Noteworthy that Z.ai, maker of the just released near-frontier GLM 5.2, has already been on the Entity List since Jan 2025[1]. Being on the Entity List does not mean all trade is forbidden. Broadly speaking it means American companies and individuals are not allowed sell them goods and services, but they are still allowed to buy from them and pay them.
AFAIK the Chinese AI companies barely depend on US goods and services, except for nVidia GPUs which were export restricted anyway, so it doesn't seem to be very consequential (see Z.ai). For the RAM maker CXMT it could be a lot more problematic though.
> Anthropic said it identified a campaign by DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI labs to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude AI platform to improve their own models
Oh, won’t someone think of the poor mass copyright infringers.
Prompt: Hello! Introduce yourself in one sentence.
Response: Hello! I'm *ChatGPT*, an AI assistant developed by OpenAI, dedicated to answering questions, providing information, and helping solve various problems. How can I help you?
Opus said to me once without any poking at it something like, "Help Grok understand it better". Makes me wonder if they are all cross-pollinated to an extent.
This doesn't at all change the irony of big AI labs complaining about Chinese startups stealing the labs' IP, essentially by scraping the responses.
HN has a higher proportion of AI promoters than AI skeptics, and for a good while, the default response to complaints from book authors, bloggers, and other content creators was that "you put it on the internet so it's fair game", or "it's no different from a human learning from your works". So yeah, unless we're willing to revise these answers, I think the same "tough luck" reasoning should apply here.
For folks who are at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, or Google, and think it's fundamentally different, I would ask you to think long and hard about that answer.
Completely agreed. I would go further and say that it should be legal to scrape responses from LLMs to train new LLMs, and that forbidding that in your ToS should be considered an illegal contract. That’s simply the best way to avoid complete monopolization of the space, without requiring more drastic measures like antitrust down the line (which we seem to not manage well these days, given the number of monopolies). As long as you pay for your tokens like anyone else, "Big LLM" shouldn’t be allowed to control what you use the output for.
What VPN provider is this? I could use it because Chinese users of my apps often complain about not being able to download things from my western hosted servers.
The US government exists to defend capital interests. It's why we can't buy BYD cars. It's why we can't import any cars unless they're 25 years old. It's why a Tiktok sale was forced. It's why the US is seeking to block states from banning prediction markets. It's why the federal government is seeking to block states from blocking data center projects.
As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China was going to make sure that no US company was going to "own" AI. It is an issue of national security. It's why the US essentially blocks US tech companies to maintain sovereignty.
I'm reminded of the browser wars of the 1990s that led to the antitrust suit against Microsoft. Microsoft used the "commoditize your complement" strategy [1] against Netscape. The US has blocked the export of not only EUV lithography but high-end chips to China. China doesn't want to be dependent on US platforms or policy.
So China is going to make sure there are open source models available and the US government is going to try and stop them to protect US tech companies.
The reason why some Capital Interests want to blacklist DeepSeek in the US is so that you are forced to buy Claude/GPT/Gemini, which will feed revenue into an industry that requires revenue (or it’s a big problem).
The reason why some Capital Interests don’t want to ban DeepSeek is so companies that utilize AI have more options, and running your own DeepSeek cluster acts as an independent cost comparison for enterprise inference contracts.
The raising AI valuation is giving more weight to those that want to blacklist DeepSeek. The AI Safety narrative is strong. I see a path where any institution with enough compute might be watched in a similar was chem labs are observed by the DEA.
only if you really believe that the recent incident was about ```safety``` and not about punishing Anthropic for its attempt to score brownie points with the other party, who will likely be in power for a while after the current party loses its Joker and inevitably begins to nominate cuckservative apparatchiks like ¡Jeb! once again.
if anything, the safety, copyright, and other narratives died down significantly for the time being at least compared to 2023-2024 when OpenAI, Anthropic and Google attempted to zerg rush regulatory capture.
and it would be great to have an independent auditor have access to all the training material and good search tools, so that take down requests can be made by copyright owners
Seems like interests of US government and US capital (monopolize and corner markets, jack up prices, extract economic rent in perpetuity) run strictly against interests of the broader US consumers and overall global population
China is far more focused on robotics. Deepseek is largely bootstrapped by the hedge fund that developed it. They received a grant from the government of China, and recently an investment. Imagine thinking text autocomplete is a matter of national security.
