There is a particular strangeness in being courted to embrace a product you have just been forbidden to touch. That was the position of the world’s richest democracies at Évian this week: hosts to a summit whose star guests were the men who build frontier artificial intelligence, and whose most powerful systems had been pulled offline in their faces days before. Power, the chancelleries keep telling us, has gone multipolar. What happened in France suggests the truth is stranger, and more useful, than that tired word allows.

When the Group of Seven gathered in Évian-les-Bains on 17 June, the headline was not a head of state but a working lunch. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind and Arthur Mensch of Mistral sat among a dozen technology chiefs and the leaders of the G7. Days earlier, Washington had imposed export controls on Anthropic’s most advanced models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, and the company had switched them off worldwide to comply. The stated concern was security: Mythos has shown an unusual facility for finding and exploiting flaws in software, the sort of capability far more dangerous in the wrong hands than valuable in the right ones. The staging implied a coronation of American technological primacy. The substance implied........

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