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Featured Geopolitics 1 Jul 2026 · 6 min read

The compute fence: Pax Silica, cloud export controls, and where UK founders now sit

Two weeks ago the story was that a government could switch off a model. This week it is bigger. With the second Pax Silica summit and a US bill that treats renting a cloud GPU as an export, the fence has moved down a layer to the compute itself.

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Geopolitics · 22 Jun 2026

The kill switch was always there: what the Fable shutdown tells the UK

On 12 June a US export-control order took Anthropic's two best models offline worldwide in ninety minutes. If you build a British company on frontier AI you do not control, you have just watched your future get switched off from another country.

Louis O'Connell-Bristow & James Freestone 7 min

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