The preprint that circulated on Bluesky this week did not argue that the AI world is splitting — it documented that the split has a thirty-year paper trail [4]. US and China as distinct collaborative poles, the UK and Germany orbiting Washington, Europe positioned as a bridge, and developing nations gravitating toward Beijing: that is not a projection from current political conditions. It is the output of mapping actual co-authorship and institutional affiliation across three decades of published research. The story the data tells is one of gradual, structural divergence…