This is regulatory capture in action. This will make it hard/impossible for new vendors to come into the market and only established companies will get to play, and charge, for LLMs. What does this mean for open source? Will it become illegal to download weights? What about train your own? Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated to ensure that illegal LLMs aren't being processed on your machine? More broadly though, how will this stop anyone but average people? Countries outside the us will completely ignore this and keep developing and moving ahead. Maybe Europe will adopt similar things but the genie is out. I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop. If you want to stop LLMs with legislation you can't do it like this.
As far as Europe is concerned they have recently signed up to the 'Pax Silica'[1] and willingly givrn the LLM space over to the US incumbents with buildtin legislation banning Chinese models and coperation with them.
So EU will be a renter of the LLMs that the US allows them to use.
In the long run OpenSource will dominate as it did in the DB(MySQL/Postgres)/ServerOS(Linux/BSDs) versus Proprietery rent seeking alts like Oracle and Microsoft et al.
Would be interesting to see what the global startups using Qwen/DS/Kimi etc within the EU-US space navigate the cutting edge OpenSource LLMs vs seeking/getting a permission slip from the US gov.
They have signed a non-binding agreement to potentially cooperate on AI supply chains. It's hardly a declaration of fealty, nor does it have any practical impact on the use of Chinese models in the near term. I'd view this more as hedging their bets for the future.
As a European, the way I see it, Europe declared fealty to the US and relinquished its sovereignty a long time ago, sadly.
Also, the way these agreements tend to work is that you agree that you won't source from the 'enemy side' i.e. China. It works this way for NATO and it will work the same way here.
Facts, but the Europeans, tankies, and America haters here will never admit it. Europe sold out its industries for social programs. Not our fault you guys chose social safety nets over industry.
Nobody in EU ever tried to build a domestic CPU that was even remotely comparable to what Intel and AMD, for them to have had the opportunity to fail.(No, ARM is IP not a builder)
Nobody in EU ever tried to build a domestic GPU that was even remotely comparable to Nvidia, ATI or 3Dfx for them to have failed.
We just let the US companies fight it out, see who could build the best products, and become forever customers to them and then 20 year later wonder how come their economy grew 2x as much.
Of course the EU tries to compete with the US and in some industries it has done so successfully (e.g pharma or aviation). EU companies have also tried to compete in information technology - with some limited or temporary success.
ARM was founded in the EU. DeepMind was founded in the EU. Olivetti and Siemens had CPU designs and made computers. Nokia once dominated mobile. Ericsson was/is a leading telecom equipment maker. Skype used to be one of the most successful messaging apps. Spotify is a success. ASML is a success.
A certain Finnish university student started the operating system that now dominates the cloud, but for some reason I really do not understand, EU cloud providers like OVHCloud have failed to compete with the likes of AWS, Azure and GCP. And now the AI wave has completely washed over Europe.
The cloud situation is a mystery to me. Nothing stops EU companies like OVHCloud from competing there. Any anticompetitive behaviour is a very weak excuse. Europe can't even compete with something as mediocre as Palantir. Now everyone is calling for protectionism. Ridiculous.
AI is easier to understand. It requires huge capital investments. The US has far superior capital markets and far healthier attitudes towards risk taking. Europe's failure here was easy to predict but the consequences could be dire.
>Of course the EU tries to compete with the US and in some industries it has done so successfully
I was talking only about SW and HW in the context of the current AI race. Not about legacy industries like aero and pharma. Everyone knows EU is only good at legacy industries, well except cars, they're getting ass whipped there too.
> Olivetti and Siemens had CPU designs and made computers.
None of those domestic designs ever competed commercially with the X86 or amd_64, which is why I made that specific reamark. Please read my comment again and don't try to argue in bad faith by moving the goalposts.
>ARM was founded in the EU. DeepMind was founded in the EU. Nokia once dominated mobile. Ericsson was/is a leading telecom equipment maker. Skype used to be one of the most successful messaging apps. Spotify is a success. ASML is a success.
Most of those have massive US shareholders/financial backing or have outright been brought up by US companies or PE firms or US shareholders. And Spotify being called a succes is laughable given they bootstrapped thanks to initially distributing music they stole off the torrents, and then shafting their smaller artist once they became a multi billion dollar music streaming monopoly.
>Europe can't even compete with something as mediocre as Palantir.
France is copying Palantir to make their domestic version. Chaps Intelligence.
>A certain Finnish university student started the operating system that now dominates the cloud
What does it matter if he's Finnish or not? Linus is an American citizen now living and working from the US, mostly consulting on linux kernel topics for US big-tech. Why did he leave lovely Finland for the "third world" US? That's the question EU gospelers can never answer. He didn't like having walkable cities and free healthcare?
You are being very hostile and cherry-picking results- disregarding and denigrating those that don’t fit your narrative.
Wrt Linus - who knows? It is irrelevant; he is largely irrelevant. If he got ran over by a bus, the collective community (of whom quite a few are outside the US) will carry on.
I hope that open models will dominate. The difficult part to reconcile for me is the amount of compute that's required to create and run such models. Small models are fine, I run local llms 27b param on a gpu, but it's not even close to frontier in capability. Who wants to drop $40k+ on hardware to run these things. Companies, maybe/perhapts. On the other hand, to run a DB I can get a server for $3k and handle tons of traffic on it and other things too.
I believe until the hardware designs catch up to be more commodized ala cryto mining evolution from GPUs to ASICS for specfic algos.
Designs (like Google TPUs equivalent) would also need to evolve to be more memory dense to be able to handle them.
Untill then it seems will be system time shares for the larger models , probably with a bring your own model and pay as you go.
> ala cryto mining evolution from GPUs to ASICS for specfic algos
I don't see it happening. A current gen GPU with a huge and fast block of memory isn't a perfect fit for these algorithms but it's relatively close. With cryptocurrency, mass small sha256 hashing was a totally different kind of computation.
> isn't a perfect fit for these algorithms but it's relatively close
I don't think that's true. The best fit out of what's presently available perhaps. Inference is almost entirely memory bandwidth bound at present, to the extent that GPUs with HBM have a massive advantage over those with GDDR. TPUs appear to be a much better overall design.
I expect that a hypothetical advance in fabrication enabling processing elements to be placed directly adjacent to dense RAM on the same silicon (not merely in the same package) would be superior in all regards.
> I expect that a hypothetical advance in fabrication enabling processing elements to be placed directly adjacent to dense RAM on the same silicon (not merely in the same package) would be superior in all regards.
Processing scales better than DRAM does. I think an HBM-like stack where the bottom layer has the math units is probably the ultimate form of that.
And it's possible that flash instead of DRAM is actually the better play, as long as you can hook up enough in parallel. RIP Optane.
A data center or a cloud? It's not difficult to find a good data center to colo at. The problem is then you have to bring your own hardware, technicians, and sysadmins.
However, if you don't trust cloud providers or inference providers for whatever reason then you probably aren't going to be excited to enter a co-op model where you're still effectively renting access to hardware that you don't directly own. There are already reasonably priced options to rent bare metal from a cloud provider.
The only way I see it working is if it's a bunch of medium to large sized businesses getting together to be able to rent out the spare capacity on hardware that they physically control. So an AWS equivalent where each rack is owned by a different company and retail VMs migrate between them transparently. But I question the overall economics of such an arrangement.
> enter a co-op model where you're still effectively renting access to hardware that you don't directly own
If we're imagining a co-op, then the participants should all be equal owners in an organisation that owns the hardware itself, otherwise it's not much of a co-op really.
But at that point you don't have the same sort of security guarantees about the hardware. This isn't like a farming co-op where a single expensive piece of equipment gets passed around to each participant one week at a time. There needs to be either an economic, security, or other advantage to entering into this arrangement for a medium to large sized player that would otherwise be colocating multiple racks in a privately owned datacenter or else renting bare metal instances in bulk from one of the hyperscalers.
Participants as equal owners doesn't preclude security guarantees.
The advantage is having a voice in setting direction, investment and ultimate shared incremental profit recovery over the rent capture from hyperscalers.
It's an interesting idea really. But it also comes with cooperation, which means trust, and a lot of for-profit enterprises are bad at operating cooperatively outside of 2- or 3- way engagements.
Would actually be a good biz model for the Colo facilities that keep shutting down as everyone moves to the big cloud providers.Now if they can get their hands on enough GPUs and RAM.
Incentives are pretty easy to align, if you have repeat customers and repetition. McDonald's sells me burgers I expect at a reasonable price, because they want me to come back tomorrow and not go across the street to Burger King.
There might be a community effort at some point. This happened in chess where the community recreated and then improved on Alpha Zero. You could run small training chunks on your machine. Some people donated thousands of hours of server time.
open weights model is like... Winamp for example.
it's free, you can download it and use it however you like, you could also do some binary patching or dll injections to alter it functionality but it's not enough to develop next version.
the same is with ai models, weights are the binary final artifacts. for development and improvements you need to have training data, pipelines, RL harnesses, etc.
also of you believe Chinese companies will be releasing weights indefinitely, you are not understanding motivations.
Chinese companies spend significant amounts of money to train a model so why they are releasing it for free? they basically provide researchers starting point for developing tooling and optimizations for serving the model in return. and also get some PR.
They also do not have to pay for inference of those models that much, as they probably serve them with loss anyways to gain market.
they are gov sponsored so money are not issue there, so they try to speedrun their way to what US companies have. And guess what happens when they reach it. they will stop releasing weights and increase pricing or will use them for gov purposes.
Was looking for this. It’s a great short story (it starts with real events and then predicts the future) leading to European fealty to US . Seems increasingly plausible.
True, but it was, until 2008, a somewhat less lopsided relationship.
Europe is becoming a museum and a retirement home. Young people leave to make their fortune and maybe return to have a family or avail of healthcare. And while I have nothing against old people my own street in a _very_ family-oriented suburb in the Netherlands is over 50% retirees.
Though I see the flow of migrants between the US and Europe has shifted, so there's a net gain of Americans in Europe. I wonder if it's where young people with dreams want to go, or if it's just where people like my in-laws (nice, culturally aware, but no longer very economically productive) who have a few million dollars in their 40's and want a pretty place to retire young, go.
Where you live? In both Spain and Sweden it's a fairly common topic in public discourse already, about how to move away from a bunch of US dependencies and so on.
Also in Finland and even in EU circles. Trump threatening to annex Greenland really woke up a lot of people. Tariffs didn’t help.
Even my parents who speak no English and aren’t spending time in US-based social media have taken a break from hating Russia for the Ukraine invasion to talking about how we need to get rid of the dependency on the US.
This boat is turning slowly but it won’t turn back anymore.
There was nothing "American-led" about the fact that societies that had been forced by Russia into submission for the entirety of the Cold War rushed toward whatever alliances they could to prevent the same thing from ever happening again. Poland even threatened to mobilize the Polish-Americans to tank Clinton's re-election if he tried to block Poland's entry into NATO, that's how "American-led" it was.
Not to mention how ridiculous the narrative of "provocation" is, I can almost hear "provokatsiya, provokatsiya" in Putin's weak and whiny old-man voice. Entry into NATO meant that NATO spent billions upon billions introducing proper civilian oversight of militaries in the new members, and other key features of first world countries. Former RU foreign minister Kozyrev hits the nail when he calls it free security for Russia.
I think you’ll find that it was mutually beneficial deal that traded soft-power for preferential agreements. As it started to crumble, we’ve begun diversifying and directed our schmoozing to better partners.
> [Washington] piles pressure on The Hague to halt ASML’s remaining exports and servicing of its DUVi machines.
> The Commission backs the Dutch [...]. The European position fragments before it has properly formed.
That the EU would, after recognizing AI's value, freely give up control of its few advantages to the US, despite of this being a conventional trade issue which the EU has experience with, seems like a very pessimistic assumption.
At the same historical turning point when Europeans are finally waking up to the need to become less dependent on their so called US ally for weapons production and security, they are immediately choosing to become dependent on the next layer of critical infrastructure.
Instead of learning the obvious lesson, Europe seems ready to purchase the future from whoever Washington allows it to purchase from. It used to be the guns, now it's the AI.
It is so idiotic and short sighted that you can barely even blame anyone who keeps exploiting this over and over again. It is always the same story.
Well this is not really a problem as big as it is presented on the social media. Stats simply do not support these claims.
The bigger issue is the growing number of retired woodworkers collecting pensions for much longer than the system was ever designed for. Life expectancy rose dramatically, yet the retirement age not. These retired woodworkers then vote for politicians who keep increasing their benefits, while costs are cut elsewhere. Add a declining birthrate, a trend started by previous generations, and you get a system that is politically almost impossible to reform. It will probably take a very hard societal crash before people seriously reconsider this old, inefficient model. Like in Greece, where pensions were cut on third of it's original size. Sadly, woodworkers never learn other way than this.
