The AI Frontier Leaves 193 Countries Behind
Beware the Permanent Periphery
Most countries will never build frontier AI, yet they face the greatest risks from it. While American labs and workers may be cushioned by domestic policy, the rest of the world could be locked out of access to cutting-edge models, facing economic disruption and strategic irrelevance. The article argues that even safe AI development in the US could create a permanent periphery of nations, as export controls and compute constraints favor American buyers, and zero-sum competition makes the frontier advantage decisive.
AI does not need to come to your country to disrupt your life; it’s enough for it to reach your rivals and adversaries.
- ViktorRay
What I find interesting is that these kinds of arguments are being made now for AI….were similar arguments made back in the 90’s during that era of American tech dominance?
Microsoft had over 98 percent market share at one point. In the 90’s every country in the world including Russia, China, Iran, etc all began using American operating systems developed by Microsoft. Were there arguments back then similar to this piece?
I remember in the 2000’s and 2010’s Richard Stallman would go to counties like India and promote Linux and free software. During those presentations he would mention kind of offhand an argument that Microsoft was engaging in a form of colonialism through its control of Windows. He made the argument somewhat awkwardly in those presentations and the Indian audience received the argument with hesitance. It seemed kind of exaggerated to conflate Microsoft and Windows with colonialism…especially in India.
But that was the 2000’s and 2010’s. Would the argument be received differently now? Were these arguments for Linux considered mainstream by Linux proponents back then or was this some Richard Stallman thing?
And now we have articles like this in the 2020’s basically making the same arguments for AI. People explicitly saying open weights AI can be a hedge against this. China developing their own models.
What I want to know if if there was broad support or even broad arguments for this kind of thing back in the 90’s when Microsoft ruled all computing even in countr […]
- mlsu
Is this “swelling AI tax revenue” and “wealth redistribution” in the room with us right now?
I see wealth redistribution alright. Not in the direction you’re thinking!
- A_D_E_P_T
> Most countries will never have frontier AI. They’re the ones who should be worrying.
Is the author nuts? Every country has access to Kimi K3, which is a true frontier model and legitimately best-in-class for a number of applications. And the best small models -- Qwen and Deepseek V4 Flash -- are also open-weights models.
What does it matter if they weren't developed in France or the UK if the average French or English person can download and run them locally? And if countries need a big AI of their own, for whatever odd reason, they can work out a deal with Moonshot and run audited instances of K3 on their .gov networks.
- seydor
> procuring the necessary compute to train and run advanced models at scale is becoming more and more expensive,
There will certainly be a glut of compute that will follow this extreme scarcity. There is already a flood of chinese models that are almost cutting-edge, and it's almost guaranteed this trend will continue as american AI gets better. There is no hidden magic in USA, it's pretty much doable, and it's being done.
In the end, the frontier models is not where the value will lie. The country that makes the best entrepreneurial rules for AI development will win economically.
Newsflash: the permanent periphery is already a reality for large parts of europe , asia . the world is half american
- podgorniy
And yes world system theory still hold regarless if it's a production of software, cars or nuts and bolts. AI does not change this schema that much (which in my opinion describes the reality way better than "developing/advanced" way of looking at the economies) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory