For persistence, I think the most glaring gap is the inference - if these rogue agents need to call Claude's API, then they aren't persistent - Anthropic can turn them off. A memory resident program needs disk to be persistent, but above all it needs CPU; without it there are only bits.

And so the implication is the swarm has access to enough local compute to perform its own inference, using a large enough model to provide the capabilities to be dangerous.

This is impractical today.

It might be practical tomorrow - if the Chinese are allowed to continue to develop large open weight models that we can quantize and ablate and make small enough to run on a million standard PCs.

Or if *anyone* is allowed to continue to develop AI in the way every other technology has developed - improving, shrinking, optimizing.

And so the argument REALLY isn't against the Chinese - it's that we can never allow this technology to advance outside of trusted labs. If they get their way, they will need to keep this tech locked down forever, which will require much much more than what they are asking.