In From Monopoly to Age of Empires1, we described a world fragmenting into competing technological and economic blocs. Technology, we argued, would not end scarcity. It would transform it: intelligence becomes abundant, while the power, chips and materials behind it become the things nations compete for.
For eighteen days in June, that argument became literal: access to one of the world's most capable AI systems was effectively export-controlled. For emerging market investors, the implication is clear: AI is changing the basis of competitive advantage, shifting it towards countries and companies that control scarce inputs, infrastructure and industrial capabilities, and away from those whose edge has depended primarily on exporting low-cost labour. This follow-up examines what that shift means for emerging markets: who owns the inputs required to manufacture intelligence, and who exports the work AI is learning to perform.
Eighteen days in June
On 12 June, a US government export-control directive required Anthropic to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals, including the company's own employees. Because Anthropic could not verify nationality in real time, it suspended both models for all users. Eighteen days later the controls were lifted: Fable 5 returned globally, while Mythos 5 initially returned only to approved US organisations. These actions had little precedent in cloud software but were entirely familiar in the worlds of uranium enrichment, encryption and advanced weaponry.
A product that looked like cloud software was handled like a geostrategic material. That is the regime change we described in our first paper.
In the Monopoly world, technology was a product, sold to anyone willing to pay. In the Age of Empires world, decisive technologies become instruments of leverage – rationed, licensed, traded for allegiance – and access to the frontier is secured with power, semiconductors, capital and, critically, political alignment. Semiconductors crossed the line in 2022; in June, frontier intelligence appeared to cross it too. For governments relying on frontier models they cannot operate independently, June made the dependency explicit: access can be conditioned, restricted or withdrawn.
Three things have changed
Our first paper argued that technology would accelerate the new regime. The June episode shows how AI is doing so in three ways.
1. Usable intelligence has become a manufactured good
Traditional software is written once and replicated at near-zero marginal cost. Intelligence is different. It must be produced continually from energy, compute, data and capital – and its critical inputs increasingly sit in the physical world.
The four largest hyperscalers could invest over $700 billion in 2026, while performance-adjusted inference costs have fallen by well over a hundredfold in roughly two years. Unit prices are collapsing even as required investment surges. That tension defines the AI era: usable intelligence gets cheaper while the capital base required to produce it climbs into the trillions. Gavin Baker of Atreides has framed the build-out as a question of "watts and wafers": if AI eats the world, silicon eats the world too.2
This is not the economics of software. AI may feel asset-light to the user, but it is asset-heavy for the system – an industry governed by capacity cycles, cost curves, supply-chain security and state involvement.
The interfaces may be branded by American platforms, but much of the system that manufactures intelligence runs through Asia: logic in Taiwan, memory in Korea, substrates, packaging and equipment across Taiwan and Japan, and power and thermal systems across the region. In the Monopoly era, the world's most profitable companies converted software scale into cash flow. In the Age of Empires era, those cash flows are being redirected into Asian industrial capacity to secure intelligence's scarce inputs.
1 Columbia Threadneedle Investments, 23 April 2026
2 Atreides Management, 20 May 2026
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