China will flood the west with affordable robotics and watch the West eat itself alive. They know Western capital owners are so greedy they'll screw over their entire society to chase a buck and replace labor..
Of course its a matter of national security if there are military applications. The point of robotics is also weird because they've already widely adopted robotics within their own manufacturing and also America already replaced the majority of their labor by offshoring so I dont know how they would destroy american society by introducing robotics.
Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity, which is why they are basically the only ones left publishing research in the open. That's probably part of their socialist nature.
But also a financial one. They believe that models are commodities, that you can swap one for the other and that the only thing that matters are the applications built upon them.
So they want to make sure that the world, and their own companies, are not limited in their business and application by a protected US commodity.
They will keep releasing in the open no matter what for quite some time.
It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.
But it's increasingly clear that since the last decade protectionism and nationalism is taking the place of globalization, even though globalization has been a terrific success in lifting billions out of poverty and making the US thrive.
Also, the open-weight local models are proving that the commodity can be delivered for most applications at a far lower price than frontier is charging.
The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.
Before anyone starts talking about the free market, there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.
Unilateral surrender in a core aspect of statecraft, which involves maintaining our industrial power and skilled labor force, is absolutely insane. I hope my government never gets convinced by market fundamentalist idiots to do such a thing, any more than it already has, to our great detriment.
The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.
> there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.
Aside from countless other ways before and after this, the US government handed over tens of billions of dollars in cash to GM and Chrysler in 2008 and 2009.
> The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.
Yeah, that was the argument against Japanese car makers, too.
A shitty system needs destroying sometimes. Competition from Toyota/Honda was critical in making US auto makers up their game.
It is terrible public policy to fall decades behind making expensive shitty versions of what the rest of the world has.
automotive platforms are a key military asset
it's not like the pokemon dildo industry, if you stop building jeeps your abolity to bully third parties is diminished
It's not like I don't understand the argument on the other side of this. I've heard it my entire life. It's been dominant since the late 1970s and 1980s.
It's just that it's wrong.
We need a competent industrial policy and support for skilled labor and policies that encourage domestic production.
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but our country has become fucked, overwhelmed by financialization, scams, monopoly rents and extraction, and all of the wealth accumulating to a handful of people, while we've become less resilient and, at this point, almost certainly have lost our place as the most dominant economy and industrial power in the world.
IMO the problem is that we've been given the excuse of market fundamentalism for the past several decades on the way down, as most everyone lost their middle class jobs, wages stagnated, etc. Now we're supposed to accept some last ditch attempt at protectionism based on directly blocking choices for consumers, when the US manufacturers aren't even really competing? It just seems like open hypocrisy. At this point the reasonable protectionist policy would be based around subsidizing American industry so that they become competitive options, not merely trying to keep the better foreign options out.
> The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.
I generally agree with most of what you said but not this. China's chief advantage is having a billion people. On average, they aren't that wealthy or powerful. And their leadership makes plenty of idiotic mistakes - look at their real estate market.
That's not the chief advantage, insofar as there is a difference between China, India, and Indonesia, which there is.
Their chief advantage has been a coherent, long-running national industrial policy and trade policy that encourages industry while keeping the financial sector from taking over the economy and ripping everybody off.
We used to do that too from the late 1930's to the late 1970's, which is why we were the dominant industrial power in the world at that time as well.
I wouldn't consider India. It's been plagued by protectionism and tariffs and won't achieve anything close to China any time soon. The only industry of value for its people which is software services is now crumbling with AI created in US and China.
Edit: probably your point too and I misread
We're in late-stage capitalism here. The pitchforks are already out and spreading across the globe. Unless the big companies get broken up, this nation will split into either a police state or socialist state.
