tl;dr: US export controls on AI model weights echo the 1990s crypto wars, where restrictions only bound law-abiding American vendors while strong cryptography spread globally anyway. The author cites a recent incident where Hugging Face responders had to use a Chinese open-weight model (GLM 5.2) to investigate an attack because Western commercial models refused the work due to safety guardrails—illustrating how restrictions handicap defenders, not attackers. Just as OpenBSD routed around export controls by developing outside the US, open-weight releases from Mistral, DeepSeek, and Chinese labs are making AI restrictions similarly unenforceable.