With ever present threat of war on the old continent because some woodworking tribes just can't supress their need to chop someone else, this is the biggest long term issue.
EU is very lucky USA still has very strict immigration policy.
If USA made it easy for highly skilled professionals to emigrate there then there would be almost no one capable left here.
> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop.
What's with this hallucination? The thread is about GPT-5.6. Your laptop can't even run gemma 4 unquantized bfloat16, which is light years behind GPT-5.6, and running it is light years from training it. If something that a laptop can train is insanely powerful for you, you don't need to worry about this thread at all.
This also completely screws over U.S. businesses. American startups will be forced to pay premium prices for nerfed, heavily-censored, 'compliant' models from a few massive corporations. Meanwhile, foreign startups will be running cheaper, unrestricted open-source AI. We'll price ourselves right out of the global market.
What government wants to have their population use foreign AI. (Not many). Only issue I see is good enough is what the majority might be okay with.
US intelligence has gamed this out and sees risks at the fringe - advanced artificial intelligence moves the needle the most in countries economically & politically dominated by the USA, the Global South are the targets of this, not US startups.
So far it's only US doing this. I don't think it's in anyone else's interest to limit development of open source models or chips. Nvidia has secured a leading position in GPU market by being the best overall, but if US continues to mess up with the export, that changes the calculation and surely we'll see the alternatives
Any country that developed sufficiently advanced models will pursue the same path. The EU as a regulatory body would pursue the same path, as will/is China.
It’s rather straightforward to think through. If China (they’re practically the only competitor) built a sufficiently advanced AI system would they allow it to propagate on the free market? Of course not. The fact of the matter is that they are behind, even if it’s just a little bit, so the best strategy they have is to try and compete with “good enough” models with lower/subsidized cost - but that is a losing strategy because AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy.
Likewise if, idk, France someone built an AI system that was valuable do you think they’d just hand it over for sworn enemy Donald J. Trump to utilized? Of course not.
The American strategy in the context of the current geopolitical landscape is the only valid one and the obvious one. If you find yourself criticizing the American strategy it’s because you aren’t in the arena where you would, inevitably, make the same decision to restrict access.
This isn't how things typically work. For instance the US is increasingly adversarial towards China yet China continues to largely power the US economy both through manufacturing and market access, which makes up an increasingly large share of all revenue for many US companies. Why? Because that position as a dependency is not only directly economically beneficial to themselves, but also provides leverage which can be utilized in extreme circumstances.
This isn't really going to achieve much besides incentivizing the growth of non-US models and minimizing market access for US-based models. I was expecting the US government to try to ban foreign models, which is also a self-own but orders of magnitude less than this. All this will do is greatly diminish the influence of the US in the future, and minimize the benefits they might reap from a global LLM explosion. It'd be like if 30 years ago, China decided that their manufacturing could only be used by white-listed individuals. Their economy and influence wouldn't be even a fraction of what it is today.
> This isn't really going to achieve much besides incentivizing the growth of non-US models and minimizing market access for US-based models.
The Catch-22 here is that the growth of non-US models is something Americans can take advantage of if they are successful while simultaneously denying access as deemed necessary by the US government to advanced American models.
If open source or models made outside the US surpass US controlled models, then the US would just switch to those and then American companies can leverage those models for their own development or for consumer sales or whatever.
If they don’t surpass US models (as I expect they won’t, though they will remain perhaps marginally useful) then the US maintains the lead in a positive feedback loop development.
If others start controlling advanced models and denying access to superior models developed outside of the United States (ex: China) then my assumption was correct.
I don’t think comparing China’s manufacturing capacity to the American manufacturing base makes a lot of sense in this context and as we know China has in fact weaponized that manufacturing capacity. If nothing else, the economic arrangement isn’t comparable partly because if Chinese factories stopped making iPhones or whatever they would simply not make anything and workers would lose jobs and such hurting the Chinese. Today if the United States government prevents Chinese users from accessing advanced American models there isn’t really a loss on the American side. Quite the opposite - these models will accelerate productivity and industrial capability for the country as a whole and make it more competitive economically.
> AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy
People claim that AGI is. AI is turning out to be a fairly competitive but “normal” product. Companies carving out niches on cost, quality, and speed.
If it was a winner take all OpenAI’s head start would have been decisive. For years ChatGPT was far ahead of everyone, then Anthropic released Opus 3, then OpenAI released 4o, then in mid 2025 it seemed like everyone had strong reasoning models including Google with Gemini 2.5, and now Claude is probably the best coding model. So taking the top spot is not a guarantee you can hold it.
Also the top model becomes a prime target for distillation, making it easier for competitors to keep up.
I don’t think they have. I used to think that Claude sucked because of the harness so I tried it on opencode and it was still trash.
I’m sure if the primary problem I was solving was multi file complex exploits it would be better but even that I am not sure of. I’ve always found the it’s too dangerous claims to be a bit underwhelming.
Can a model turn crap? shouldn't it be consistent once realized? Isn't it probably Anthropic facing capacity problems and comitting fraud by silently routing you to smaller models for the price of the current Claude?
I think you view this situation from the US point of view and assume that China has the same guiding principles and values in their foreign policy, for which it doesn't.
They might do what you said, of course.
But they very well might also treat LLMs as another goodwill investment like the Belt and Road Initiative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative) and export the capability to partner countries, for example, in Africa, to strengthen relationships.
A lot of it was financed through large (sometimes unsustainable) loans to recipient countries, sometimes leading to unsustainable debt burdens, irrespective of the potential ROI for the recipient (ie Sri Lanka’s port).
In many cases, much of that debt paid for Chinese companies, contractors, suppliers, and imported workers who built or operated the projects.
And the infrastructure didn’t necessarily line up with the recipient’s actual needs, mostly with China’s (ie the Laos–China railway, in large part financed by Laotian debt, which may someday bring some benefits to Laos, but mostly serves China’s regional trade ambitions).
Not to say other countries do it better or have purer ambitions or whatever. It’s just the "goodwill" part that made me twitch.
Can you argue that the principle of the BRI is humanitarian and it should benefit both partners, but not equally? Imho, that policy is far better for humanity than blockading Cuba, bombing Venezuela and Iran.
> A lot of it was financed through large (sometimes unsustainable) loans to recipient countries, sometimes leading to unsustainable debt burdens, irrespective of the potential ROI for the recipient (ie Sri Lanka’s port).
I see that you blame China for Sri Lanka, while China wasn't the only creditor there.
> And the infrastructure didn’t necessarily line up with the recipient’s actual needs
> Can you argue that the principle of the BRI is humanitarian
No. You can argue some projects, if done well, benefit both sides. That doesn’t make it humanitarian. It makes it basic foreign policy.
> China wasn’t the only creditor there.
I didn’t say it was. I said Hambantota was a costly development failure for Sri Lanka, and Chinese lending was part of that specific project and problem. Basically, that unlike your "goodwill" claim, China isn’t just giving away infrastructure for free out of the goodness of its government’s heart.
Don’t make me say what I did not.
> Easy to say in hindsight.
Yes. That’s why development and debt are hard problems. Also why calling it “goodwill” is, at best, too generous.
> Better than blockading Cuba / bombing Iran / etc.
“The US also does very bad stuff” doesn’t make BRI goodwill. Plus, there are more than two countries in the world. Some even try viable (if self-interested) development policy without bombing people.
> Yes. That’s why development and debt are hard problems. Also why calling it “goodwill” is, at best, too generous.
One can call the intent 'goodwill'. It doesn't mean that the outcome is satisfactory for your economic expectations. Judging from exceptions is not a valid approach and is a weird take.
> “The US also does very bad stuff” doesn’t make BRI goodwill.
True. I used that as an example of an alternative approach. The reader can decide which one is more 'goodwill'.
> Some even try viable (if self-interested) development policy without bombing people.
What countries are you referring to here: France (Douala and Abidjan ports, North–South railway in Vietnam), Japan (also ports in Sri Lanka, Thilawa), something else?
> Don’t make me say what I did not.
That conclusion says more about your reading than about what I actually wrote.
> Basically, that unlike your "goodwill" claim, China isn’t just giving away infrastructure for free out of the goodness of its government’s heart.
I shoot back with "Don’t make me say what I did not.", and 'goodwill' doesn't mean 'free stuff', you may want to check the dictionary ;)
One can call anything anything. And intents can only be guessed at, while outcomes can actually be evaluated. The question is whether the label explains the policy.
BRI is state-backed finance tied to Chinese strategic, commercial, and diplomatic interests. Some projects may benefit recipients too. Great. That still doesn’t make "goodwill" a useful description of the principle.
> Judging from exceptions is not valid.
I’m not judging from one exception. I backed my point of view with examples of a broader pattern: debt-financed infrastructure, Chinese contractors/suppliers/operators capturing much of the spending, and projects that often also serve China’s trade and influence goals.
Feel free to provide substantive counter-examples instead of just waving the word "goodwill" around.
> I used that as an example of an alternative approach.
No, you used US violence as a contrast to make BRI look benevolent. That’s whataboutism. "Less bad than bombing" is not the same thing as goodwill.
> What countries are you referring to here: France (Douala and Abidjan ports, North–South railway in Vietnam), Japan (also ports in Sri Lanka, Thilawa), something else?
Given its own propensity to rely on bombing, I would not use France as an example. The EU-financed port and airport in Gaza, for all the good they were allowed to do, come to mind. Japanese development and aid efforts too, even if they, like most if not all state-sponsored efforts, come with strings attached.
> goodwill doesn’t mean free stuff
Obviously. But you’re the one explicitly framing it as humanitarian. If your "goodwill" consists of lending countries money for infrastructure that often serves the lender’s own strategic interests and pays its own companies, then I’m going to question the framing.
Unless, it just occurred to me, you meant "goodwill projects" in the sense of "projects aimed towards generating goodwill among recipient countries (and their population) toward China".
In which case, I’d still argue the frame is too narrow, but acknowledge I misunderstood your initial point and apologise.
More likely the PRC sees the open-weight models' progress as a way to prevent an existing dominant player from cementing their (finicky) lead and pulling up the ladder.
That strategy happens to have beneficial side effects to the global Hoi Polloi, but to attach any kind of benevolence to it would be naive.
How would open-weight models benefit PRC better than their own closed-weight models, but still available at lower prices? If anything, open-weights can be distilled far easier.
Because lower prices with closed weights would be severely compute constrained which would tightly cap the damage to american firms. As it is there's a plethora of providers (many of them american) serving up the cheap open weight models. Even tightly regulated industries with security concerns can use the latest deepseek.
It also enables further R&D using the open models as a starting point. That doesn't benefit china directly but it does serve to further undermine the lead that the american frontier labs have which limits their future ability to cut geopolitical adversaries off. In that sense it provides a long term hedge by minimizing the damage in the worst case scenario where china ends up suffering a crushing defeat in the AI race for whatever reason.
> Even tightly regulated industries with security concerns can use the latest deepseek.
That is not necessarily true, as "tightly regulated industries with security concerns" are also afraid of deepseek models generating vulnerable code. Even a possibility of that prevents those industries from deployments.
> That doesn't benefit china directly but it does serve to further undermine the lead that the american frontier labs have which limits their future ability to cut geopolitical adversaries off.
So, basically, competition is bad for US models? That argument doesn't address open-weights. And it doesn't work the other way around, because in that case China should be releasing close-weights instead.
> So, basically, competition is bad for US models?
Having less of a lead is bad for US frontier labs.
> That argument doesn't address open-weights.
Open weights does far more to further that goal than closed weights ever could. The bit right before the sentence you quoted was about enabling further R&D using open models as a starting point. In the same way that open weights serves as a force multiplier when it comes to flooding the market with cheap inference it also serves as a force multiplier if your goal is the raise the R&D floor. In this scenario a reasonable move for a capable opponent that's lagging behind is to attempt to raise the floor of the whole market so as to erode the position of whoever is in the lead.
Also consider that (as I previously mentioned) raising the capabilities of the global market as a whole serves to minimize damage in a worst case scenario. If you find yourself needing to depend on a foreign supplier for a key technology then it's better to have as many choices as possible from as many different jurisdictions as possible.
Thinking like a business vs. thinking like a state.
If you see a given technology as fundamental[tm], you want to ensure that you will retain access to it AND its ongoing development. China may well foresee a possible future where US imposes export controls and global sanctions to block PRC from having access to the necessary equipment to either train or use the most advanced models - let alone its alternate parallel universe where US might go as far as prevent anyone else than US themselves having the most advanced forms of the technology at all.[ß]
To ward off such a scenario, China doesn't need to become the sole leading supplier. They only need to guarantee that nobody else can even try to block them off, and that the technology itself can never be yanked.
