Lots of parallels to the crypto wars / export controls on cryptography.
The main difference here is that cryptography didn't require significant compute hardware, which is the perfect place to also apply export controls (and they have).
We could smuggle PGP source code on paper / DeCSS source code on t-shirts. That ain't gonna happen with the hardware needed for frontier models.
The parallels to comic sans are so obvious that first thing I did in the article is Ctrl-F "comic", because my first thought was: how much further has this taken the concept.
The distribution of mentions of Comic Sans in the article is revealing: there are a bunch of mentions at around the 30% mark (in which they acknowledge the obvious heritage), and then barely after that. This font really does go further. Beautiful!
The main difference here is that cryptography didn't require significant compute hardware, which is the perfect place to also apply export controls (and they have).
We could smuggle PGP source code on paper / DeCSS source code on t-shirts. That ain't gonna happen with the hardware needed for frontier models.