The world may soon be fracturing into artificial intelligence “haves” and “have-nots.” Last week, reports emerged that the White House had asked Anthropic and OpenAI to withhold early access to their latest systems from the British government’s AI Security Institute, the world leader in testing frontier models. Alarmed British officials had already begun to assess the economic and security impacts from losing access to the latest models.

They are right to worry. The rest of the world should be even more concerned. If Washington is prepared to restrict access for its closest intelligence partner, no country can count on an untrammeled supply of U.S. AI indefinitely.

The world may soon be fracturing into artificial intelligence “haves” and “have-nots.” Last week, reports emerged that the White House had asked Anthropic and OpenAI to withhold early access to their latest systems from the British government’s AI Security Institute, the world leader in testing frontier models. Alarmed British officials had already begun to assess the economic and security impacts from losing access to the latest models.

They are right to worry. The rest of the world should be even more concerned. If Washington is prepared to restrict access for its closest intelligence partner, no country can count on an untrammeled supply of U.S. AI indefinitely.

Indeed, the British episode is the latest in a growing list of warning signs for middle powers. When Anthropic launched its powerful Mythos cybersecurity model in the spring, it gave access first to a select group of handpicked companies. Every one of the launch partners was American. In June, in an effort to address a domestic security question, the Trump administration used sweeping export control authorities to bar any foreign national, anywhere in the world, from accessing Anthropic’s most advanced models. The order was lifted weeks later, after the company agreed to work with the government on standards for future releases, but for U.S. allies, the lesson was clear: Their access to frontier AI depends on the whims of the U.S. government.

But foreign states are not without leverage of their own. To sustain the stock market rally and the trajectory of AI progress—among the Trump administration’s central political priorities—the AI industry needs to keep building data centers. In the United States, that is getting increasingly difficult: Americans dislike AI and the firms that build it; they dislike large, noisy, energy-hungry construction projects; and they dislike shadowy corporations paying hush money to advance such projects.

That opens the door to what might be called a grand compute bargain. Allied democracies can offer something the U.S. AI industry desperately needs: data center sites with reliable power, predictable governance, and existing security relationships. In return, they can extract something they desperately need: guaranteed access to frontier AI systems. It’s a clean quid pro quo: U.S. allies help solve the domestic data center shortfall, and the United States gives its allies a slice of its AI industry in return.

The scale of the U.S. data center........

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