Anthropic built its most capable model and decided the world wasn't ready for it. A Chinese lab matched Western frontier performance on zero Nvidia hardware and gave it away under MIT license. Three rivals formed an unprecedented alliance to stop model copying. In a single day, the industry crossed a threshold: the models are now too powerful for their builders to ship freely, but too distributed to contain. For anyone building on top of these platforms, the question is no longer 'when will models be good enough?' — it's which capabilities your provider will actually let you use.