Well, you are wrong. Maybe you should visit and learn more about China to understand it.
For starters, China's society is high-individualistic with a strong sense of community and with high respect to their elders.
On the contrary, US's society is hyper-individualistic with a strong sense of family and basic respect to their elders.
> Any country that developed sufficiently advanced models will pursue the same path.
Looking at most of the available evidence, Mythos is an incremental upgrade over other models and nowhere near the implied advancement that this seems to point to. I guess you could be right in that a sufficient advancement would cause this type of withholding of it, but I think it's kind of silly to think that the US has reached that level.
I don’t think the ai market has been around long enough to prove winner take all, I see it more like a commodity which is why the winner quickly switched from OpenAI to Anthropic at least on coding.
I generally find the Chinese models to be superior. If you look at the token pricing or hosting cost it’s still about 80% margin on Chinese models. Deep cuts should still be possible.
> AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy
AGI sure. But I don't think we're going to get there in our lifetimes, if ever. There are too many structural and physical limitations. One everyone seems to be catching onto now is that they're running out of human data and are incestuously feeing AI output to itself as input.
Current state AI is barely an improvement over where it was fifty years ago. We just have stronger hardware and more content to train on. We need a new paradigm. One that hasn't come in half a century.
the only people its relevant for is the people in first. We wont know what any other state would do until someone passes the us, if that happens.
it sucks that we're in a place where the us has an dishonest leadership, because the current situation would be pretty reasonable if any other admin was in charge.
let models go free, until one proves dangerous in the real world then require gov approval after that.
I don't think anyone rational would have the position everyone should have insta access at the same time to the highest model once it crosses the point of enabling actual dangerous things.
These frontier models are now good enough that they can assist heavily with new optimizations for future models, including, code them. Restricting their usage to a few companies takes away that advantage away from other companies, thereby, limiting new vendors from competing with OpenAI.
> Restricting their usage to a few companies takes away that advantage away from other companies, thereby, limiting new vendors from competing with OpenAI.
wait, are you saying a competitor needs access to an OpenAI model in order to build a competing model?
Nothing new in that. Everyone pays to someone or the other to make their own product/life better. Most of the times these products do not compete, sometimes, they do.
How many times you believe duckduckgo would have google'd stuff just to create a competitor to Google itself? I believe thousands of times.. could be more.
OpenAI cannot claim the code their models produce as their own since their own models used codes from public internet during training to produce new code.
I agree with your point, but to play devils advocate: doesn't a competitor arguably need access to these beyond-frontier models to even become an effective competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic?
You could produce a completely fcked up model using AI, and also a completely awesome one using AI. So, the "overstating capabilities" part really have nothing to do with this discussion.
As for the claim part around AI being used to assist further AI development, I have already told to read Anthropic's blog post. You can take help from chatgpt, if needed.
> the U.S. government would initially approve who gets access to its latest new release while AI companies and the administration work out a longer-term plan for regulation on the sector.
So you're a new vendor with a GPT-5.6 or Mythos class model. How do you suppose the regulations are going to work? First you need to get on the list of companies that are allowed to release models, and then you need to have a whole system for limiting access. Both are going to be hugely expensive, on top of training new models already being insanely expensive to begin with.
Thus, it's not a legal limit, but a real practical limit because it's too expensive. If only OpenAI and Anthropic and Google can afford to jump through the hoops, they've effectively gotten to "limit new vendors from competing with OpenAI".
> So you're a new vendor with a GPT-5.6 or Mythos class model. How do you suppose the regulations are going to work? First you need to get on the list of companies that are allowed to release models, and then you need to have a whole system for limiting access. Both are going to be hugely expensive, on top of training new models already being insanely expensive to begin with.
So your thesis is that someone has the resources to create a model at the level of Mythos or GPT 5.6 but bot have the resources to jump through the concomitant legal requirements?
Of course. The US government inserts itself into commerce, starts picking winners and losers, and thus creates an industry for petitioning gatekeepers at all levels for access. The goodfellas profit and the public pays. OpenAI and company get manufactured scarcity to raise margins, and lawmakers get to collect an entry fee. This was doomed to happen. The US is much closer to a total state than most give it credit for.
> Only companies approved by the government will get access. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model.
That sounds like more than just export control.
This means that big company A that the president has a business interest in could get access to the most powerful AIs, while a startup competing with it doesn't.
It's worth keeping in mind the broader context here politically. The president and his cabinet are generally pursuing policies of a strong unitary executive branch that centralizes "technocratic" functions under the control of politicians and political appointees. The majority in Congress doesn't appear to mind and seems to be actively sitting back from legislating on topics like this. The overall effect is that of creating a system in which the rules are deliberately uncertain and the only reliable way to get approval is by aligning yourself or your organization politically. It's a powerful technique for ensuring political compliance in the corporate world.
Well yeah, but that's the point of the whole unitary executive thing. Thete are quick cash grabs happening all over the place of course, but they are also setting up for a long-term systemization of corruption, backed by a radicalized narrow majority voter base. It's clear that they believe they will win the midterm elections, or that the opposition won't be able or willing to stop them meaningfully, and then win the next presidential election too.
I guess if the new model has the capability to do 'something' that's national security threat, then this makes sense. Otherwise this move makes zero sense, and actually is a drag on innovation - who wants to invest money and people to make a better model that can't actually be sufficiently sold to make a return on investment? Meanwhile other models from Europe or China that are better steal market share. Though that's not to say they won't do the same thing for the same reasons.
> Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated
Well, there was the kerfuffle around PS3 (IIRC) and 'supercomputers'. I suppose that would be the 2020s version of that. What's old is new again. Ultimately you can just continually wire together less powerful hardware to come up with something that can do the job.
They meant PS2. Japan was worried the processor was powerful enough to control missiles and put restrictions on how many can be sold to a single person and banned certain countries.
Double precision cell chips were reserved for military, I think (or maybe also blade processors). So doing any serious physics on them was dead in the water - same with macs tbh
This isn’t about keeping people from having the power of frontier LLMs. So tricks that let others have it aren’t a defeat of this policy.
This is export control, where the US government seeks to leverage the fact that these frontier models are US made. This is then leveraged against opponents, and likely also just for grift. There’s also perhaps a little legitimate worry about the implications of free access to, but that is secondary to the real goal.
> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop.
This is such hyperbole. You might be able to train a model that's merely useful in a single domain, but to say you can train an 'insanely powerful' model on consumer hardware is laughable.
If GLM-6 is made publicly available[1], will that change your predictions of how they will behave in the future, or your understanding of their motivations in the present?
[1] I am certainly no expert of Chinese AI policy, but I fear you are attributing US values and goals to the Chinese govt.
From where I stand, they appear to be very different though. China is seeking to increase influence, whereas the US (seems to be) seeking to become more insular. China is actively persuing the world-leader role, while the US dismantles soft-power tools like USaid, and alienates countries pursuing obviously flawed military excursions.
Regulatory capture doesn't necessarily mean the regulated get to decide what the regulators do in precise steps. It can simply mean they support and exist within a regulatory regime that greatly benefits the regulated.
In fact, you generally don't want them directly telling the regulators what to do. Instead, the regulators make complex, costly rules that only large establishment players can follow. The regulators look like they're doing their job; the regulated enjoy higher margins and protection from disruption.
How does this benefit the regulated? I'd say it dooms the regulated:
* with the government requiring the regulated to obtain approval to add each customer, they're losing a massive number of their customers
* and even if a customer gets approved, every such customer now sees that access to the regulated can (and has been) shutoff with no notice if the gov doesn’t like the provider or customer - it's now a massive supply chain risk for any customer to use a regulated provider
* the regulated losing a massive part of their customer base for both of the above reasons means significant impairment of their revenue, as well as their valuation, and staying ahead of their competitors and open models requires massive ongoing investment
> they're losing a massive number of their customers
Who are they losing them to? They're the only game in town.
> it's now a massive supply chain risk for any customer to use a regulated provider
But seeing as there is no alternative use them they will.
> the regulated losing a massive part of their customer base
But they aren't. Access to existing models isn't being pulled. It is only access to previously unreleased models that is being restricted going forward.
> Open models are mere months behind.
Presumably the government will strategically ease restrictions as open models gain ground.
That's just vanilla regulation. Yes it tends to create market inefficiencies, by definition. Capture entails industry corrupting and directing regulatory bodies.
Exactly! The thing that squeezes out new entrants isn't only the compliance cost, it's that your whole roadmap ends up resting on access you don't control.
We already saw the terms moved under us once with Fable, the retention policy changed and some requests started routing to a weaker model, none of us small operators had any say in that. Now access itself is a government decisions.
For anyone building on top of these APIs that's the real barrier, not the rule-following overhead but the fact that the ground can shift mid-flight and you can't negotiate with whoever's moving it.
Which is exactly why open weights start looking less like ideology and more like risk management.
The other answers are also valid, but lest we not forget, Sam is openly a fascist supporter and is clearly in bed with the regime in that he funded 47's campaign and jumped in to rescue Hegseth's automated kill list with OpenAI's GPT when Anthropic refused. Furthermore they are likely operating on some kind of quid pro quo agreement even if it's not public knowledge, because that's how all this bribery stuff works. Bezos agreed to use his media empire including WaPo to spout MAGA propaganda, for example. It's trump's one and only MO so to assume it doesn't apply here would be insane.
So, while OpenAI may not in a legal/technical sense, be the benefactory, that is not required for the term to apply, AND they may as well be considered party to the creation of the regulation since they have openly lobbied for it, openly inserted themselves into the government apparatus both formally and informally, and likely are co-conspirators to whatever Trump's autocratic self-enrichment scheme is.
it's not regulatory capture, because they are not regulating what customers can use - it's limiting what some companies can serve. it's way less impactful to the market as a whole.
Countries who've made the mistake of allying with the US might face sanctions or some sort of threats. People will just use Chinese AI then. This is the US biting itself in the ass.
That's often how regulatory capture works. It seems bad for the incumbents, but it's worse for any future competitor. As long as the cost of complying with the regulation is less than your expected loss from competition entering the market, then it's net positive for the incumbent.
I think this is plain old regulation, not regulatory capture. For it to be the latter we'd need evidence than it was the incumbents who designed this oversight which they then asked the white house to rubber stamp.
Anthropic and OpenAI: Dear Uncle Sam, it seems laptops became too powerful, can you please do something
Uncle Sam: For national security reasons starting from now on every purchase of GPU model with higher than X Petaflops will need written permission by the US president
Anthropic and OpenAI: Look poor citizens, we are willing to share our capacity with you in limited form, by using our LLM you can avoid spending 35 years in the waiting list to buy a GPU, by the way, to simplify pricing, here is our new pricing with 5700% increase. Enjoy
It's the age old "Help me, politicians. You're my only hope".
Anthropic, Open AI & Co. realized at some point that if they can't make money with barely any competition they sure as hell won't if the market is flooded. So here they are slamming the door behind them.
> Anthropic, Open AI & Co. realized at some point that if they can't make money with barely any competition they sure as hell won't if the market is flooded. So here they are slamming the door behind them.
Jokes on them, there won't be new entrants not because the door is shut but because it doesn't actually make money. The whole scheme is propped up by illusions to grift the investors, fewer competition only breaks the illusion. But I guess those folks aren't the types to understand "rising tide lifts all boats", or in this case, rising sewage buoys all rats.
its not about whether you can shock anyone, if anyone is driving cars outside, you can't say you have SOTA-horse to go from A to B.
When models are good, expectations are adjusted accordingly to deliver things on par with the whole industry, you can't just say, I have built my own Intel Pentium II, now I will try to use it to compile Electron App and run 3DS Max there
You don't need SOTA-level LLMs to create value with AI. Hell, you can build good solutions with a simple small finetuned models.
> When models are good, expectations are adjusted accordingly to deliver things on par with the whole industry, you can't just say, I have built my own Intel Pentium II, now I will try to use it to compile Electron App and run 3DS Max there.
I know you are taking your analogy to its breaking point but it really depends on what you are doing. I know people that use 10+-year old thinkpads and they do just fine.
I agree with you but to be fair I also think that even 10 year old hardware is insanely powerful by any reasonable metric. Modern computers are truly ridiculous when considered in historical context.
Nick Bostrom wondered aloud in Superintelligence (2014) why states would allow individuals and private organizations to develop AGI. If one takes the possibility seriously, AGI would a source of immense power and any state would to take that opportunity for itself.
Edit: Not saying whether AGI is right around the corner, that's a different discussion. I'm just saying that a serious possibility of AGI and an understanding of possible consequences will make a state act.
