The community response to the Supermicro indictment was calibrated in a way that is itself a data point. Practitioners who follow the AI-geopolitics beat had constructed a mental model in which export controls set a legal boundary while gray-market logistics built a parallel infrastructure — and the indictment of Liaw [7][16] confirmed that model rather than challenged it. That is not a failure of attention; it is a failure of the controls themselves. When an enforcement action arrives and the expert response is 'yes, that tracks,' the regime has already…