Export-Controls

The engineer commissioning a US rare earth separation line has the ore, the financing, and the building. What he does not have is the trained operators a separation facility requires on shift to run the solvent-extraction circuits. The country contains fewer than 100 such specialists in total. The binding constraint policy discourse names — mines, money, megawatts — is not the constraint he faces. He is waiting for a labor pool that does not exist. ...

Export Controls Created the Efficiency They Feared Most A machine learning engineer in Jakarta downloads Qwen 3.5 — Alibaba’s open-source AI model — onto a MacBook. No license application. No US approval. No cloud subscription. The model runs locally, scores 81.7% on graduate-level reasoning benchmarks, and costs her nothing. She is a downstream beneficiary of the very efficiency gains that US export controls inadvertently accelerated — and her access was never the scenario policymakers modeled. ...