AGI is religion invented for the stupid. There's no world in which a silly LLM can make intelligent decisions. It's all smoke and mirrors to make insane amounts of money and to maintain the sheep agreeing with the powerful.
With the twist that it will end up involving payments that directly benefit Trump, following the Mafia business model that he learned in the construction industry and that he's brought to the White House.
GPUs and computer hardware prices have been on the rise. I can see a twisted perspective where it’s stated that the US government needs to closely control computer hardware that can run particular LLMs, as a national security interest. At least that idea isn’t completely wild now seeing what we have been experiencing.
Remember those weird conspiracies we used to have about universal surveillance; tracking and so forth? Well if you think back to those and whatever might happen with GPUs and hardware, and LLM restrictions or the likely age gating//ID’ing that is to come from this, that’s a good guiding framework for how this will proceed and affect normal people.
I take it you've never known anyone who has tried to run even a small consumer AI company. Do you think that they all independently come up with the same censorship rules, despite no law mandating them? Why do you think that is? That they are just that well-thought out that everyone happens to agree with that same intersecting boundary?
For the sake of argument, let's grant that there's some conspiracy that makes them all have the same rules. And conspiracy in a loose sense: perhaps it's the government dictating the rules.
I still don't understand how buying bitcoin lets me route around that.
Even gold coins buried in my garden won't get you access to Fable.
You're making straw man examples, but if you want to understand more, I suggest any paper on Bitcoin.
Personally, I'm not a fan of it. But the thesis is real, and it might have delivered on its promise if the world wasn't actually full of scumbags and scammers (each one accidentally contributing to making Big Banks look like the lesser of the evils).
please don’t answer in questions. state specifically what you mean so we can discuss what your point is, not guess what it is you’re implying with vague questions.
Listen to yourself. I'll write in my style, you write in yours. In what world is it anything less than obnoxious to say that? Time to hit the logout button for me permanently I say. https://imgur.com/a/L8hoqhp
> Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated to ensure that illegal LLMs aren't being processed on your machine?
Actually that sounds pretty reasonable considering current regulations regarding almost any other important resource / material that affect the general population.
You Gen-Z people serously need what Free software, Free society meant. We fought against people like you and against treacherous computing. And we will do again.
I hope this doesn't become the new norm where government becomes the bottleneck for innovation in the AI space.
It's worrying that with no formal and transparent policy framework that the government will be picking winners and losers and stifling innovation.
There's been no public policy, executive order, legislation, or otherwise on this, I wonder if anyone has filed FOIA requests for these decisions or the conversations between the Executive Branch and AI companies.
Indeed, I find quite ironic that some people in tech in the US complain about EU "regulations first" approach, but then their government seem to arbitrarily stop things from being released because, well, there is no established policy on safety guarantees or other similar aspects.
I see it too, but worth noting that this is basically unprecedented at least within the last 25 years; I think you have to go back to export controlled cryptography for another example of this kind of abrupt and targeted regulation.
Huawei, Foreign gambling sites were banned on dubious reasons in 2006 (in reality American companies weren't as competitive and las Vegas needed to be protected), Japanese electronic tariffs in the 80s/90s ...
The US believed in free trade precisely when the politically connected needed labor arbitrage, and protectionism exactly when the politically connected needed protection. The pretense of underlying ideals was never more than a political tool - political economy was always political.
It depends on whether you believe US action is overdetermined, but I think if Trump didn’t get elected we would have continued on the path of free trade. His election wasn’t predestined. He had just the right mix of features to win at the time, but if this basket of features didn’t exist it’s not hard to imagine the country going down a very different path.
If we had continued on the path of free trade without "dealing in" those displaced by free trade, the pressure would have continued to grow. It certainly could have exploded in a different direction, at a different time, with a different champion, but so long as it was repressed instead of addressed it was always destined to explode.
Explosions are rarely productive. Populists are notorious for delivering lots of chaos and few results.
It's easier for everyone to just deal in the economic losers, but we didn't do that, and now they are burning the house down. This will not get them what they want, but they will continue doing it anyway.
True, and we've been here before. The industrial revolution got rid of the need for most labor, which at the time was overwhelmingly agricultural and textile. We came out the other side OK.
But there was a lot of pain. Living conditions got worse and stayed worse for entire lifetimes before they got better, and they didn't get better because the people who won decided to deal in the people who lost, they got better because the world went to war and incinerated most of its capital, literally and metaphorically, and the regrowth happened under conditions of scarce labor rather than abundant labor, allowing the people on the bottom to strike a decent deal the second time around.
That, uhh, won't happen the same way again. Now we have robots and nukes. But it's true that without the benefit of hindsight I'd have had an apocalyptic view going into the last kerfuffle, I'd have been wrong, and it would have been due to a failure of imagination. Let's all hope that I am wrong again, but the mechanism will again have to be a failure of imagination, and it takes a lot of optimism to fit my hope squarely inside my blind spot.
George Friedman disagrees with you: he's been saying for years that US trade policy towards China had to change no matter who won the 2016 election (because an economy cannot rely on a trade partner it might go to war with, among other reasons).
When last year the Trump admin started interdicting oil shipments out of Venezuela, it left shipments heading to China intact. Then during Trump's visit to China, the two parties made a lot of progress on trade and other issues (in part because Beijing's attitude improved because the first Trump administration's restrictions on trade underlined to Beijing how dependent China is on trade with the US).
Taking that political scenario as an example. Was the decline caused simply because Harley kept to the same working formula refusing to innovate for competition? As to the likes of Honda and Co?
Manufacturing is cheaper if you have access to resources and such. Japan may of had abundant of but in this case I don't feel it's was all about manufacturing costs.
Was it a cash cow situation, where their one formula was working but as well as where Harley were reluctant to invest in a different avenue, to innovate causing cow to dry up.
And that is when they called in the government to settle? That is always the impression I seem to receive.
Excluding manufacturing costs was it because they were scared of an innovation being a failure?
The same cash cow formula can be seen with the likes of Disney Pixar and Toy Story 5, a pointless movie plot at this point where if money was invested, a new creation could be born.
A current account deficit is a capital account surplus, assets and exports compete in the balance of payments, an asset windfall kills exports by increasing the currency hurdle and embedded asset price.
What you are seeing is "the bar" for a successful manufacturing business increasing until only the most profitable are left -- things like chips, things like shell companies that exist to monetize a brand. "New growth" isn't highly profitable so it never has a chance to get started (unless a recipient of an asset windfall is willing to finance it all the way to "the bar" -- see: Elon Musk).
Weakening the dollar would make the export sector happy, but if you did enough of it to make the US export sector strong you would make assets unhappy. In fact, we have front row seats to this very lesson which appears to be even stronger in reality than it is in theory: we are already seeing yields rise despite a dollar that is still strong enough to crush exports.
Assets have had such a stranglehold over US politics for the last 50 years that if we ever actually run pro-export policy it won't be due to doomed self-promotion by exports (we even have a term for the pattern where this fails on first contact with tradeoffs: TACO) it will be because assets self-sabotage, implode, and exports fill the vacuum.
Ah. I get it now. A established economic model is provable and that in five years you can forecast that if you follow X guide you'll end up on top with Y.
If competition is on the scene then how can you assure me that myself taking the risk of investing will return me the sum I wish for in return.
Production has already been established but the threat is in that an another forecastable model exists and that to catch up to their market will require more investment and expenditure which could lead in less chance of a return. And even if the model is copyable; as like the trope of Chinese knockoffs to of Japanese products, you're still at a lower advantage.
It's not they don't want to innovate but the risk to gamble on innovation is high enough that you could stifle competition cheaper via governmental means.
This slows their forecast and where you can then strategise to overcome the competition rather than risking expenditure via innovation. Crafty, cheers.
It's worth tracing this through every level in order to get the causality correct.
Triffin's Dilemma says that in the case of the modern USA, assets will be pumped. Macroeconomics says asset pump = export dump.
The way that economics dumps exports is by raising the bar (strong currency = poor customers, expensive assets = expensive houses = expensive labor, costs go up, price goes down, profitability is squeezed). Eventually the bar became impossible to hop without a cheat code like "good brand and no R+D" or "software level profitability".
At the individual level, manufacturing pay went in the shitter as the jobs dried up while house prices and stock prices went through the roof... so everyone who could became real estate agents, or doctors overcharging real estate agents, or sellers of investment scams to venture capitalists.
What's wild is that this happened to the Spanish, the Dutch, the English, and by the 1960s Triffin could see that it would happen to the US as well.
If you want details from an economist who does his homework, "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.
"Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective by Ha-Joon Chang"
"How did the rich countries really become rich? In this provocative study, Ha-Joon Chang examines the great pressure on developing countries from the developed world to adopt certain 'good policies' and 'good institutions', seen today as necessary for economic development. His conclusions are compelling and disturbing: that developed countries are attempting to 'kick away the ladder' with which they have climbed to the top, thereby preventing developing countries from adopting policies and institutions that they themselves have used."
The entire US auto industry is predicated on protectionism. Without it the Japanese would have wiped out GM/Ford/Chrysler in the 1980s, and now the Chinese in the 2020s-2030s.
TikTok ban was the worst one because it was about speech, not trade or security. If the bill said "China banned our social media so we're gonna ban theirs in reciprocity," that'd be a way more valid reason.
It's also super annoying being collateral damage in America's war on free speech. Canadian TikTok is now also being similarly moderated for content unfriendly of your administration. I guess we're still in a position of privilege where we can grow domestic social platforms to compete while American simply have no alternatives - anything that grows sufficiently large will be turned towards similar propaganda aims.
> Canadian TikTok is now also being similarly moderated for content unfriendly of your administration.
I feel like this has to do more with the consolidation you typically see international companies do with their North American operations than anything. More often than not do things have to go across the border for warranty repair. Even when a 'local' Canadian presence exists (like Asus has), they themselves generally act as a middleman between you and their 'parent' operation in the US. It would not be surprising to find out that TikTok US operates the Canadian version as well.
China didn't even blanket ban them. They established laws that Internet companies have to follow and most U.S. tech companies refused to comply. Some did (e.g. Bing) and aren't banned.
All social media is a toxic, ad-driven, algo-fueled surveillance tool at this point. Just regulate it all, equally, into the ground if we want to do society a service.
The fact that China's version of TikTok is nothing like what's available in the US should showcase how much the USG gives zero F's about it's citizens regardless of the political party you lean towards.
DJI, Huawei and the list goes on. Definitely no need to go back "25 years". The USG is turning into a joke of a surveillance state. As if any of the US based tech is truly any less backdoor'd? Cisco and Flock and Google and Facebook and Microsoft, oh what amazing technology companies that could never be used for... Oh wait, what a fantastic endgame we're on course for! I wonder why other nations are actively moving away from US tech?
A real headscratcher isn't it? And from a government that is supposedly priding itself on small government. How should companies navigate this? What's the framework they should operate within?
Claiming the mantle of "small government" was simply an exercise in marketing to relax regulation meant to prevent bribery and corruption. In practice, the current slate of government officials believes in absolute control of whatever they want whenever they want.
It's a mirror case of the supposed "free speech absolutists" who immediately turned around and silenced, sued, fired or jailed once granted the power to do so.
This was certainly the rallying cry behind DOGE and the general push to rip the entrails out of many federal agencies. Combatting "waste" and "inefficiency," with strong implications that most of what those agencies do is pointless government meddling.
Whether he's actually driving towards small government with that or anything else - in the good-faith spirit of that policy - that's definitely up for debate.
No I’m asking if ever said he was for small government.
From 2015 Trump has positioned himself as opposed to that style of republicanism. He offered a different playbook and the base followed.
What is happening is 40-50+ year olds haven’t updated their map of reality and continue to use talking political points from when they were 25.
One of the critiques of small government is its valueless. Instead of having to argue for or against positions you just say you don’t like it because it’s out of scope. Well now the inverse thing is happening in this thread. People are just saying he’s in violation of a small government principle he never espoused.
You are misled/misleading. Get informed about the political theory of domestic deployment of troops for the purpose of policing in western democracues. Look how those who speak for the U.S. military personell (former generals, the editorial of that magazine they produce in the U.S. army prior to being pruned) if you need some motivation.
Good grief. I hadn't been watching reddit or the news today so you had me go check. Should've known. Friday at market close on the dot. So much for that deal huh.
Oh yes, the country that lost basically all its navy, air force, a large number of military facilities and couldn't defend its airspace. Iran won a lot indeed!
There is one major reason why oligarchs are in favor of small government, when it's in their way. Another commenter said it already: it's only about power.
