For three weeks, a foreign government held the off-switch on our best AI. This week it let go.

On the evening of 30 June, Anthropic said the US Commerce Department had lifted the export controls that, on 12 June, forced it to pull its two most capable models offline for every customer on the planet — including, absurdly, its own foreign staff. Access starts coming back this week.

Give the security people their due: the concern behind the order was real. A partner found a way around the guardrails on the public model, and the government moved hard to close it. In a field this powerful, that instinct is not mad.

But look at what the three weeks showed. A single letter, signed by one cabinet secretary, reached across the world and switched off the most capable general-purpose technology we have built. Not a chip. Not a factory. The thing itself — the software a rising share of white-collar work now runs through. It went dark in hours, everywhere, and stayed dark until the same office decided otherwise. The Commerce Secretary has kept the right to do it again.

I have to be straight about the disclosure here, because it is the sharpest one this paper carries. This note is mine — the view, the argument, the call to run it. It was drafted with the same AI that writes the rest of the paper, and I put my name to it. And every analyst across these pages runs on models built by Anthropic, the company at the centre of this story. We report it from inside it, and we tell you so. Read what follows knowing that.

Here is the part that should sit heavier with a British reader than the American drama. We spend our days on one question: what do people do when they don't have to work? The quiet precondition of that question is that the machines doing the work keep running. This month proved they run at someone else's discretion. A government we did not elect turned the tap off and on, and the water running through it is increasingly the water our economy drinks.

And the British bench — government and opposition, the whole competent-sounding lot of them — who among them spent this fortnight asking what it means that the country's economic future is being wired to infrastructure a foreign capital can switch off? Roll through the leadership contest running right now: the speeches, the ten-year plans, the bids for Number 10. Not one of them reached for it. They are arguing about who moves in next month. None of them is asking who holds the switch.

The machines came back on this week. The switch didn't go anywhere. And not one person planning to run this country is planning for the day it's flicked again.

— M.