The shutdown section is missing a major possibility: AI shutdown combined with hardware bans. Deep ultra-violet (DUV) and extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) lithography require highly specialized machines that there are a limited number of. So along with the shutoff of AI research, also shutoff production of new DUV and EUV lithography machines, and then shutdown the remaining machines. This would probably take years, or require significant payments to motivate companies to do so, but at that point the existing stock of high performance GPUs would start to decrease thru attrition, and the remaining ones would start to increase in cost since no new ones are being produced. Buy back and destroy programs, or programs to buy back the existing GPUs and shift their use to non-AI use such as scientific simulation would increase the speed this happens. This would basically force new technology back to circa 2005 levels, which would be much less risky for creation of super-intelligence. (Or back to a different level, depending on where people decide to do a hardware ban. And it is worth mentioning that computer use has changed significantly because of increases in the amount of data that can be stored on magnetic media and in the amount of fiber optics that have been installed and this would not be affected by a lithography process limit.)
This would be politically much harder than a pure AI shutdown (since it affects all computers), but would solve the problem in Plan S of “The main downside of Plan S is that the shutdown deal will probably break down eventually.” since decreasing the amount of compute available can decrease the chance of creating artificial super intelligence.
(As a related example, https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/treaty restricts 28 nanometer process node and smaller technology)
I haven’t seen an in depth analysis, but I also have not looked hard. I did read today: “One pivotal question is how far China has progressed in building its own EUV machine. Reuters, a news agency, reported in December that a team of former ASML engineers in China had completed a prototype EUV machine in 2025 and were testing it at a high-security lab in Shenzhen. ASML said it cannot control where former employees work, but they are bound by confidentiality agreements and in some cases the company has successfully taken legal action in response to theft of trade secrets.
The prototype had not yet created any working chips but the Chinese government had set a goal for it to produce functional ones by 2028, Reuters reported. ”
https://www.economist.com/china/2026/07/05/has-china-obtained-the-worlds-most-important-machine
So basically China has been trying to build a EUV machine since roughly 2019, and still has several years to go. DUV would probably be relatively easier but still fairly difficult since visible light optics and mirrors cannot be used. Current semiconductor manufacturing requires thousands of steps, all of which have to sufficient yield for the final output to work.
The China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund spent around $20 billion dollars in Phase I (2014 − 2019) to work on building DUV technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Integrated_Circuit_Industry_Investment_Fund
Visible light photolithography semiconductor making can be done in a home shop as has been done by Sam Zeloof for example: https://www.hackster.io/news/etching-pcbs-sam-zeloof-steps-it-up-a-notch-and-down-a-few-orders-of-magnitude-with-his-own-ics-cdb0e297bc1a
So EUV level even in the easy case where you have access to employees who have worked on the machines and access to parts of the existing supply chain and likely state level support is still nearly a decade long project.