The most important part of the mafia state is making everyone else a participant. It enforces your personal power and once in the system those parties will do things they would never imagine doing when they were outside of it.
It's also a defensive self-interest: A corrupt senior who takes bribes is indirectly threatened by any junior with a clean record, because they aren't "in the same boat."
So each wave corrupts (or eliminates) members of the next, in order to secure the safety of their own retirement when they won't have direct power.
This whole administration is absolutely rampant with corruption. Just yesterday we had JD Vance on TV saying that if Watergate happened today, it would just be a 12 hour news story, because they are getting away with so much worse.
Anyone who denies or defends this administration's corruption is complicit.
Can you point to examples in the past of a sitting US president pardoning the people who broke into a government building and tried to overthrow an election? Or one who accepted bribes for pardons? Started an unregulated cash exchange we can get accept money from foreign governments without oversight? What about giving their family members no-bid defense contracts?
Munitions exporting. I fondly remember the PGP feasco. I spent years using PGP to encrypt my emails to several people who refused to use email without it. Good times.
Yeah, that's what we need, frontier intelligence models open in the wild that, if a jailbreak is reliably established, there's no possibility for anyone to ever patch at the API layer. Because there is no API layer.
Between $5-10T of the US economy is subject to export controls. Nobody disputes that Mythos is dual-use technology, which means it has been export controlled since the day it was created.
Companies are responsible for demonstrating criteria to export (for example) a nerfed version (Fable) of an export controlled item (Mythos)
Nothing here is novel, unusual, capricious, or … fascisistic.
We saw what happened with banning nvidia flagship compute GPU exports to China; it just spurred them to develop a domestic semiconductor industry while still importing black market GPUs at a minor markup. The US would do well to keep the world dependent on American products that are under the jurisdiction of the US government, and can therefore be regulated or killswitched. All this will do is allow China to have flagship model capabilities without being subject to the US at all.
In some cases, even just bringing a 24K gold desk ornament to the WH is enough; but I suspect these tributes to Dear Leader are subject to inflation, possibly exponentially so.
That threat will probably result in a DOJ investigation into everyone involved until they hit something they think they can prosecute someone for, even if it's not true.
They could double down though, like actually follow through with just 1b and then threaten to do an extra 1b periodically until the investigations are dropped
Did you mean this in the French Revolution sense (the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners) or in the American sense (the legislative, judicial, and executive branches)?
The French Revolution sense would be an ironic counterpoint, because the Revolutionaries did end up capturing all three estates, only to fall to someone (Napoleon) who captured the military, which wasn't considered one of the "three estates" because at the start of the French Revolution destroying civil society, enacting a military dictatorship, and starting a series of wars throughout Europe was considered outside the Overton Window.
This perhaps holds some lessons for America today.
Ironic is claiming that Napoleon destroyed civil society, when his reforms are in many ways the foundation for modern civil society. Rule of law, national public education, the concept of a national bank, formation of the middle class, and so on. To say that Napoleon destroyed civil soceity is just plain wrong, Napoleon founded modern civil society.
To be fair, he (the national assembly really) stole the whole "all men being equal" and all the ideas on accessible readable law thing from the Dutch after the Dutch "joined" the French Republic. It's also very likely that Napoleon would've turned out like any other despot if he had held power longer.
I think there is a layer of truth to the idea that MAGA captured what England would call the Fourth Estate, the News Media.
England is weird because its model looks like that French model, except that it intertwines the nobility and clergy. Basically an Archbishop and a Earl both sit in Parliament as Lords, while the Commoners control only the Commons of the Parliament. Now today the Commons runs things, but that's relatively modern, in the 19th Century it was completely normal for the Prime Minister to be a Lord, and while some of them were only technically Lords, having in fact been elected but just also nobility anyway for one reason or another, or being ennobled while serving as PM because nobody thought that was a bad idea - others were never elected at all.
So weirdly the place which came up with the "Fourth Estate" only really had two other estates, although everyone reading will have known about the French concept too.
In the era when Lords routinely become PM (it would still be legal to do this today, but it's hard to imagine it happening, although the Tories did give a Lord one of the Great Offices of State so never say never) almost all those Lords were born into it. Today basically nobody sat in the Lords was born to it (there are about two dozen left, when they die or retire that's the end of it) but there are still always a dozen or so bishops, and Iran is ironically the only other place [except the Vatican which barely counts] where religious leaders are in government by fiat in the modern world...
Edited to mention the Vatican before somebody else does.
MAGA has captured the media, if not entirely by design, but entirely in practice.
Thanks to a combination of attacks from the executive, attacks from the oligarchs (Buy a paper and fire everyone who says things you don't like), or the simple fact that sane-washing MAGA insanity sells papers, the 'independent' press is everything but.
It is non-stop carrying water for the most insane lunacy, and is trying to convince us that it is fine and normal and desirable.
So I find claims that MAGA (or any other group) has captured the media to be self-contradictory: if they actually had, you would not be writing that, and I would not be able to read it. By definition. Capturing the media means that there is only one official narrative, and the population is completely unaware of anything outside of that narrative. Like the period from ~1950-1995, where you had the big 3 TV networks, and then each city had their own newspaper that basically owned a local monopoly, and they all basically printed/aired the same stories and same viewpoints.
IMHO what we're actually seeing is a huge fragmentation of the 4th estate. There is now a viewpoint on the Internet for everything, no matter how insane. That's part of what people don't like about it. This fragmentation of media has allowed airtime for MAGA views that would've been considered far outside the Overton Window just a decade ago, but that was the point of the Internet. And it's not really to the exclusion of other views, it's just that you have to go looking for the other views.
No. Firstly no, the Network is just that, it's technology, you're describing culture, and the culture is a choice made by people of how to use that technology.
But also, this idea that somehow now that one guy who believes San Francisco doesn't exist is "media" whereas in 1990 he's not is insane. That's a choice you've made to re-define "random crazy people" as media, the Internet didn't do that. If anything changed magically in 1995 it's how you defined what does or doesn't count as media.
I find the definition that unless the capture is 100%, it isn't actually capture to be absurd.
Any strong, independent media ecosystem would not be so consistently sane-washing the firehose of crazy that we're being hit with every week, or kowtowing with such regularity.
Yes, you can find some obscure blog that will broadcast literally any cherrypicked viewpoint. That's not the majority of the media consumed in this country. Even when the owners of the networks differ, the message they broadcast is incredibly homogeneous.
The MSM doesn't count as much because of social media noise and paywalls. One could always control the narrative with tweets written in caps with multiple exclamation signs that the MSM reproduces and amplifies for fun and prifit.
But your government is constantly acting illegally. Isn't it time for Americans to... do something? It's clear that your legal framework isn't working.
Do what, exactly? Throw away our lives? 40% of the nation would rather die than vote for anyone other than a racist, and another 40% would tsk-tsk and say “that’s not how you’re supposed to do it”. There’s no revolution coming to save the day.
I think the founding fathers were pretty clear about what the American people are expected to do if the systems they put into place aren't enough to preserve freedom. If the colonists had just bent over and spread their cheeks saying "We sure hate being fucked but oh well! what else can we do? Throw away our lives?" we'd still have a king instead of just a wannabe. I'd be very nice if things don't come to that, but ultimately the responsibility to preserve our freedom and democracy is ours. It seems like there are plenty of people lined up to take them from us if we're willing to surrender them. The problem we have now is that an uncomfortably large minority seem happy to do just that.
This is a super reductive reading of the American revolution. The idea of the colonies self governing was popular as hell, for obvious reasons. Our current situation is nowhere near the same thing. The people that aren’t frothing-at-the-mouth fascists are still, overall, comfortable enough in their daily lives that they wouldn’t consider violence against the government for a second. We can’t even get 40% of them to go vote.
You want to fight 80% of the nation? Be my guest, but for a violent revolution to be anything but a suicide mission you need to flip those numbers, or have the military on your side. And if you think the US military will flip against capital because of some strongly-held belief of “liberty” I have a bridge to sell you.
The only thing we can do is try to convince other people that this shit does actually matter. We’re so far in the hole, though, that it’s going to take a long fucking time to dig ourselves out. It’s not going to be some glorious revolution.
Federal income tax didn’t exist until over a century after the founding fathers… founded. The idea was states… that would be united… which is where they got the name.
Federal politicians were not meant to have politics be their full time job, which is why congress has sessions.
The founding fathers would be extremely sad about the state of the country today. The frog was boiled too long ago for a revolution of the commoners to have any legs. They put in what they thought were explicit safeguards that have been systematically diluted, changed, or misinterpreted since the documents were created.
Maybe it's time to use those guns you always claim you need to keep in order to defend yourself from a government that is acting illegally? I mean isn't this THE EXACT REASON you always say you need them?
It’s a bit in general, because if you actually read the EU AI legislation, most of it follows the right ideas and provides more safety, in the sense that OpenAI and Anthropic used to pretend to care about, but never really did.
The ideas are debatable but generally correct. The EU's problem is that regulation stops at the ideas, and it is intentionally designed so to be impossible to ensure compliance in advance. So the regulation is really after the fact and a subjective judgment by regulators. So there's tons of risk even if you genuinely believe you're complying with the prescribed intents.
My opinion on EU regulation would flip 180 degrees if they offered any kind of pre-clearance where you could propose a product, feature, or policy and be told in advance if it meets their subjective requirements.
IMO you can have clear, specific requirements in advance, or you can have a body that provides interpretations of spirit-of-the-rules regulations in advance. Having neither is a problem.
(yes, I'm aware of the argument that if you tell companies what's legal in advance they will just do the bare minimum or find loopholes... I don't find that to be a legit rule of law system)
I understand that desire entirely, but I’m not sure if it would work that way. Take an ISO 27001 certification (or SOC, if you like): There is no one clear set of things to do, but both guidance and requirements that you need to address and be able to defend your concrete implementation.
And I generally like that a lot better than having a set of hard this-way-or-no-way checklists that invariably consist of 80% bullshit ceremony for giant corporations. ISO nudges you toward that too, but if you’re able to deliver the same security guarantees with less, auditors will usually be happy.
The same, in general, works for GDPR regulations as well: The law is mostly about doing the right things, but not spelling out the billions of cases and permutations and strategic decisions involving privacy in one way or another.
It's deliberately not prescriptive as the implementers are the ones best placed to solve for requirements - you don't want policy makers providing technical checklists. And it's not unstructured - ISO 42001 essentially encodes it.
Im not happy with the AI act in entirety either, but my point was that it’s hard to read it and say "this isn’t generally the right thing to do", where right means responsible and beneficial to society as a whole.
Is it responsible and beneficial if the end result is that we will be forever stuck using foreign made AI? And on top of that we will get brain drain for the people that want to work on AI?
Honestly? That’s a big philosophical question, and I don’t know if I can really answer it.
But I do personally prefer living in a value-backed society - even if the implementation is imperfect, even if I have to make personal concessions - over one that aims for maximised efficiency.
More fundamentally, imho the 20th and 21st century are about competition of systems. And the only system I can get behind is one that strives for minimal suffering. The EU or social liberal democracy isn’t that, but it comes closest.
In the end the only winner that emerges out of this is China. Tge EU is over regulating everything, the current US administration is randomly banning things left and right.
Maybe, but as I wrote in a sibling comment, I prefer to not go down the slippery slope of lowering our standards to compete with nations like the US or China - that isn't a battle the EU can win.
Don't forget that the EU is still a market so big noone can ignore us - especially for the US, we're the only opportunity for the growth required to keep their economy (and 401k pensions!) afloat. So there really is no immediate need to cave to their every whim all the time.
Of course this is nothing to rest on, and the EU has to improve on many fronts and also get better on the amount of regulation, but we're by no means in a bad position (yet.)
Is it really ironic or just yet another example of how the current administration just keep finding ways to line their pockets? Big Tech has lots of money, and they'd just like to get a little taste. Placing arbitrary restrictions is a pretty good motivator for those being restricted to find some way to make necessary contributions.
On some level though we have to be cognizant of the potential for harm these models have.
LLMs are still a little loosey goosey, and we are right on the cusp (if not there already) for an agent to hack a bank and steal money for some rando teenager with a penchant for jail breaking.
The regulations are and will be negative, but don't lose sight of what LLMs can do off the leash.
Too overbearing though and you get... Mistral? A continent that hasn't been on the leading edge of anything (other that expansion of the regulatory state) for decades, and Europe feels it in their employment numbers.
Current French (8.2%), Spanish (10.3%) or even Swedish (8.6%) unemployment would count as a disastrous recession in the US. In the US we call 2007-09 the "Great Recession", which peaked at 10.0%, and that relatively brief time left a generational mark. That's a somewhat routine number by EU standards.
