Who are running these bots? I presume developers at all of the frontier labs know (or at least would know to look for) Wikipedia has bulk APIs for automated access. Unnecessary scraping increases their workload/costs too, so why in 2026 is this still a problem?
Is there any actual proof of this? Everything suggests it's a sincerely held belief and there's been no whistleblowers claiming otherwise. "Since before they could add 1+1" works against your argument because the models had no commercial value, no guarantee they would ever have commercial value, and plotting regulatory capture was about as serious an idea as regulatory capture of antimatter engines.
>That said, sure, it had a fraction of the features back then, and only a fraction of the world population was connected to the internet.
And the world was better for it. Connectivity and internet are not inherent goods. They can be used for good purposes but it is hard to argue that has been the mean.
The purpose was to clarify that the obstacles to constructing modern nuclear weapons is not accurately characterized as "99%" fuel-related. Even if a group were to obtain a stockpile of ready HEU and plutonium-239, there is knowledge they simply will not have because they did not spend a trillion USD testing different bomb configurations last century. The difference in yield is two orders of magnitude.
True for fission bombs. Less true for fusion bombs. The principal makeup and manufacturing of fusion device parts like tampers are still unknown to the public. Having a supply of HEU does not tell you how to assemble a functional triple stage device or how to utilize tritium, an isotope that measurably decreases in purity by the day.