There’s a particular kind of own goal where you not only miss the net, you kick the ball directly to the opposition striker. Washington’s AI export controls are shaping up to be one of those.

The short version: Anthropic and others pushed for export restrictions on frontier AI models, ostensibly for safety reasons. Within weeks, labs in Tokyo and Beijing were shipping products with a pitch they could not have written better themselves. Sovereign AI. No export control risk. Your access won’t vanish overnight because someone in Washington had a bad morning. That wasn’t a compelling sales angle before the ban. The ban made it one.

Something caught my eye this week that had me nodding along like a bobblehead on a bumpy tram ride. France has announced a formal plan to migrate its government desktops away from Windows and over to Linux. Not a pilot program. Not a feasibility study. An actual directive, with ministries required to present their migration plans by autumn 2026. This is real, and it’s a bigger deal than most people realise.

So there I was, scrolling through the news over breakfast this morning, and the headline practically leapt off the screen: petrol prices rising again, and the Albanese government being upfront that even the Iran-US ceasefire — such as it is — won’t be bringing relief at the bowser anytime soon. Can’t say I’m shocked, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

And honestly, calling it a “ceasefire” feels generous. From what’s been reported, Israel was bombing Lebanon within hours of the announcement, Iran was still firing missiles at Gulf states, and now apparently there’s a dispute over whether the ten-point terms Iran published were even the terms that were actually agreed to. One commenter online put it bluntly: “We don’t know what the actual terms of the ceasefire were. Hell, I’m not sure the parties themselves know what they agreed to.” Which is a pretty grim summary of the situation, but probably accurate.

I’ve been following the Hormuz situation pretty closely over the past few weeks, and honestly, the more I read about it, the more I find myself thinking about leadership — specifically what good leadership actually looks like when things get genuinely difficult.

The news that Japan is going to maintain normal fuel supply to Australia, and that Prime Minister Takaichi is potentially visiting, is quietly significant. It doesn’t have the drama of a military announcement or the viral punch of a political brawl, but it matters. A lot. And the way it came together — through methodical diplomatic legwork with Japan, South Korea, and Singapore — is the kind of thing that rarely gets the credit it deserves because it doesn’t make for exciting television.

Right, so I’ve been down a bit of a rabbit hole this week, and honestly I’m still not entirely sure how to process what I’ve seen.

Chinese state media has released a second episode of their AI-generated animated series about the Iran conflict. Yes, you read that correctly. State-produced. AI-generated. Animated. War coverage. It’s a sentence I genuinely never expected to type, and yet here we are in 2025 where apparently this is just… a thing that exists now.

There’s a conversation happening in the AI community right now that’s making me increasingly uncomfortable, and it’s got nothing to do with whether machines will eventually take over the world. It’s about nationalism, paranoia, and how we’re letting geopolitics strangle technological progress.

Picture this: you’re working with clients who need AI solutions that are completely air-gapped—no cloud services, no data leakage, ever. National security type stuff. Your only option is open-weight models running in closed environments. Sounds straightforward enough, right? Except there’s a catch: your clients won’t touch Chinese models with a ten-foot pole. “National security risk,” they say, as if the model weights contain some sort of digital time bomb waiting to unleash chaos.

There’s something quietly significant happening in France right now that probably won’t make much noise outside tech circles, but it’s worth paying attention to. The French government is rolling out their own video conferencing platform, essentially ditching Zoom and Microsoft Teams in favour of a homegrown solution they’re calling “Visio” (yes, the same name as Microsoft’s diagramming tool, which is either brilliantly cheeky or a massive oversight depending on your perspective).

The tech world loves a good release date drama, and DeepSeek’s decision to delay their R2 model has certainly given us one. But scrolling through the reactions online, I’m struck by something refreshing – the overwhelming support for taking the time to get it right.

It’s fascinating to watch how different communities respond to delays. When a major gaming studio pushes back a release, the internet explodes with outrage. When Apple delays a product launch, shares tumble. But here we have DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, delaying what would presumably be their next flagship model, and the response from users is essentially “let them cook.”