Prologue: The Heist That Wasn't Silicon Valley, December 2025. The air is thick with a new kind of tension. In venture capital meetings, developer forums, and the halls of Washington D.C., a single name is whispered: "Qwen." The story begins not with a typical product launch, but with a quiet, seismic release on a developer platform. It ends with a U.S. government scramble to understand an entirely new policy problem: how to regulate an open-source AI model anyone could downl