America should not imprison frontier AI Fable is free. But the technology desperately needs better regulations July 2nd 2026 New rules often come out of disasters. America’s Federal Reserve was founded following the Panic of 1907, when stock prices fell by half. Pressure from muckrakers such as Upton Sinclair brought about the Food and Drug Administration. The Securities and Exchange Commission was founded during the Great Depression. Artificial intelligence has not yet caused a calamity, but it might. Models like Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol are extraordinarily good hackers and could become capable advisers to bioterrorists. Understandably, the Trump administration is trying to regulate the technology before catastrophe strikes. It is working with AI companies on
voluntary standards that could soon be released. Unfortunately, its efforts so far have been a mess. Anthropic was its first victim, slapped with export controls in mid-June after the release of Fable, a guardrailed version of Mythos. That came not long after a row between the company and the Pentagon. Fears of a grudge were allayed when the administration appeared to compel OpenAI to limit access to its Sol model. Then, on June 30th, the Commerce Department abruptly lifted the ban on Fable after Anthropic fiddled with its safety protections. Throughout, the government has seemed to make up rules on the fly. Its decisions have also had an unpleasant nationalistic tinge. At first it restricted Fable only for non-Americans; Anthropic decided that a wholesale block was the only way to comply. It looks as if the administration pulled the only lever available, knowing that it was a de facto ban. But throughout the past month’s brouhaha, the government has made clear that Americans’ AI access takes precedence over foreigners’. Now that America has started licensing AI releases, it is unlikely to stop. But regulating frontier AI is tricky. China’s top models are only months behind America’s, and most are open-weight, meaning anyone can run or tinker with them. One recent release, GLM 5.2 from Z.ai, already matches the best of the last generation of American models. Chinese labs may take longer to catch up with Mythos, since they have fewer chips and American labs are cracking down on distillation, when competitors use the outputs of the best models to train their own. But that buys months, or a year at most. America could ban Chinese open-weight models and punish foreigners who use them. But even if it managed to enforce its ban, a vast home market would keep China’s model-makers going. So a permanent block is unworkable. It is also undesirable. Many American AI firms and researchers rely on Chinese models, which are cheap and malleable. The intelligence that makes new models dangerous also makes them tremendously useful. Worries about China aside, a gulf between publicly available and restricted models is a problem. Societies adapt to AI best when improvements arrive gradually, not in a great lurch. Imagine the mess if regulators bottled up several generations of Mythos-style advances.
The few with access would acquire great power. The sudden jump in capability whenever the models did get released would unleash chaos. How then can models like Mythos and Sol be safely set free? The emerging norm provides for an evaluation period and a staggered release to trusted institutions. That is a good start, but it needs formalising. Some choices, such as how much risk to tolerate, belong to elected leaders. But politicians should not be micromanaging the process or horse-trading with AI companies, as they do today. Once those goals are set, politicians should stand back. Evaluating a model is a technical problem. Governments have some expertise, for example in America’s Centre for AI Standards and Innovation or Britain’s AI Security Institute (AISI). But the private sector has more. The finance and electric- power industries offer structures where oversight is carried out by industry bodies, overseen by government. Something similar might help amalgamate knowledge from the AI labs, research groups and foreign bodies such as AISI. Ideally, America would work with its allies on AI regulation. Alas, it is hard to imagine Donald Trump giving up the immense sovereign power that stems from control of frontier models. Locking others out of AI is not in America’s economic or strategic interest, but neither were indiscriminate tariffs or threats to Greenland. So other countries must build leverage with their own AI sectors and regulations, and find fail-safes for American export controls. They could, for instance, ensure that businesses can easily switch to non-American models that run on non-American data centres. It is far wiser to depend on America than on China, but they would be mad to ignore the risks. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2026/07/02/america-should-not-imprison-frontier- ai
