Country-based AI controls are failing. The spyware industry demonstrates why.
The article argues that US efforts to control adversary access to frontier AI models through country-based restrictions are failing, drawing parallels to the spyware industry's long-standing verification challenges. It highlights recent events including the World AI Conference in Shanghai, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's announcement of an investigation into Chinese IP theft, and Anthropic's brief suspension of Fable and Mythos models. The piece identifies two key enforcement problems: subsidiary routing, where restricted Chinese parent companies (like Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent) legally access AI services through Singapore-based subsidiaries, and distillation, where rival models are trained on frontier model outputs (exemplified by Moonshot AI's Kimi K3). The article notes that Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic have built their own safeguards with varying effectiveness, but concludes that current export control laws fail to address these loopholes, urging policymakers to learn from spyware industry verification methods.
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