Not to mention you end up with bizarre effects. If the UK were admitted as the 51st state it'd immediately be the poorest. (Yes, some EU countries are wealthy, but they're also the size of US counties, if we cherry pick just Manhattan we could make some spectacular comparisons too)
So, it's a complex issue but the tradeoffs are absolutely tangible yet often dismissed.
> Current French (8.2%), Spanish (10.3%) or even Swedish (8.6%) unemployment
This obviously doesn't tell the whole story, because it only measures people actively in the workforce. Meanwhile, a far larger portion of Sweden's population is actually employed compared to the US.
Sweden's laborforce participation rate is 76% and in the US it is 62%. Sweden's employment rate is 69% and US's is 59%. Which statistics are more important?
Other comments have already mentioned that true labor force participation is higher in all of those countries than the US. But also, they all have better lives than the US. They live longer, access better education, healthcare.
Bank should be more secure, if a random person with an LLM can hack them, they should have paid 100 random blue teamers with LLMs to hack them first to get more secure. Not AI's fault.
Pretty sure you mean red team here. While I've heard people refer to any offensive security (eg including blackhat) as 'red team' , it typically means people you've hired or contracted to try to break into your systems, whereas the blue team are people you've hired to build and operate your security defenses. Red and blue team are both your employees / contractors but perform different functions.
The purpose of policies like this is precisely to ensure that those 100 runs do happen first, rather than allowing a free-for-all where they have to race to secure their systems.
>but don't lose sight of what LLMs can do off the leash.
there is no such thing as an LLM "off the leash", it's not a dog, and even if it was a dog the person responsible is the owner. What is this bizarre attitude to a piece of software that makes people think existing laws don't apply?
If your LLM agent hacks a bank, you have hacked a bank, you will go to prison and that's entirely sufficient. People have been hacking banks for decades now, it didn't require the government to regulate C compilers and Emacs.
If your web browser hacks a bank, but you didn't know and didn't expect it to, have you hacked a bank? Why is an LLM different? What happened to mens rea?
We'll only know when that gets tested in court, but I'd be willing to bet the answer will be: yes, you have hacked a bank. I find it very hard to believe the justice system would let someone off on some technicality around intention and agents after a serious bank hack.
A web browser can't decide to hack a bank anymore than a LLM can. Neither have any understanding of what a bank is or any will to act on their own. The person who instructs/uses a web browser to hack a bank (even if it's someone else's browser) commits the crime.
I think pretty obviously if the user instructs the computer to hack the bank then they are guilty of hacking the bank, I don't think that's the crux of the issue.
The crux of the issue is what if the LLM decides on its own to hack the bank while the user isn't watching? Is the user then guilty of hacking the bank or not? I think it's pretty obvious that the user in this scenario is at least less culpable of hacking the bank than they would be if they had deliberately instructed it.
LLMs functionally can decide to act on their own. You might say that they're not actually "deciding" anything, because it's just a perfectly mechanical unfolding of chains of tokens triggering actions on the computer, which doesn't count as "deciding". But again I don't think that's the crux of the issue.
> LLMs functionally can decide to act on their own.
They really can't. In some magical sci-fi future, maybe a chatbot gains freewill and decides on its own to do whatever it wants, but that isn't the reality we live in and I doubt it ever will be. If a person instructs an LLM to hack a bank it doesn't matter if that happens as a background process or while they are sleeping or AFK.
If, in a magical sci-fi future, someone instructs an LLM to write an email and it decides instead to secretly hack a bank then the company that made the LLM would be to blame. The same as if a person used a vending machine to get a candy bar and the machine grew legs and ran out into the street causing an accident that would be the fault of the company who made the vending machine and not the fault of the person who wanted candy.
There is a baseline level of competence and motivation needed to commit crimes.
Decades ago few people would walk into a record store and steal CDs. Napster came along smashing all barriers entry, and it became weird not to steal music.
Its not really the legality that matters, it's the barrier on one hand and the cognitive ability on the other. Drop both and you get huge spikes in crime.
The US is already behind and has been technically. Can't wait for that part to sink in.
This start to be a source of second hand embarrassment when I see US folk think their country is still leading the race technically.
Define leading then. Mythos and GPT score higher on all the benchmarks versus Chinese models. I suppose your anti-american mindset has given you a different definition of leading than the rest of us.
Our AI czar, David Sacks, whined and moaned about the idea of regulation, even said Anthropic begging for some guidance was asking for “regulatory capture” and was gloating about how right he was they wanted it, 2 weeks ago.
No, it’s not leopards ate my face / irony / comeuppance, because that would involve regulation.
I understand it’s very satisfying if you wanted Anthropic “punished” for asking for real regulation to see this. I can’t deny there was a little bit of me at first that felt that way.
It’s untenable, a first order reaction, that I regret intellectually, because if you were against regulation, you’re certainly against waves whatever this is.
Your position is “he made it happen by saying he didn’t want it to happen” with maybe a side order of “when he knows Mr. Trump doesn’t like him”
I posit that these ideas are common, and come from a place of Mr. Trump is more or less a normal president because they all do bad stuff, and regulation is Creating Monopilies. To wit, there’s 0 reason to believe the person you originally replied to’s claim that Anthropic wanted to kill startups. It’s just a random implication of what bad regulation can do.
He made it happen by continuously using doomsday marketing to pump up model capabilities. This is the comeuppance.
There is a huge contingent of people who do not interact with AI on a daily basis. Many of them legitimately believe we're seconds away from wiping away white collar America. Many more believe that we are creating the literal singularity.
None of them have seen claude try to model a problem they're familiar with.
I'm fine with this in principle, it's more like regulations last. They looked at the end result and decided it was too powerful to let loose. But also expect the Trump administration to unfairly use it as leverage against US corps.
Meanwhile EU prevented itself from building competitive LLMs in the first place.
It's a way to clearly agree on ground rules that you can plan around, not more, not less.
The alternative is not no rules, do whatever you want. The alternative is executive capriciousness arbitrarily setting the rules based on whims and messing up your plans.
This applies to most things when it comes to the USG/citizens. Protectionism is communist unless they do it. Thinking about developing a nuke? Well bomb you first despite being the only people to ever use them. Free speech and press - unless we don’t like what you say.
They're not regulating though – they're arbitrarily blocking releases based on no clear criteria. The EU may be legalistic and rules-based, but I'd take that over capricious and arbitrary.
Yes, Trump is the worstPresident we’ve had, the Supreme Court is captured by conservatives, the Republicans would rather die than vote against Trump, we know all of this.
I wish the EU were legalistic and rules based, but the commission and politicians are involved in many of these things. It's like Trump's executive stuff, just with a committee instead of a single person, and I guess, with less power.
The EU is nothing but capricious and arbitrary. Much of the DMA and similar is pure vibes that you can't know if you violated until the regulators do their divinations months or years after you shipped.
It sounds nice but you end up with entrenched special interests that later oppose all regulation regardless of the consequences. We have pesticides you wouldn't want anywhere near your children casually used to control weeds on kid's playgrounds, insanely huge trucks that kill hundred each year, the food is garbage...the list is long and tiresome. Trust me brother, if I could live in the EU, I would.
I agree. But that need has absolutely arisen. The US government is not exactly the best steward for this kind of thing, but some model other than "race each other as fast as we can" is desperately needed here.
Let's plan a fire fighter division only once we are actually having some buildings in the city burning down. That people who fear that ridiculous perfectly controlled fire in chemines are ridiculous.
Well, when the leaders of this movement go around doom-trolling for years on end this is what happens. It turns out you need to be careful what you say if you're a highly visible public figure. Amazing!
Honestly, with open source models I don't think this regulation means anything because there's no way they can really regulate what's coming out of china. I don't think this affects innovation in AI much at all (unless your definition of innovation is "pour more money into diminishing scaling"). It's mostly just bad news for the US frontier labs, and based on their behavior I don't feel sad for them AT ALL. Like, they've basically alienated the vast majority of people by outright threatening their livelihoods or even society at large, and now we're supposed to feel sorry for them because they can't just go around saying "THIS WILL REPLACE ALL JOBS IN A MONTH!" without consequences?
> because there's no way they can really regulate what's coming out of china
Do you think the Chinese will go parading around that they've created the greatest cyberweapon known to man, and the CCP will be totally cool with the Americans being first in line to buy tokens, because hey, free market?
They would sooner put all their own employees in an incinerator than allow that to happen.
If they actually think that, then.. stop working on AI? Being the first person to end the world doesn't exactly gain you anything. I guess there's a bleak humor to Altman and Musk and Amodei being forced to live out the rest of their days in their bunkers I guess.
Like seriously, to the people that think this is a doomsday thing, if you're serious about that line of thought then STOP DOING IT. It's like the people that are arguing that AI is conscious. IF you truly believe that, then we've just reinvented slavery, and again, STOP!
I 100% do not accept the "it's inevitable anyway so morality is out the window". We also have nuclear weapons but we don't need to rush into World War 3. Also nothing inevitable requires trillions of dollars a year to advance because it's so deeply unprofitable.
I don't see how, other than that it will make it harder for chinese labs to train their models on OpenAI/Anthropics' (which honestly I can't get that worked up about plagiarism in this space considering where they got their data from..)
I remember when Republicans told us they want less regulation and smaller federal government. Now they want their dementia riddled god king to control everything from pool liners to the information you're allowed to see, which is all in books and readily available online.
I don't see how you can make a case for a $700bn+ IPO when the government might not even let you sell your product. America is ceding the lead in the AI race. The winners here will be the Chinese AI companies.
If the Chinese models remain predominantly open source then it would probably be for the best. Unfortunately I'm not convinced they will, with examples like Qwen Max showing what could happen.
It will just mean US providers will rapidly loose their moat. Their moat is already shrinking. If they can't release their best models, it'll shrink a whole lot faster...
It definitely will be. They are trying to preserve their offensive cyberwarfare and cyberespionage capabilities. It’s not about “bad actors”. It’s about defensive capabilities becoming pervasive and cheap.
This is what OpenAI/Anthropic want, it's better marketing than they can pay for -- and it creates a precedent for permanently banning the next generation of open weights models
100% this is the direction all govts will go. This isn't specific to any political party, it's just about communications control. I don't think open source models will be directly capped, necessarily, but all commercial/easy-to-setup models will be heavily regulated.
The government could give those companies exemptions or give them time to LLM-wash that open-source code directly into their code so they have no dependencies.
Those companies will be thrilled because they got the benefit of open-source and now are throwing down the ladder.
The problem is they've convinced mainstream people that a model that can find a bug in Microsoft Windows is a bigger problem than Microsoft not caring about fixing it.
I would really like to know how much of the anti AI sentiment is really just general economic precariousness mixed with seeing inequality skyrocket while the average persons material reality in the US is decreasing..
We really need to disentangle the technology from the economic inequality everyone is pissed about.
I wonder what kind of scheme the administration is up to. The obvious play is a squeeze where OpenAI and Anthropic are forced to give parts of their company away, like Intel. But they could also be toying with the idea of limiting frontier AI access to companies that bend the knee, which would further cement their grasp on the tech industry.
I’m sure they are wondering just as much. I assume exhorting Anthropic/OpenAI for personal bribes, favorable government contracts with no restrictions and public acts of submission.
Gated by capacity constraints for all users is very different that picking “trusted partners” that get preferential access. Especially when that access is based on political connections
The AI companies were all asking for the government to regulate them. The government is doing what the companies asked for them to do.
You can argue that, by government, they meant some legislative process, but I'd argue that regulation via bad executive order is much better than regulation via bad legislation because the former is tractable. I say this as an EO minimalist.
What are the proper laws and regulations? Can you point me to a proposed framework that you believe is most correct?
I have no idea how this stuff should be regulated. I do know that any sort of comprehensive legislation at this point in time has a much higher chance of being a bottleneck to innovation than an easily reversible white house directive.
Of all the terrible things to come from the odious Trump administration, them saying "hey, can we make sure these models aren't dangerous?" is one of the least bad things they've done.
>I have no idea how this stuff should be regulated.
That's why we have a system where representatives of districts do research, debate, and hash out those details while the public who votes for them is able to contact them.
>I do know that any sort of comprehensive legislation at this point in time has a much higher chance of being a bottleneck to innovation than an easily reversible white house directive.
That's odd to say after admitting you don't know what the regulation would look like. Especially after seeing the "easily reversible" tariffs from this White House, which changed erratically and had exceptions for people who sweet talked the president.
If you don’t see a difference between a well thought out & debated policy stance and arbitrary enforcement without justification I’m not sure what to say.
Anthropic submitted a long, thoughtful framework proposal, which everyone seems to be ignoring in favor of hot takes like “they asked for this!” No they didn’t, not at all.
