I think the most interesting question here is: does UK AISI's loss of access portend limited commercial model access for non-US customers? Could European pharma firms be withheld BioMythos access while US firms develop next-gen drugs? I think yes. Commercial frontier access is very costly to sustain; first for misuse and distillation concerns, eventually also for shortages in inference compute. The question is who makes the cut. The hope was that US allies - in particular the UK - could just be maximally inoffensive and skirt through: including them isn't very costly, they still provide some revenue, so why not? UK AISI's exclusion might be one early indication that the pure 'please don't hurt us' view of retaining access was a bit too optimistic. UK AISI is arguably the most inoffensive foreign actor to give access to: they're clearly useful to labs, their security is pretty good (though recent security incidents didn't look great), they are part of the most US-aligned government apparatus, and they have a long-standing relationship. And yet they still didn't make the cut this time: especially with the current admin, there's always a cost to expanding international access, and as models get more powerful, that cost increases - past the threshold of 'why not'. I'd expect a similar dynamic to eventually apply to middle powers' industries trying and failing to get access to actual frontier models that could accelerate their R&D, with obvious compounding consequences to their competitiveness. Being inoffensive is not enough to get into limited access programs: the labs will have so little inference supply and so much demand that they simply don't need a lot of inoffensive frontier buyers outside the US. But there's always a cost to expanding into new markets - America-first scrutiny, security concerns, regulatory complications, and so on. Soon, there might simply be no actual incentive to incur that cost and make the frontier available to international buyers. That's the limit of the inoffensiveness approach. Fundamentally, 'why not give these guys access, too' is a soft criterion for eligibility, but not a hard criterion for priority at all. That's where AI is different to most other tech, especially software: the unit economics simply don't really incentivise inference-constrained developers to find ways to enable widespread access. So middle powers and their economies will need a better carrot that incentivises frontier model provision. I think their best bet is compute-for-access deals in the short term, deep exclusive industrial integration in the long term. Labs want more compute fast; middle powers can capitalise and onshore limited chip allocations by offering favourable compute deals (read: fast time to power). Part of these deal would be to compel developers to provide priority (frontier) access to their host countries; maybe at commercial parity with the US, maybe even at parity with limited-access programs. That deal setup changes the choice architecture for labs: they can no longer choose between selling the same token of Mythos 5.1 to US or foreign buyers; they can only choose between selling the token to foreign buyers or not getting to produce the token in their offshore datacenter at all. Compute-for-access is particularly nice because it's a stick as well as a carrot: if you try to renege on the deal at some point in the future, you lose access to the datacenter as well. Of course host countries will still need to do their best on security alignment; at some point, the security risks of offshore frontier hosting become too large for even compute incentives to matter, and labs or USG will decide to bear the cost. The point is changing the incentives: if there is some reason for the labs to want to provide access, they'll be more motivated to collaborate on figuring out a security alignment that satisfies their and USG's standards and makes frontier access possible again.