Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher
Published
The Chokepoint is a governance thesis. Advanced AI depends on an extraordinarily concentrated supply chain: TSMC (roughly 90% of chips below 7nm), Samsung (roughly 10% of advanced chips), Intel (catching up with CHIPS Act investment), and ASML as the sole global supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. The claim is that this concentration is humanity's last leverage point for hardware-level AI governance, because a single supplier's policy decision can effectively mandate compliance with embedded alignment requirements. The window closes as domestic capability emerges in China and elsewhere, so the framework must be established before the concentration ends.
The mechanics are simpler than the geopolitics. Without EUV lithography there are no advanced chips at the process nodes on which frontier AI depends. ASML is the sole vendor of EUV machines and the sole source of the service, replacement parts and software updates those machines require to remain functional. A conditional-sale policy from that single vendor, backed by service-lifecycle terms, functions in practice as a global mandate on any fab that wants to keep its EUV line running, which is any fab operating at the relevant nodes. The chokepoint is the moment when leverage of that scale exists in a small number of hands, and the thesis is that this leverage will not last.
The Chokepoint appears for the first time in the published book (print edition 2 January 2026; ebook edition 6 January 2026; ISBN 978-1806056200; ISBN-10 1806056208). It is later formalised in Section 11 of the Eden Engineering paper as the Chokepoint Strategy, together with the HARI Treaty as its policy vehicle.
Three state-level convergences appear in the register. On 3 June 2026 the European Commission presented its Tech Sovereignty Package (Chips Act 2.0 and CADA); Commissioner Virkkunen was quoted saying 'we want to be sure nobody has a kill switch', framing the direction as anti-foreign-kill-switch sovereignty. On 12 June 2026 the United States ordered Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline, the first export-control action against a deployed commercial AI model. On 24 June 2026 OpenAI and Broadcom announced the Jalapeno inference ASIC (nine-month tape-out, 10 gigawatt deployment target through 2029). Together with President Macron's G7 Evian remarks on 19 June 2026, these arrivals converge on the infrastructure-as-leverage frame from the book, roughly five months later.
The Chokepoint is a governance thesis, not an implemented policy. It rests on empirical claims about market concentration that are publicly verifiable but structurally time-limited. The Eden Engineering paper notes explicitly that the window may last five to ten years and that China's more-than-150-billion-dollar semiconductor investment shortens it. The convergences above are structural, not causal: none of the state actions cite the book.
From the book Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything by Michael Darius Eastwood.