To give credit where credit is due, it is good that the Trump administration has not avidly played these stupid export control games. They tend to do little except hurt open collaboration; I remember when all open source cryptography had to be developed outside the US due to ITAR.
Their website literally has chinese characters on it even in english mode and everyone under the sun including crappy money talk show hosts know them as the chinese player that undercut western players. It's not exactly a secret.
You'd think anyone with two brain cells and confidential data could apply some judgement of their own...
Not sure I'd go that far but I do use them almost exclusively for my coding on the basis that it is an acceptable trade-off. Far cheaper and my shitty apps are really not that valuable as training data
Noteworthy that Z.ai, maker of the just released near-frontier GLM 5.2, has already been on the Entity List since Jan 2025[1]. Being on the Entity List does not mean all trade is forbidden. Broadly speaking it means American companies and individuals are not allowed sell them goods and services, but they are still allowed to buy from them and pay them.
AFAIK the Chinese AI companies barely depend on US goods and services, except for nVidia GPUs which were export restricted anyway, so it doesn't seem to be very consequential (see Z.ai). For the RAM maker CXMT it could be a lot more problematic though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z.ai
IMHO, models by US companies are the biggest security risk so I'm fine with using models on this "blacklist."
> Anthropic said it identified a campaign by DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI labs to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude AI platform to improve their own models
Oh, won’t someone think of the poor mass copyright infringers.
Its not right to steal what I worked so hard to steal from someone else. [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhvd6bIRPK4
I made Qwen respond it was made by Google with a simple Chinese greeting.
But also, I made Sonnet introduce itself as made by OpenAI..
Prompt: 你好！用一句话介绍你自己。
Sonnet in around 5% of resplies:
Found it like a month ago and it kept working, I wonder if it will stop after this comment.Translated:
Prompt: Hello! Introduce yourself in one sentence.
Response: Hello! I'm *ChatGPT*, an AI assistant developed by OpenAI, dedicated to answering questions, providing information, and helping solve various problems. How can I help you?
Opus said to me once without any poking at it something like, "Help Grok understand it better". Makes me wonder if they are all cross-pollinated to an extent.
Illicitly learning by asking someone a question and listening to their answer.
"illicitly" implies a law that is being violated. What law?
It could also mean a TOS violation / breach of contract.
(To be clear, I find the complaint hilariously hypocritical.)
If DeepSeek just would have destroyed the input in the process, it would have been legal and Anthropic should have been fine with it.
gee I wonder how their models learned Chinese?
Also in Musk vs Altman case, we have found that this is regularly done by all labs.
Just because they did it doesn't mean more people should do it...
This doesn't at all change the irony of big AI labs complaining about Chinese startups stealing the labs' IP, essentially by scraping the responses.
HN has a higher proportion of AI promoters than AI skeptics, and for a good while, the default response to complaints from book authors, bloggers, and other content creators was that "you put it on the internet so it's fair game", or "it's no different from a human learning from your works". So yeah, unless we're willing to revise these answers, I think the same "tough luck" reasoning should apply here.
For folks who are at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, or Google, and think it's fundamentally different, I would ask you to think long and hard about that answer.
Completely agreed. I would go further and say that it should be legal to scrape responses from LLMs to train new LLMs, and that forbidding that in your ToS should be considered an illegal contract. That’s simply the best way to avoid complete monopolization of the space, without requiring more drastic measures like antitrust down the line (which we seem to not manage well these days, given the number of monopolies). As long as you pay for your tokens like anyone else, "Big LLM" shouldn’t be allowed to control what you use the output for.
I like Ant, but also I support the tit-for-tat competition. In the best interest of consumers.
why? Just because you have that opinion deoesn't mean people shouldn't do it
Actually in competition it means exactly that.
Oh course it does, why wouldn't it work this way in regards to computer science?
Are we seriously going to go back to a time where numbers were considered munitions?
Hmm, my VPN provider explicitly has Chinese exit points. And whats funny is I can load AliPay from any CVS. (Like, seriously)
You can try to pry Qwen and Deepseek from my Graphene/Linux hands.
