Frontier Technologies and GeOpolitics

Essays on frontier technologies and their role in geopolitics, with a focus on Europe and China

Longer pieces by Chloé Codeville on Europe-China technology policy, export controls, AI strategy and digital money.
Published on Medium, collected here.

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Aerial view of the Shanghai skyline across the Huangpu River, overlaid with a network of connected points

Published on Medium

WAIC Debrief · No. 2

Debrief 2 — Four Weeks That Complicated the Argument

Four weeks after this dissertation went in, China reportedly started drafting controls on its own AI model weights. The same move it's spent years calling illegitimate when Washington does it. This debrief tracks what that does to the thesis: what it confirms, and what it breaks.

14 August 2026
WAIC Debrief · No. 1

Debrief 1 — WAIC 2026: The Week Global AI Governance Split in Two

The most consequential thing that happened at this year’s World Artificial Intelligence Conference happened the day before it opened, and it was not a model release.

13 August 2026
Openness Under Constraint · 6 of 6

Coordination and Its Discontents

Mearsheimer’s point generalises: capability alone does not produce lasting influence. Converting capability into influence requires coordination, and coordination requires institutions.

11 August 2026
Openness Under Constraint · 5 of 6

The Ecosystem Game: Where AI Power Actually Accumulates

There is a version of the AI competition that is easy to report on. It has benchmarks, release dates, and a leaderboard that reshuffles every few months.

10 August 2026
Openness Under Constraint · 4 of 6

Open, But Not Free: The Politics of Strategic Permissiveness

The infrastructure that feels most neutral is usually the infrastructure whose politics have been most successfully naturalised.

09 August 2026
Openness Under Constraint · 3 of 6

Efficiency Became a Geopolitical Strategy

Efficiency made models deployable. Deployability made openness strategically valuable. Openness made diffusion possible.

08 August 2026
Openness Under Constraint · 2 of 6

The Birdcage: Rereading China’s Tech Crackdown

The cage is not decorative. Nor is the room inside it. Both are real, and the arrangement only makes sense if you hold both facts simultaneously.

07 August 2026
Openness Under Constraint · 1 of 6

The Chokepoint: What America Was Actually Trying to Do

Control the bottleneck, and you control who gets to attempt frontier AI at all. That was the theory of the case.

06 August 2026
Climate & trade

Climate Change, Consumption, and the Story We Don’t Like to Tell

The problem isn’t that production-based accounting is wrong. It’s that it’s incomplete. When we focus only on where emissions happen, we erase the role of demand.

18 January 2026
Digital money · Part 2

Stablecoins, CBDCs, and the Quiet Battle Over Digital Money (Part 2)

Money is not valuable by nature. It works because it is trusted, and that trust rests, explicitly or not, on collateral.

05 January 2026
Digital money · Part 1

Stablecoins, CBDCs, and the Quiet Battle Over Digital Money (Part 1)

A stablecoin is a digital token designed to keep a stable value, usually by being pegged to a real-world currency like the U.S. dollar.

01 January 2026
China · AI strategy

Open Source as Infrastructure: How China’s AI Strategy Travels Beyond Its Borders

In recent Chinese policy documents, open source is no longer framed as a trade-off between openness and control. It is framed as a way to scale.

30 December 2025
China · AI policy

What China’s Official AI Discourse Reveals About Its Priorities

The key takeaway lies less in current AI capabilities than in how the Chinese state conceptualizes technological power, and how that conception shapes policy choices over time.

27 December 2025

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