The most powerful AI model in general release this week requires government approval to access.

OpenAI launched Sol, Terra, and Luna (restricted to around 20 companies). That's not a GTM decision. That's a policy one.

Before Fable and this one, I assumed frontier AI access was fundamentally a commercial problem. Pay enough, move fast enough, you reach the frontier.

That assumption changed last weeks.

At the same time: Microsoft shipped MAI-Code-1-Flash into GitHub Copilot, not routed through OpenAI. JetBrains made Codex the default agent in its IDE. GitHub Desktop went Copilot-native.

Every major coding surface made a model allegiance decision in seven days.

Here's what that means in practice: the layer controlling which model reaches your developers is becoming a real battleground. Which IDE your org standard ...