What VPN provider is this? I could use it because Chinese users of my apps often complain about not being able to download things from my western hosted servers.
The US government exists to defend capital interests. It's why we can't buy BYD cars. It's why we can't import any cars unless they're 25 years old. It's why a Tiktok sale was forced. It's why the US is seeking to block states from banning prediction markets. It's why the federal government is seeking to block states from blocking data center projects.
As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China was going to make sure that no US company was going to "own" AI. It is an issue of national security. It's why the US essentially blocks US tech companies to maintain sovereignty.
I'm reminded of the browser wars of the 1990s that led to the antitrust suit against Microsoft. Microsoft used the "commoditize your complement" strategy [1] against Netscape. The US has blocked the export of not only EUV lithography but high-end chips to China. China doesn't want to be dependent on US platforms or policy.
So China is going to make sure there are open source models available and the US government is going to try and stop them to protect US tech companies.
[1]: https://gwern.net/complement
The reason why some Capital Interests want to blacklist DeepSeek in the US is so that you are forced to buy Claude/GPT/Gemini, which will feed revenue into an industry that requires revenue (or it’s a big problem).
The reason why some Capital Interests don’t want to ban DeepSeek is so companies that utilize AI have more options, and running your own DeepSeek cluster acts as an independent cost comparison for enterprise inference contracts.
The raising AI valuation is giving more weight to those that want to blacklist DeepSeek. The AI Safety narrative is strong. I see a path where any institution with enough compute might be watched in a similar was chem labs are observed by the DEA.
if you look at share of industry profits, currently most of AI profits are captured by NVIDIA and cloud providers
banning deepseek/open weight models will allow Ant/OAI jack up prices and extract more profits for themselves
keeping open weights models available will keep current industry profit distribution where majority is captured by nvidia and cloud providers
>The AI Safety narrative is strong
only if you really believe that the recent incident was about ```safety``` and not about punishing Anthropic for its attempt to score brownie points with the other party, who will likely be in power for a while after the current party loses its Joker and inevitably begins to nominate cuckservative apparatchiks like ¡Jeb! once again.
if anything, the safety, copyright, and other narratives died down significantly for the time being at least compared to 2023-2024 when OpenAI, Anthropic and Google attempted to zerg rush regulatory capture.
and it would be great to have an independent auditor have access to all the training material and good search tools, so that take down requests can be made by copyright owners
Seems like interests of US government and US capital (monopolize and corner markets, jack up prices, extract economic rent in perpetuity) run strictly against interests of the broader US consumers and overall global population
> As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China was going to make sure that no US company was going to "own" AI.
Yea m8, I think you might've been a bit late to that realization.
China does not think llms are a matter of national security, they aren't as brain broken as the west.
That's 100% untrue lmao.
China is far more focused on robotics. Deepseek is largely bootstrapped by the hedge fund that developed it. They received a grant from the government of China, and recently an investment. Imagine thinking text autocomplete is a matter of national security.
China will flood the west with affordable robotics and watch the West eat itself alive. They know Western capital owners are so greedy they'll screw over their entire society to chase a buck and replace labor..
Text autocomplete can write code, carry out actions (tool calls) and launch cyber attacks. It very much is a matter of national security.
Of course its a matter of national security if there are military applications. The point of robotics is also weird because they've already widely adopted robotics within their own manufacturing and also America already replaced the majority of their labor by offshoring so I dont know how they would destroy american society by introducing robotics.
LLMs and current AI models are absolutely top priority for the Chinese government, they’re just funding robotics as well
Chinese have a wider outlook on it.
Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity, which is why they are basically the only ones left publishing research in the open. That's probably part of their socialist nature.
But also a financial one. They believe that models are commodities, that you can swap one for the other and that the only thing that matters are the applications built upon them.
So they want to make sure that the world, and their own companies, are not limited in their business and application by a protected US commodity.
They will keep releasing in the open no matter what for quite some time.
It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.
