This narrative has been promoted by........

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