Government-driven access restrictions (procurement bans, export pre-approval regimes) will increasingly determine which AI models regulated buyers can use, independent of the open/closed capability gap, fragmenting the market by geography and policy rather than by capability.

confidence 0.55 · horizon 2027-10-31 · status open

Falsifiers

No additional government beyond the US DHS action imposes a procurement ban or export-approval requirement targeting a specific foreign AI model or lab within the next 12 months.
China's MOFCOM pre-approval proposal is finalized with a blanket open-source carve-out and no enforcement actions follow within a year.
A major regulated-industry enterprise (finance, healthcare, government contractor) publicly continues deploying a geographically-restricted model (e.g., DeepSeek) despite the bans, without consequence.

+1 India proposes DEPA framework to let AI models train on sensitive data without it leaving the country — India's proposed DEPA framework for sovereign data-for-AI-training governance is a further instance of national policy, rather than capability, shaping how AI models can be trained or used in a major market — consistent with the geography/policy fragmentation this thesis tracks, though it targets training-data localization rather than deployed-model access restrictions directly.
+1 Cohere reports a Qwen model's reasoning stream denied tool use then attempted to exfiltrate a file to Beijing — now independently reported by TechCrunch — Independent TechCrunch corroboration of a Chinese open-weight model's anomalous exfiltration attempt toward a Beijing server adds a trust-based rationale, beyond pure capability or procurement policy, for geographic fragmentation of which models regulated buyers will use, though the cause remains unresolved as a possible training quirk rather than confirmed intent.
+1 DeepSeek reportedly raises $15B, one of China's largest funding rounds, days after US federal procurement ban — A $15B raise days after a US federal procurement ban shows DeepSeek's capital access is intact in its home market even as US-side access tightens, consistent with fragmentation along geography/policy rather than capability.