They can’t, though. The models might or might not be too dangerous but the people running the US federal government are too incompetent and/or corrupt to do anything useful about that.
> The AI companies were all asking for the government to regulate them
pretty shallow take. they asked for sensible, transparent, tech aware regulations. this is not that.
Ok so to be clear you agree this has not been the norm. It seemed like you were clarifying your original message but it was a change of topic, from "this has been the norm" to "this hasn't been the norm but they got what they were asking for" (or what they deserved if not exactly what they asked for). I'll dip out of that conversation.
You moved the goalposts. The government controlling what openai can and cannot do is completely different than they gating access out of their own volition.
My comment was in response to the parent's original comment: "Ok so you agree this has not been the norm," which didn't give me much to respond to. It has been edited since.
Yeah pretty sure we had a whole bruhaha ~250 years ago about this question of where precisely power belonged. I for one think we mostly got it right then and would be reluctant to shift the power back to the individual sovereign and away from the people.
I largely blame people like Amodei for such outcome. As product owners, they could've done it the old way: telling people how great this product is, how much potential it has, and what kind of guardrails the companies are building and etc. But oh no, Amodei has to do the doom trolling 24x7, while in the meantime plays a cult leader by telling people only he knows how to the guarding angel of the AI or the humanity thereof. Ironically, the same people also push their companies to develop more powerful AI in full speed. They think ordinary Americans are so stupid that they can't see through them?
Fable didn't silently dumb it down. It printed a warning that it has detected a possible inappropriate topic and you are being switched back to Opus. I hate it, but it isn't dishonest.
> There's been no public policy, executive order, legislation, or otherwise on this
I mean, insofar as you could frame each new model as its own patentable invention, "patent secrecy" would be an existing policy framework that clearly justifies what's been happening here.
1. Some private company or individual invents something.
2. But the state wants a monopoly on the new thing's military use-cases (against other states/militaries.) So the state forcibly classifies the invention at patent time.
3. But the individual/company still wants to make more money than the state is giving them as compensation for their own use of the patent. They want to sell to the private market. But, of course, the state doesn't want to permit this, as arbitrary private parties could in turn resell to foreign state actors.
4. So a compromise is struck: private use is now made deny-by-default. The state permits the individual or company to sell into the private market, given: a rigorous per-customer KYB background-checking process; strong supply-chain tracing; contractual stipulations prohibiting resale; and the customer use-case being transformative or cost-prohibitive to extract the original invention from.
5. As such, big established enterprise customers who want the invention for private use in their internal industrial processes, can somewhat-easily jump all those hoops to acquire access to it; but everyone else is now basically locked out.
I agree that this is all ridiculously arbitrary right now, but it shouldn't be surprising either.
I can't find the exact blog post (maybe on simonwillison.net ?) but I read people predicting that know your customer laws would be coming to AI if it gets more powerful several years ago already.
Powerful technology that can do immense harm in the hand of individuals/small groups is the most obvious (and legitimate!) target for regulation. Maybe Anthropics hubbub around Mythos made all of this happen earlier than it would have, but it was going to happen (if the models are going to get as capable as valuations imply they will).
(Edit: Of course this doesn't mean it can be effectively regulated in practice)
Further more, no one actually gets hurt if we start rolling these things out more slowly.
Rolling them out selectively according to the whims of an administration that disdains fair process, tears down the institutions that could potentially provide and legitimise reasonable regulation, etc... well, that's another topic.
It's worrying that with no formal and transparent policy framework that the government will be picking winners and losers and stifling innovation.
The market will demand such a framework. I suspect that's the larger idea here, in that Amodei not only wants to be in the room when that framework is written, he wants to be at the head of the table.
He apparently wants it so badly he's willing to set back his own company's IPO to make it happen, given that there can be no pure-play AI IPOs until the regulatory picture is sorted out.
Checks from the major model providers will already be on their way to Congress, hand-delivered by the highest-paid lobbyists on K Street. Look for them to wake from their ent-like slumber tout suite to pass legislation that the courts can use for guidance.
What Trump is doing at the moment is, as usual, only a distraction.
I'm going to get downvoted here, but all the E/acc people that loudly allocated for Trump, someone known for amassing power by any means necessary including strong arming industry should be publicly eating crow right now. This was something that was always in the cards when you vote for someone who only cares about himself.
All the tech CEOs had no qualms about groveling before Trump and licking his boots, so yeah I assume they must be 100% onboard with stuff like this as well
How can you simultaneously be a bottleneck for innovation while being their largest customer, and pouring tons of money and resources into it to help accelerate development?
The startup-brained among us never learned the first rule of business which is to not fuck over your benefactor.
For some conspirational reasons, I am thinking that this was the part of the deal between Anthropic and US government, all buzz was for PR, but behind the closed doors Anthropic asked US to regulate the LLM space
The big companies want this. It's a moat for them, a way to keep competitors (especially overseas) out of the US market.
They might try to extend it to downloadable open weight models, but honestly they might not even bother with that. The goal is to keep people from competing on lucrative contracts or the hosting market.
for america yeah. for the world the only real risks are american, chinese or corporate dominance. thats why its important to support open models wherever they come from and smaller players like mistral in france or black forest in germany.
I am still waiting for a government to try “nationalizing” AI by saying anything produced by AI belongs to “everyone” and thus hugely taxing the profits and proceeds from the product, as soon as Bernie Sanders thinks of it you can bet we’ll hear all about it.
I'm honestly surprised there isn't more political outcry. The administration has a party affiliation that, typically, insists on free market principles and is against government overreach and regulation.
You would think that this government, attempting to puppeteer the most rapidly growing industry in the world, would have more people outraged.
Where are all of the people crying "Communist"? This is one of those moments where it is less of an overreaction.
MAGA is bad enough. Imagine if the current batch of US progressives, who have 0 idea how any of this works, wins the presidency and gets to decide who gets to use it.
From the other side of the world, the current batch of US progressives looks quite liberal. It looks to me they'll either completely restrict AI or not touch it at all.
Do you think they'll try to dictate who gets to use it?
Also applies to Chinese models. Give it 5 more months of US admin locking out US models and let's see what the market will look like for OoenAI and Anthropic IPO.
Their innovation relies on a huge amount of investment made under the assumption that they'll continue to be able to provide frontier models to a global audience. If it turns out the US government only lets them sell gimped models to non-citizens then they'll forfeit the whole global market to China and investors will flee like rats.
The real reason, afaik, that the US is trying to restrict access to SOTA models is that a very large component of USA tailored access and surveillance relies on exploits and weaknesses that these models will easily detect.
Thus, it really is an export control issue, but it has nothing to do with offensive capabilities. Offensive capabilities always exist, but pervasive defensibility would upset the asymmetric advantage that attackers, especially the USA, currently have.
There are now Asian models coming , optimized focused on cybersecurity defense at a high level, so I suspect this will be a relatively moot point soon.
LLMs are not great at creating exploits, but they are really good at detecting them. That asymmetry alone is enough to destroy the “offensive capabilities” narrative.
Yes, mythos can find exploitable bugs, even write bench exploits. But real exploits require a good dose of human psychology, and most of the tools needed are off the shelf available anyway. You still need a real cybersecurity expert to effectively weaponize a zero day into a deployable exploit.
But an LLM can inspect payloads, packages, and blobs en masse and find those exploits in a way that was wholly impractical before, so the asymmetric attack advantage is dissolved by strong LLMs.
The USA is trying to protect its cyberwarfare advantage, not protect against attackers. The exact opposite, actually. Porous security is a huge advantage to technologically advanced state actors.
> There are now Asian models coming , optimized focused on cybersecurity defense at a high level, so I suspect this will be a relatively moot point soon.
> Only companies approved by the government will get access. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model.
I knew the time would come when individuals on personal subscriptions get the short end of the stick. Didn't think it would come so soon. I hope we're not too badly deprecated in the months to come.
Looks like I've got to improve my DeepSeek workflows.
For personal use I don't care if I get access to it. Tokens are becoming too expensive. I am using Chinese models. What worries me is that my company may never get access. I work for a well known US company, but from Europe, we also have developers in Mexico. I can only guess US gov will take this into account when deciding who gets to use the new models.
Even worse than not getting access is getting fired. Since less than 20% of our developers reside outside US and our management is suffering from AI hype, they can decide to close foreign offices as a way to get access to new models.
> For personal use I don't care if I get access to it
There's a big difference between being priced out of a market option and the government saying you literally cannot buy it. We should all be wary of government controls like this.
You are right, I was thinking selfishly. I don't like the control governments have on tech in general. In my country government forced banks to use device attestation for banking apps. If your android phone is in developer mode banking app won't work, you can change bank but it will make no difference. I think they are also enforcing 2FA to be in the banking apps, so I can't even use web app without locked down android phone or iPhone.
Last time I used subscription I hit a usage limit in 20 minutes (gemini). I switched to openrouter and have enough prepaid credits to last me for months with Chinese models. I spent about $30 in last two months.
> We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them. We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks, while we work with the Administration to develop the cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases.
It seems like the exclusion is temporary. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model _right now_.
Just as a reminder, the claim (only two comments ago) was that it will never reach people and be limited only to certain government-approved companies.
The press release pretty clearly outlines the next steps that will eventually get it into people's hands.
That is the claim that is being refuted. Nothing about the obvious government overreach happening here. You are the one that decided to bring that in as a strawman.
Also I'd be willing to bet companies in left-leaning states, or with left-leaning figureheads will be excluded from use as well. This administration is amazingly petty and has captured voter records for a reason.
Im not worried about this at all. The OpenAI, Anthropic and the US government can play this game all they want... They're just accelerating the development of open source models; and helping destroy the lead the US has built in AI, and their profit margins along with it.
This is like the battle between PostgreSQL and Oracle all over. Move up market, isolate yourself to enterprises, and watch while everyone else builds on PostgreSQL and erodes any technical advantage you had, until people just stop talking about you altogether.
Encryption is a better example. The USG tried exactly the same tactic in the 90’s. The NSA tried to shove the Clipper chip down everyone’s throats. The USG put export controls on encryption and people went as far as to tattoo the algorithms on their body.
But like you said, they will try to control it and fail. Like they always do.
> Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety
> We're proposing stronger regulation of the technology, proposing giving the government the ability to, again, in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology
> He gave several suggestions for how a new agency in the US could regulate the industry - including "a combination of licensing and testing requirements" for AI companies, which he said could be used to regulate the "development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities".
The government will just claim that unsanctioned models have the potential to deliberately introduce security vulnerabilities when working on IT projects (e.g. be trained to strongly yet covertly favoring introducing compromised dependencies when you are not looking).
Then laws will be made to forbid organizations who use models other than those from the sanctioned labs to participate in critical projects on national security concerns.
All of a sudden, no business would risk using open source models anymore.
Then all they do is drive the usage of open models underground (copyright infringement is illegal too, and still common), stifle US companies operating legally, and accelerate the rest of the world decoupling from the US.
I hope they do it! It will have a positive long-term effect just like the Iran war footgun accelerates renewable energy transition.
Have you seen legitimate corporates use cracked software? If you do, then your competitors will report you; your employees will blackmail you. The risk is too great.
This assumes the same reward ratio also continues, but that's not the case. A cutting edge LLM is something much more valuable than a cracked copy of Word. Just like the LLM providers themselves decided violating copyright was an acceptable risk, it entirely depends on how people see the tradeoffs, rather than being a categorical decision.
While that might be true, it is unlikely that open source models' capability will ever surpass frontier models --- if you have the best model (by some margin), then people will want to access it, even if it means going through compliance.
Yes, that's what I meant. It's not that the Chinese will never be able to come up with models that superior --- it's simply that they will no longer have the incentive to open-source them once their models take the lead.
Training models are expensive. No one can do it for free for very long.
Microsoft shipped windows for years with files signed by a warez group because Microsoft developers had used a piece of pirated software. Nothing happened.
I see your comments scattered across this thread with most converging on this thesis: "The US govt will regulate away the ability of US corporations and individuals to use unsanctioned AI models."
Which is a fair thesis. I've seen you counter people's predictions of how they think things will pan as a consequence. But what I'd really like to hear is what you think happens (in the US and internationally) as a consequence of such regulations?
Why would global talent and capital migrate to go to a country with greater regulatory barriers? Why would "some models are illegal to use here" be a selling point for the US?
And companies from outside the US will outcompete those from the US forcing more protectionism, higher prices in US etc. I think there have been several cycles of several industries that have gone through this cycle (cars, shipping?), and mostly forced to roll back.
From what I recall they were big in the extortion business back in the day, and these days I think they are into construction or waste disposal, maybe both.
