Sanctions are legal restrictions that stop people and companies from dealing with a named target: a government, a company, a ship, an individual. Four systems matter most for anyone doing business across borders. The United States runs the most powerful one, because so much of the world’s money moves in dollars. The EU and the UK run their own regimes, which overlap with Washington’s but are written and enforced differently. The UN Security Council sits above all three in law but has no enforcement arm of its own.

Most laws aimed at the most powerful AI models decide who is covered by counting training compute. The unit is FLOP, the total number of floating-point operations used to train a model. This page compares the thresholds now written into law, what each one triggers, and when the obligations start. Last updated: 15 September 2026. The short version The EU sets its line at 10^25 FLOP. California, New York, Illinois and South Korea all use 10^26, which is ten times higher.

I think Big Tech gets away with treating “user safety” as a compliance checkbox more often than it should, and I’ve said so in this space before. If a $1 billion fine landed on Google for something a European regulator plausibly called a child-safety failure, my first instinct is to side with the regulator. My first instinct is wrong here, and not for the reason Google’s lobbyists would give you.