>If you believe the labs' implied/stated objectives, the end goal is eating all human-driven GDP, and the US is still the largest single-market economy in the world, last I checked.

The US is about a quarter of the global economy, but let's use Microsoft's international revenue share of ~50% as a proxy for tech services. It's ~40% for the S&P 500.

I don't know what share of that would be impacted by export bans, but it would certainly affect ROI. It would hurt the competitiveness of the wider US tech industry and create incentives for moving highly paid work overseas.

>US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP.

It's 12% to 13% but this is distorted by the way in which tech services are counted in export statistics and also by tax avoidance. Just look at Ireland's ridiculous GDP numbers.

If the technology is as powerful as these somehwat fantastical "goals" suggest, the incentive to use it everywhere in the world would be enormous. An export ban wouldn't mean that only the US has the capability. The theory behind current models is well known. It's just a matter of optimising them for specific use cases and using them on an industrial scale.

Most AI researchers are not US citizens either. It's completely obvious that this is the US shooting itself in the foot (if it were to last, which I don't believe).

You raise good points and these would make sense under normal circumstances.

But none of this matters if AI offers infinite leverage and America hoards all the compute and talent.

This explains what I mean in a much better articulated fashion - https://x.com/tszzl/status/2065939227167392147

For other sovereign nations, being a market for American technology products is no longer good enough to get access to American tech. I imagine the relationship would become a lot more one-sided (in favor of America) if the model capability gap keeps increasing.