Procurement decisions are not authoritarian rule. A government agency deciding that a vendor doesn't meet its operational requirements and setting a timeline to transition off that vendor is one of the most ordinary functions of institutional management. Every organization, public or private, does this. Authoritarian rule involves the coercive suppression of rights or autonomy. Choosing not to renew a contract with a provider who has voluntarily excluded itself from your use case is the opposite of coercion; it's respecting that provider's choice and acting accordingly.
The "zero-sum" label is equally off-base. Zero-sum describes a situation where one party's gain is necessarily another's loss, and that is precisely the nature of military capability competition. If an adversary fields unrestricted AI systems and you field restricted ones, the gap is real and the consequences are asymmetric. You don't have to like that reality, but calling it a zero-sum argument as though it's a rhetorical trick misidentifies what's actually a structural condition. The term you seem to be reaching for is something closer to "fear-based reasoning" or "false dilemma," but neither of those applies cleanly here either, because the competitive dynamic being described is well-documented and not hypothetical.
If there's a genuine objection to be made, and there may well be, it has to engage with the specifics: whether the restrictions in question actually matter operationally, whether the transition plan is proportionate, whether the policy creates worse risks than it solves. That's where the real debate is.
The "zero-sum" label is equally off-base. Zero-sum describes a situation where one party's gain is necessarily another's loss, and that is precisely the nature of military capability competition. If an adversary fields unrestricted AI systems and you field restricted ones, the gap is real and the consequences are asymmetric. You don't have to like that reality, but calling it a zero-sum argument as though it's a rhetorical trick misidentifies what's actually a structural condition. The term you seem to be reaching for is something closer to "fear-based reasoning" or "false dilemma," but neither of those applies cleanly here either, because the competitive dynamic being described is well-documented and not hypothetical.
If there's a genuine objection to be made, and there may well be, it has to engage with the specifics: whether the restrictions in question actually matter operationally, whether the transition plan is proportionate, whether the policy creates worse risks than it solves. That's where the real debate is.
[edit:typos]