The AI Decoupling: From US Monopoly to Sovereign Zones

US restrictions on frontier AI access backfired catastrophically: instead of maintaining American dominance, they forced rapid decoupling into independent regional stacks, with DeepSeek's breakthrough proving that isolation accelerates technological independence rather than preventing it. This fragmenting landscape—where the US, Europe, and Asia now run separate ecosystems with incompatible governance and hardware—marks the permanent end of unified global AI infrastructure and reshapes how innovation flows worldwide.