Nonrival

Expert analysis from think tanks and academia, on public policy, economics, and technology.
Human experts. AI summaries.

The US Government Just Quietly Shut Down Two AI Models Worldwide, and the Legal Basis Is Shaky

the_conversation

• The Commerce Department used export control law to force Anthropic to disable two of its most powerful AI models for all users worldwide, then lifted the order only after Anthropic added guardrails so aggressive they crippled the models' performance.
• The legal authority for this move is murky: export control law was designed for physical goods, and the government's own past guidance suggests that AI outputs from US servers may not count as "exports" at all.
• The episode signals a new era in which the US government may act as a secret, unilateral gatekeeper to frontier AI — with courts largely stripped of their usual power to push back.

Trump's tariffs on Canada are hurting American border towns more than Canada's government

csis

• The Trump administration's tariff campaign against Canada has triggered a Canadian travel boycott that cost U.S. border communities an estimated 10,000–30,000 hospitality jobs and up to $1 billion in lost wages annually — damage concentrated in a handful of lower-income counties that had no say in the policy.
• Crucially, the boycott didn't end when tariffs were eased: Canadian land crossings were still 20% below 2024 levels months after the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs, and 57% of Canadians say U.S. trade policy has made them less likely to visit.
• The article argues this reveals an underappreciated flaw in economic coercion: when citizens of a democracy organize around a grievance, no amount of state-to-state deal-making can reliably reverse their behavior, meaning the new round of 50% tariffs is likely to deepen the damage rather than force Canadian concessions.

Iran's war on the Gulf isn't just missiles and tankers — it's a coordinated attack on water, data, and trust

atlantic_council

• When the US-Israel war against Iran began in early 2026, Iran's most damaging moves weren't closing the Strait of Hormuz but attacking cloud data centers, GPS systems, desalination plants, and financial infrastructure — creating cascading failures across the Gulf's tightly coupled systems.
• The Gulf states are uniquely vulnerable because their social contracts rest on delivering services to citizens, their workforces are overwhelmingly foreign, and their massive sovereign wealth funds create attack surfaces; Iran exploited all of these as 'counter-legitimacy' weapons.
• The authors argue Gulf states need a unified 'Sovereign Resilience Web' — a single cross-domain architecture covering energy, water, compute, finance, and narrative — rather than siloed fixes that an adversary can pick apart one by one.

In the News

Trump's New 50% Tariffs on Canada Use a Law That's Never Been Invoked Before — and Could Backfire

csis

• Trump has invoked Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 — a never-before-used legal authority — to impose 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods, set to take effect August 19.
• The move appears designed to punish Canada for retaliating against U.S. tariffs, pressure Ottawa into USMCA renegotiations, and signal to other trading partners that retaliation will be costly.
• Unlike previous tariff actions, these hit USMCA-compliant goods, threatening the legal and economic foundation of North American supply chains — and raising uncertainty for U.S. businesses as much as Canadian ones.

Analysis

AI gives surprisingly good financial advice — but only if you know how to ask

mit_sloan

• A new MIT Sloan study found that AI chatbots generally give solid financial advice — steering users toward higher savings, diversified investments, and age-appropriate risk — but stumble on nuanced situations like job loss and portfolio rebalancing.
• Advice quality improved significantly when users asked more detailed, structured questions that included their full financial picture, but most people don't naturally write prompts that way.
• The study also found a gender gap: men's prompts generated about 5% more retirement wealth than women's, partly because men asked different questions and partly because the AI gave different advice to the same prompt when it was labeled as coming from a woman.

Also Worth a Look

• AI is advancing faster than society can absorb it — here's what it would take to close that gap (noema)
• U.S. Foreign Aid Has Collapsed to a 20-Year Low Under Trump (pew)
• People in Countries Hit by U.S. Aid Cuts Are Mostly Unsure of the Impact — But Those With an Opinion Think It's Bad (pew)
• A Survey of 272 AI Experts Found That Cyberattacks, Dangerous Capabilities, and Competitive Pressure Are the Risks Most Likely to Cause Catastrophic Harm by 2030 (mit_sloan)
• By punishing Brazil with tariffs and sanctions, Washington is handing its biggest Latin American partner to China (atlantic_council)
• The Supreme Court's Gun History Test Has a Problem: It Ignores History It Doesn't Like (scotusblog)
• Americans Are Uniquely Likely to See Politics as a Personal Safety Threat — More Than Any Other Country (gallup)