Turkey and Israel should trade energy, not insults Both have much to gain from being less belligerent July 2nd 2026 A minister in Turkey has spoken of one day “ruling” Jerusalem. Israeli officials have warned darkly that Turkey is “the new Iran”. Listen to the volleys of invective flying in both directions, and you might think that two of the Middle East’s pivotal powers are heading for conflict. The tension is real. Turkey, a mostly Muslim country, fumes over Israel’s ill- treatment of Palestinians. Israel accuses Turkey of harbouring leaders of Hamas, the Islamist group that attacked Israel on October 7th 2023. Each thinks the other threatens its borders. Israel has fostered ties with Kurds, including some that Turkey’s government, ever wary of Kurdish nationalism, sees as enemies. Turkey has close relations with the ex-jihadists
now ruling Syria, who appear to be reformed but who Israel fears could one day prove hostile to the Jewish state. Israel’s prime minister and Turkey’s president often swap ferocious insults. Binyamin Netanyahu recently called Recep Tayyip Erdogan an “antisemitic dictator” who is “committing genocide against the Kurds”. Then again, Mr Erdogan has likened the Israeli leader to Hitler, saying Israel is a chaos factory fuelled “by blood and tears”. Such rhetoric gets attention abroad, but it is mostly intended for domestic ears. Mr Netanyahu faces a tough election in the autumn, and fears that he will lose office having been cast as the man who failed his people on October 7th. Mr Erdogan may lean on Turkey’s parliament to call an election next year. Each loves to pose as a doughty defender of the nation against external threats. Each is thus a handy foil for the other. It does not have to be this way. Both countries are allies of America, which is, belatedly, trying to discourage the verbal salvoes. Not long ago, the armed forces of Israel and Turkey were able to co-operate. In the recent past it was possible to imagine healthy economic ties, too. Their respective industrial and technological strengths and physical proximity should have made that straightforward. Given the right politics, how might a better relationship be fostered again? Energy may be the key, despite an embargo Mr Erdogan’s government imposed on trade with Israel in 2024. Much of the oil Israel imports is pumped in Azerbaijan or the Kurdish region of Iraq, and then transported by pipeline through Turkey or shipped through Ceyhan, a Turkish port. More should follow. Given Iran’s ability to disrupt the flow of hydrocarbons through the Strait of Hormuz, other countries should develop alternative sources and supply routes. One rich possibility is gas in the eastern Mediterranean. Exploration there by Israel is already advanced. It should be open to joint projects with Turkey and other littoral states to develop subsea gasfields and export the energy they find there. When Israel and Turkey worked together more closely, plans were drawn up for a pipeline to connect the eastern Mediterranean gasfields to Turkey’s
southern ports. A related project would be to forge a regional network of pipelines to bring oil and gas from afar more easily to market. Israel and Turkey should both aspire to be a part of this network linking Gulf producers and others to buyers in Europe and Asia. It is still not clear when, or even if, the Strait of Hormuz will be fully reopened to tanker traffic, at least without users paying fees to Iran (and perhaps Oman). If Israel and Turkey want to reduce their vulnerability to the regional rogue, and maybe make a large heap of money in the process, they should trade fewer barbs and more barrels. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2026/07/02/turkey-and-israel-should-trade- energy-not-insults
Venezuela’s earthquakes are partly America’s problem The government’s response has been dire. Its patron has a duty to help July 2nd 2026 THE earthquakes that struck Venezuela on June 24th killed more than 2,000 people, by the official count. Many more are listed as missing, and the UN has ordered 10,000 body bags. But the true toll will probably never be known. After decades of brutal kleptocracy, Venezuela is no longer the kind of country where bodies are properly counted. The regime’s response to the disaster has been dismal. In La Guaira, the worst-hit state, survivors say no official help came in the first 48 hours—the crucial period when there is the best chance that people trapped under fallen buildings might still be breathing. Families were left to scrabble for their loved ones in heaps of dust and broken concrete. Heavy machinery for