The Token Dependency

The world runs on oil. We know this. Wars have been fought over it, economies have been built around it, entire regions derive their geopolitical power from it. The Gulf states matter because of energy. Russia’s leverage is its pipelines. This is obvious.

What’s less obvious, and what I think people are massively underestimating, is how dependent the world is about to become on tokens.

I’ll start with myself. I’m maybe twenty times more productive with AI than without it. I wasn’t a great coder (I was self-taught), and now I have six or seven AI agents running at any given time, even when I’m on my phone. Even this essay: the first draft started as a voice recording, which an AI transcribed, and then another agent converted into an outline. My entire workflow, from research to writing to building products, runs through AI models.

And I’m just one person. Now imagine this at scale.

We’re moving toward a world of agentic AI: systems that run 24/7, autonomously handling tasks, making API calls, processing data, generating outputs. Companies will depend on these agents the way they currently depend on electricity. Except electricity comes from diverse sources and local grids. AI models come from a handful of companies in two countries.

Think about what that means. If you’re calling these models from an API, your entire operation runs through someone else’s infrastructure. Your productivity, your competitiveness, your economic output: all of it flows through a pipe controlled by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or their Chinese equivalents.

Now think about sanctions.

The U.S. can already sanction countries out of the global financial system. That’s powerful but messy: it requires coordinating with banks, monitoring transactions, dealing with workarounds. Sanctioning AI access would be cleaner and more devastating. You just turn off the API. One switch and a country’s most productive tools go dark. No workaround, no alternative routing, no smuggling.

This is more effective than any oil embargo. You can stockpile oil. You can’t stockpile tokens.

This is why local models matter so much more than people realize. Every country outside of the U.S. and China has a massive incentive to invest in open-source, locally-hosted AI models. Not because they’re ideologically committed to open source, but because it’s a matter of sovereignty.

During the Cold War, there were two blocs (the communist world and the West) and then there were the non-aligned countries. The non-aligned movement existed because smaller nations recognized that full dependence on either superpower was dangerous. I think we’re heading toward something similar with AI.

Right now, China is giving away powerful open-source models, which is amazing. But you can’t assume they’ll keep doing it. Generosity in geopolitics is always strategic, and strategies change. If you’re a mid-sized country building your economy on Chinese open-source models, you’re one policy shift away from losing access.

What the world probably needs (and I’m genuinely curious to see if this happens) is something like a supranational entity that funds and maintains open-source AI models at near-frontier capability. A collective effort by the countries that are neither the U.S. nor China to ensure they always have access to competent local models. Not necessarily the absolute best models, but close enough that losing API access to the frontier labs doesn’t cripple your economy.

This might sound dramatic. But if you told someone in 1970 that a group of oil-producing countries could hold the entire global economy hostage by restricting supply, that would have sounded dramatic too. And then 1973 happened.

If we thought the world was already dominated by the U.S. and China, I can almost guarantee that in fifteen to twenty years it will be far more dominated, because these will be the countries with full control over the smartest systems ever built. Every other country will either have hedged with local models, or they’ll be completely dependent. And dependency, as history keeps reminding us, is never free.