Gating frontier AI by nationality is such a dumb move

I get why the U.S. government is nervous about the newest OpenAI and Anthropic models. Nobody wants frontier AI being used for cyberattacks, weapons research, or whatever other nightmare scenario people are worried about. But the recent push toward “trusted U.S. users first” and blocking or delaying access for everyone else feels… not very realistic? Once a model is public enough to be sold through an API, access is not a clean on/off switch. People who really want it will find ways around it: shell companies, contractors, subsidiaries, employees in approved orgs, shared accounts, proxy access, whatever. You can add friction, sure. But I don’t see how you make “foreigners can’t use this” actually hold at global scale. And the downside seems pretty obvious. Legit researchers, startups, security teams, and even allies get pushed away from the frontier. Meanwhile, China and others get an even stronger reason to build their own stack faster and stop depending on U.S. models at all. So what’s the actual endgame here? Is the idea to buy a few months? Prevent model weights from leaking? Slow down cyber misuse? Force more safety testing? Those are all different goals, and “let the government decide who gets access” feels like a pretty blunt tool for all of them. I’m not saying there should be no regulation. I just don’t understand how a model can be semi-public, commercially useful, and geopolitically gated in a way that actually works. Maybe I’m missing something, but this feels less like a long-term security strategy and more like security theater that annoys everyone except the people it’s supposed to stop.