New Delhi, June 16 -- Four years ago, US semiconductor export controls sought to deny rivals such as China the means to build advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

Last week's curbs placed by America on access to Anthropic's frontier models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by foreign nationals, including researchers at American labs, suggests that AI models themselves are now being treated as strategic assets.

If the first phase of US policy intervention in the AI race was about control of the chips that power advances, the next stage is about controlling who gets to use that intelligence. The contest, in other words, is moving up the stack-from chips to infrastructure and now to AI itself.

This development introduces a paradox at the hea...