On June 12, the U.S. government directed Anthropic to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, inside or outside the United States. The order forced the company to disable both models worldwide. Days later, Beijing-based Zhipu rolled out GLM-5.2, a near-frontier, open-weight system that users could download and run locally.

Its Hong Kong-listed shares surged as much as 48%. Chinese state media and government-linked commentators seized on the contrast, portraying Washington as restricting access while Beijing championed openness. The episode exposed a strategic vulnerability. We tend to imagine the U.S.-China AI race as a contest of chips, compute, and benchmarks. But it is equally a contest over who supplies the world’s digital infrastructure — and whose rules come with it.