The short answer: the company would be operating unlawfully almost everywhere that matters, "offshore" would buy it a regulatory vacuum rather than permission — and its real legal jeopardy would come less from bioethics statutes than from fraud.

The product on offer is the most restricted category in biotech. Editing embryos to shift a heritable trait is germline modification, and no jurisdiction on earth currently licenses implanting edited embryos — not even for disease, let alone enhancement. One review of 39 countries found 29 ban heritable modification outright by statute or guideline ( Global Policy Landscape, The CRISPR Journal), and the Council of Europe's Oviedo Convention holds that genome interventions may only be preventive, diagnostic or therapeutic "and only if its aim is not to introduce any modification in the genome of any descendants" ( Oviedo Convention, Art. 13) — a position the Council deliberately reaffirmed after re-examining it in light of CRISPR ( Council of Europe). The enhancement framing is fatal even under liberal future regimes: the UK, the furthest along in exploring a lawful pathway, is contemplating only a narrow, serious-monogenic-disease route via HFEA-led public engagement ( Fertility Regulator's remarks, BioNews) — a high hedonic set-point is nowhere near that line.

What "offshore" actually gets you. It means incorporation in one of the many states with no dedicated rules — an absence of prohibition, not permission. The precedents are instructive:

• John Zhang's 2016 "three-parent" baby was performed in Mexico precisely because it was prohibited in the US and unregulated there ( Wikipedia) — the flag-of-convenience model works only until publicity arrives.
• He Jiankui's 2018 CRISPR babies were prosecuted in China before any germline-specific criminal statute existed — he was convicted of the general offence of illegal medical practice, sentenced to three years and fined ¥3M ( He Jiankui affair). China then hardened its law, though commentators note gaps remain ( Nature HSSC, 2026).

So general criminal law — unlicensed medical practice, bodily harm, child-endangerment analogues, conspiracy — applies even where germline-specific statutes don't. And if founders, money or marketing touch the US, the US's constraint is regulatory rather than statutory: Congress bars FDA from reviewing any application involving heritable modification, making clinical use effectively impossible domestically ( Science,  GLP Regulation Tracker) — while still giving prosecutors wire-fraud, money-laundering and securities-fraud hooks over offshore operators who solicit US customers.

The fraud angle is the company's biggest problem. Well-being and hedonic tone are massively polygenic — twin studies attribute maybe a third of subjective well-being variance to genetics, spread across thousands of variants of tiny effect, with no known edit that raises a set-point without grave off-target and pleiotropic risk. A service marketed as delivering "innately happy babies" is selling an outcome it cannot deliver, which converts the business from a bioethics problem into a straightforward consumer-fraud problem in the US, UK and EU regardless of where the clinic sits.

The parents' side is the legal grey zone. UK law binds licensed clinics, not patients travelling abroad — the same logic by which UK residents legally obtain non-medical sex selection abroad, which the HFEA has itself acknowledged ( HFEA on sex selection,  HFEA on treatment abroad). No major jurisdiction currently has an extraterritorial ban on obtaining germline editing abroad (unlike FGM or child-sex-tourism statutes), and the child would acquire citizenship normally. But parents would contract in a vacuum: no enforceable consent regime, no malpractice insurance, no malpractice recourse, no regulator to complain to, and exposure to child-welfare scrutiny on return if harm emerges.

Net assessment: the venture is criminal or prohibited-in-effect in every state with a functioning regulator, merely unregulated — and therefore unenforceable and uninsurable — in the rest, with its principals exposed to general criminal law and fraud charges the moment a real birth announcement goes public, as He Jiankui demonstrated. The customers face little criminal exposure at home but assume total, unrecoverable risk. The scenario is, of course, a cousin of the one argued for in The Hedonistic Imperative — but as a commercial proposition under current law, the binding constraint isn't any jurisdiction's squeamishness; it's that the genotype–happiness link is far too polygenic for the product to be honestly sold at all.