Last month, Vallone, who led model policy research at OpenAI, joined rival Anthropic. Two people familiar with her exit said she was given an “impossible” mission of protecting the mental health of users becoming attached to ChatGPT. Vallone did not respond to a request for comment.

Another American strength is its electoral system. Voters in Venezuela and Russia had no opportunity to check the power of aspiring autocrats until it was too late, whereas the US midterms offer an opportunity to at least partially defang a rogue administration. And with a robust and decentralised media landscape rendering the Trump administration’s excesses clear for all to see, this is an opportunity the American electorate appears keen to take. Indeed, it is possible that one reason Trump’s second term has been so fast and furious is that the administration believes it only has two years to act.