on 1: the chaebol only really exists as a result of concessions made by the state- the chung-hee government created de-facto sheltered markets for them to operate in (cheap credit, forex access, national champions selected etc)
the labs occupy an interesting position that are kind of the inverse. chaebols function as a result of the state provisioned access to capital which is scarce elsewhere in the local economy. the labs exist in the deepest capital markets humanity has ever built.
this means that the chaebol has incentive to cooperate with the state that the lab does not have. anthropic does not NEED concessions like the chaebol did
the state has much more teeth here to ensure that that sovereignty does not exist. this is why i think nationalization or something close to it (operational licensing scheme) is a foregone conclusion. the korean equilibrium only works because both parties hold each other in check (nation needs growth, chaebol needs capital) vs the ai trade which is a pure check mate.
if you are anthropic at present, your only rational move for any degree of survival is to airlift your entire team into contested hinterlands. AGI is much more likely to be achieved on a native reservation than in the marina.
without a jurisdictional challenge it seems foolish to believe an independent scaled frontier lab exists within 24 months, the state has no incentive to allow it.
on 3: a useful frame I like here (shamelessly stolen from
@coen_armstrong) is modeling this via "drop out year". take the epochai trend line and model out when the cost of a frontier training run crosses 5% of GDP for a given country. this is somewhere around 2037 for US/China but only a few years away for the euros.
if you really only have 2-3 turns left you don't have a ton of choices: there will be some catch up economies that seem to uniquely benefit from ai-induced growth and will springboard (high professional services mix, already relatively offshored, structurally low margin) ie you could imagine the uk growing at 10-12% because of this
but otherwise your best bet is to make concessions to one of the sovereign trainers. there's also a handful of weird economies that own some factor input to training (a lot of the global south is underrated in its productive power capacity) that are going to inflect here.
one could easily imagine mexico being underpriced if a 2026 data-center ban means that frontier compute capabilities are built immediately over the border by american firms and intelligence piped back over.
1. if transacting with superintelligent models outside of the boundaries of a lab becomes difficult due to national security / ai safety concerns and so on, it will mean the Coasean boundaries of the labs will grow to encompass all interesting industry, creating a truly cyberpunk chaebol-capitalism type of future, where the goverment sort of runs them but they also sort of run the government
2. as if there weren't already enough reasons to break up your family, leave your home, the Zone of Thought will increase the attractiveness of migrating to try and have your child on american soil, so they can have 1000x the effective brain power of people born elsewhere
3. every country should probably try and either work towards a new ai security pact with the americans immediately or pool every ounce of national resources to try and create their own ASI labs lest you become complete intellectual, economic, and moral vassals to the united states of america and the output byproducts its ASIs (you wont even get to talk to them). if they succeeded (big if) this will imply a more global race and more risk factors than was previously implied by the formerly only "beating china" narrative -- but many will prefer it to the superintelligent monopolar value lock-in
4. the other alternative is to keep the tension between safety and concentration of power at the top of mind and for the government/labs to push for solving it, rather than instrumentalizing all other values to be subservient to minimizing ai harms. insofar as safety means defending properties of the fragile world we like, the diffuse nature of power is one of those properties
5. historically the americans have been really quite Benign about their global public goods hegemony despite the ability to extract significantly more rents than they do, and it makes it easy for people of all stripes to fight for america rather than under it. we probably don't have to, but i hope america overall works towards export promotion of american models rather than export control