But it's increasingly clear that since the last decade protectionism and nationalism is taking the place of globalization, even though globalization has been a terrific success in lifting billions out of poverty and making the US thrive.
Also, the open-weight local models are proving that the commodity can be delivered for most applications at a far lower price than frontier is charging.
The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.
Before anyone starts talking about the free market, there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.
Unilateral surrender in a core aspect of statecraft, which involves maintaining our industrial power and skilled labor force, is absolutely insane. I hope my government never gets convinced by market fundamentalist idiots to do such a thing, any more than it already has, to our great detriment.
The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.
You can just copy the chinese playbook and allow entry if you are willing to hand over ip.
> there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.
Aside from countless other ways before and after this, the US government handed over tens of billions of dollars in cash to GM and Chrysler in 2008 and 2009.
> The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.
Yeah, that was the argument against Japanese car makers, too.
A shitty system needs destroying sometimes. Competition from Toyota/Honda was critical in making US auto makers up their game.
It is terrible public policy to fall decades behind making expensive shitty versions of what the rest of the world has.
automotive platforms are a key military asset it's not like the pokemon dildo industry, if you stop building jeeps your abolity to bully third parties is diminished
> automotive platforms are a key military asset
All the more reason not to save companies that can't compete in the global space. What good is a jeep that the Chinese laugh at?
It's not like I don't understand the argument on the other side of this. I've heard it my entire life. It's been dominant since the late 1970s and 1980s.
It's just that it's wrong.
We need a competent industrial policy and support for skilled labor and policies that encourage domestic production.
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but our country has become fucked, overwhelmed by financialization, scams, monopoly rents and extraction, and all of the wealth accumulating to a handful of people, while we've become less resilient and, at this point, almost certainly have lost our place as the most dominant economy and industrial power in the world.
> We need a competent industrial policy and support for skilled labor and policies that encourage domestic production.
Yes!
But "tariff/ban BYD" is not that.
IMO the problem is that we've been given the excuse of market fundamentalism for the past several decades on the way down, as most everyone lost their middle class jobs, wages stagnated, etc. Now we're supposed to accept some last ditch attempt at protectionism based on directly blocking choices for consumers, when the US manufacturers aren't even really competing? It just seems like open hypocrisy. At this point the reasonable protectionist policy would be based around subsidizing American industry so that they become competitive options, not merely trying to keep the better foreign options out.
> The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.
I generally agree with most of what you said but not this. China's chief advantage is having a billion people. On average, they aren't that wealthy or powerful. And their leadership makes plenty of idiotic mistakes - look at their real estate market.
That's not the chief advantage, insofar as there is a difference between China, India, and Indonesia, which there is.
Their chief advantage has been a coherent, long-running national industrial policy and trade policy that encourages industry while keeping the financial sector from taking over the economy and ripping everybody off.
We used to do that too from the late 1930's to the late 1970's, which is why we were the dominant industrial power in the world at that time as well.
I wouldn't consider India. It's been plagued by protectionism and tariffs and won't achieve anything close to China any time soon. The only industry of value for its people which is software services is now crumbling with AI created in US and China. Edit: probably your point too and I misread
We're in late-stage capitalism here. The pitchforks are already out and spreading across the globe. Unless the big companies get broken up, this nation will split into either a police state or socialist state.
To give credit where credit is due, it is good that the Trump administration has not avidly played these stupid export control games. They tend to do little except hurt open collaboration; I remember when all open source cryptography had to be developed outside the US due to ITAR.
I don’t have the emoji handy, so just imagine the most savagely doubtful-looking emoticon that anyone has ever made.
The whole thing seems like nonsensical.
Their website literally has chinese characters on it even in english mode and everyone under the sun including crappy money talk show hosts know them as the chinese player that undercut western players. It's not exactly a secret.
You'd think anyone with two brain cells and confidential data could apply some judgement of their own...
I trust Chinese companies with my data far more than American companies.
Not sure I'd go that far but I do use them almost exclusively for my coding on the basis that it is an acceptable trade-off. Far cheaper and my shitty apps are really not that valuable as training data