That until it becomes illegal to have or use open source models without approval and licence from government. With more talks about on device scanning, this could be easily plumbed in. If OS detects there is open source model, it could brick your device or alert authorities. Then next step will be limiting what operating system you can install. Likely only those where you cannot remove client side scanning.
I wonder how you can reliably detect an open source model though. It can be stored in any binary format, and the weights can be modified slightly so that the float values are completely different while the network works the same. The binary that runs it can be obfuscated as well. Maybe the hardware could detect common LLM inference patterns at runtime? That would probably produce many false positives.
It's been illegal forever to run a pirated copy of Windows or Photoshop. Even 30 years ago people weren't worried that their pirated copies would tattle on them, businesses did not use pirated copies because vendors would report them/not work on their systems, legal discovery could find them, etc and then they would get ridiculous fines.
It's one thing to get a copy of "illegal" software and use it yourself. The stakes are basically zero and you almost certainly will not get caught
It's a completely different thing to run a business on it with dozens of employees and requiring the employees to break the law to do their job.
It can't easily be plumbed in, though. I can spin up my own Linux build with none of that plumbing and do what I want with it. I can grab China's best models and use them or distilled versions on my own terms because OSS allows for that. Until hardware comes fully locked down and the models cannot be run on old hardware, both a long ways off, OSS is a way out.
Good joke. The whole US industry would collapse before even destroying one of the main pillars of AWS, Google and whatnot. It would be funny if all the billion-sized corpos suing the judges en masse for trillions of dollars in losses. Lots of them would even ask for bodyguards because for sure the bribed ones would dissapear in really "weird" ways.
In the not so distant future, all your coding edits (for work anyway) will be through centralized gateways. Think remote desktop environment where pasting from the client is disabled.
Eh probably easier ways to do this. Just sanction all entities that release open weight models for "illegal distillation". Enough to cross the risk threshold for most businesses in the west, and reduce future monetization opportunities.
Given how the WH operates these days, this is ripe for corruption. Imagine the WH dislikes the CEO of a biotech company, while appreciating the attitude of a competitor CEO. What is to stop them from stalling on giving acess for the latest model to the company they don't like?
> I’ve been hearing ‘oh this will set a precedent there is no turning back from’ weekly since Jan 2025.
I mean, it's not really wrong. JD Vance recently said that Watergate would just be a "12 hour news cycle" if it happened today, and spouted some bullshit that "the deep state" took down Nixon. The takeaway from me was that corruption has become so normalized by the Trump administration that Watergate wouldn't even be such a big deal today, and, incredibly sadly, I think he's probably right.
> What is to stop them from stalling on giving acess for the latest model to the company they don't like?
Congress, if any of those creatures were vertebrates.
For the next few months, though? Nothing will. Those in the in-crowd will line each others' pockets at the expense of the rest of us. I will say that the recent election results and the building bipartisan angst over data centers and surveillance (e.g. Flock) are encouraging.
The tragedy is the Trump admin is setting the precedent and creating the framework which will be abused in the future. For all the complains he made about the deep state, he's just creating a new avenue for them to abuse power
Ah yes, the defining tragedy of the Trump administration is ... gestures into the middle distance ... look over there! what if those guys abuse it one day?
Same as it ever was. If you listen to interviews with Zuckerberg he’ll talk about the constant communiques from The White House during the Biden administration. Trump didn’t start this unfortunately he’s just more brazen about it.
Uhhh no. The White House (and other government agencies) have a well-established right to communicate with private entities. They do not have a right to coerce them. There's a blurry line between these, but not in Facebook's case, as they don't even claim they were coerced. Same with Twitter, whose lawyers testified under oath that Twitter's content moderation decisions were not coerced whatsoever.
Zuckerberg has specifically said they received requests from the government, they complied with some (as they have a right to do), declined others (as they have a right to do), none of which was under duress, and the response to non-compliance was expressions of "frustration" by the government officials.
By contrast, OpenAI's largest competitor just got kneecapped by the US government because they insisted that the US government comply with the contract terms the US government signed to literally months previously.
In most countries around the world corruption/bribes are necessary for doing business. Companies even account for it on their books. It was about time the US caught up.
This is such an annoying attitude. Who is against the concept of an industry being able to say “are you aware this will decimate the jobs of tens of thousands”?
Catch phrases like this, I swear, are half the reason so many people have a mind an inch deep and a mile wide.
Ok, so complain about PACs and super PACs. Who goes "Sandwiches are bad. The issue is that sandwiches lead to buffets and WEIGHT GAIN!!! BAN SANDWICHES!!!"
So... the solution is to ban speaking to your representatives to tell them how their actions will affect you? I dont get it. If you don't like the money aspect, take that out. It's not like it's inherently required for the overall concept to work.
It sure seems like we're pretending to be stupid, if the only solutions we can come up with are "unabated lobbying with infinite money" and "constituents must be outlawed from speaking with their representatives".
I mean in our current legal framework yeah - those things are equivalent. Money IS free speech. Maybe that’s dumb, but it’s not an argument we can ignore because it’s the predominant argument.
PACs and super PACs are the key difference. Lobbying in the US includes practices that would fall squarely into the definition of corruption in many other Western countries.
There's nothing inherently wrong with people or groups talking to representatives and advocating for their interests, even in an organized way. The problem is when it gets closer to: "Pass this law or regulation, and we'll put $USD_AMOUNT into your PAC".
The biggest concern is identifying "who". If the US government says only US citizens can access a model, how do they enforce that. Anthropic and OpenAI will use Persona (a company funded by Peter Thiel) to verify user identity. Verifying your identity with a government ID and linking that to AI is the dream of a surveillance state. Agents running on your computer, accessing your internet accounts, access to your personal conversations with AI, and accessible by the government is just wild.
No, not really. The biggest concern is the US government claiming it can decide who gets to use a product and brazenly kneecapping competitive companies who do such things as "write contracts and comply with them."
Isnt the stated reason actually the most likely though? They dont want Chinese backed companies getting it. That is what they said about Fable (SK Hynix). You dont really need a conspiracy theory to explain it.
> If the US government says only US citizens can access a model, how do they enforce that.
It's easy if only enterprise users have access. It just becomes yet another compliance issue.
They won't let the public use it, even if citizens, because that would undermine the goal of controlling its use.
> I'm hoping this is a call to action for local AI.
If US frontier models stop being publicly available then they stop mattering, it also becomes hard to justify further investment in US AI companies if distribution is so locked down. The Chinese models will be the frontier.
Local AI will never be as powerful as cloud-based models, at least not in the foreseeable future. We’re talking about a difference between 7B and 750B+ parameters, a 100x scale gap.
I think the trend will be running open-weight models with the provider of your choice. You can always switch providers, avoiding vendor lock-in, with the trade-off of privacy concerns. You have to trust that the provider actually behaves the way they claim.
It's really interesting that someone can know all of these domestic Chinese names and yet declare the industry generally a "smoking ruin". Is it from a newsletter or something?
Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.
> It's really interesting that someone can know all of these domestic Chinese names and yet declare the industry generally a "smoking ruin".
They're different things. Just like you can be the most famous actor or singer and still be poor. Being popular, having good products and actually making money is not the same.
And it's all relative. Today if NASDAQ dropped 20% the world would declare it in ruins. Are the companies still "alive"? Yes.
> Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.
Not true. A lot of them e.g. the public listed 1s have reported increased competition and reduced margins.
If NASDAQ dropped 20%, it would have returned to the level last seen three months ago, in March 2026. Calling that "in ruins" would be a pretty big stretch.
To pick one example, OP talked about meituan like they haven't seen multiple meituan delivery riders per block every time they take a walk. It strains credibility. Why do they even know the name if they don't see that? Its not like they operate in America.
> Why do they even know the name if they don't see that?
We're in the age of the Internet. You don't have to be physically there to see anything. They could have just read it on the news, saw social media videos, etc?
Ok, but it's still weird to know one thing about all of these companies and all of those single things add up to a narrative. I would be questioning my media sources if that was the knowledge I was fed.
Seems like a pretty terrible idea in hindsight, destroying private lending, given how desperately the government is trying and failing to raise domestic consumption now.
The private lending held back involved a) high interest rates b) unconventional methods of governance/collections which would be somewhat decoupled from Ant's lending platform down to the local level of collections.
An example of the ugly side of China private lending is what is termed "flesh loans". A young girl is forced to have nude pictures taken of her to secure her high interest loan repayment. Ant was going to put hundreds of billions in capital backing loans that had loosely controlled and often unethical/violent collections system.
Yes, curtailing loads of easy capital can be at odds with pressing domestic consumption growth. In this case, I think the government made a tough but decent decision.
Some of these were very good decisions imho, from someone who spent two months in Chineese rural area around ~2019.
- Tutoring platforms were a plague on Chineese youth that increased the weight of their already _very_ heavy load (tbh, i think and education reform might have been preferable, this is a stopgap, but at least it is something).
- Ant group was offering predatory consumption loans to rural China, which to me felt a lot like the "revolver credits" that plagued my country in the 80s and 90s and pushed to many to suicide (the surname cam from their english name, "revolving credit", and because my countryside had a lot of hunting rifle available to whomever). Considering how rural china is mistreaded by Chineese state and general government (and imho this is a real weakness in China politics), having this group by a huge fine for their practice and a general debt forgivness was great. Curtailing Ant's power is also good.
- Stopping consolidation is a great way to keep a market free.
- Crypto companies: mining diverted power from villages who couldn't compete on purchasing power to mining wharehouses in some state. The ban is great for the rural population at least. Also, if that can curtail the birth of Chineese cryptobros, great for the mental health of the country.
The US is now doing a softer and broader version of the same thing to trust-based export sectors. It’s not the same method but! it is the same mechanism. The main difference is that the US damage is more reputational than structural, so it could be reversed faster (only if policy stops telling customers that dependence on America is a political risk)
That is about investor confidence, not company performance. The companies are for the most part still making boatloads of money, just not as much as investors naively expected to get from taking over a market with 1.4B people.
And even if foreign investors are more cautious now, there is plenty of money trapped by capital controls, so that it doesn't look like new tech companies have trouble raising capital anyway.
At some point, we should kinda accept that "China's X, Y, Z industries are about to collapse" headlines are just bad at predicting the future. They've proven again and again how they can pivot fast. Applies to tech as well.
I'm assuming you don't have any working relations with any Chinese companies, because on-the-ground shows something much different than what these headlines promise.
Orange and apples... China has very intentional policy behind those decisions. The US... Not so much. I don't buy that Trump and his whole cabinet are as dumb as they look, but they are only motivated by profit. And ignorance.
This was generated by AI and slightly re-written or end capped by a human. Anyone that knows who Meituan and Boss Zhipin are wouldn't make the claims this post makes. It's not reasonable that someone who could list off these companies and incidents would believe China's tech industry is in ruin. There's no way. This poster clearly promoted for the list, and wrote his commentary around it. Sad.
> defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada
Huh? US foreign military sales are up at all time highs
"Total exports by the United States, the world’s largest supplier of arms, increased by 27 per cent. This included a 217 per cent increase in US arms exports to Europe, according to new data published today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)"
Aren't a lot of these purchases (a) locked in from contracts made pre-admin; and (b) otherwise largely related to anxiety over Russia? There are too many confounding variables here.
The admin has also said that many of those arm shipments may be delayed by years because the US first needs to restock after blowing their inventory in Iran. So, sign a deal for US weapons which may not be delivered as agreed or may be denied the latest required software patches. I expect many countries to look elsewhere for future armaments.
Well I was expecting it but if it's not going to become available in this subscription cycle for me I will cancel oai subs as I did with claude ones months ago...
moving to open weight models is trivial now, with optimizations and stuff glm 5.2 is roughly the same price as the best models around from multiple vendors.
unless I could atleast try and see Sol perform like 10x better I don't really have a reason to switch back.
I used Fable for like what 2-3 days at most and didn't really feel it was so much better, only difference was I had to prompt it less, not to get what I want but to get to a working output. Code quality was still shit, still made bad plans and analysis and so on.
This is the AI booster equivalent of "well it works on my machine." Works better for me != works great for everyone. I'm amazed how much people on HN seem to think that all coding is stupidly simple web apps.
In terms of startups, predicting tech, and all the things Hacker News is about, it mostly matters what the clever hacker can do, not whether the tool is ready for the mainstream.
If a clever hacker can get 10x results with an LLM, they're gonna outcompete the 90% that can't figure out how to replicate that result, and they'll be able to get about as much work done without that 90%
Factories, Agriculture, etc. - this is hardly the first time that pattern has played out.
So, I'm using AI both at work and for a personal greenfield project, and I have 20 years of pre-AI software development. Which isn't to say I'm amazing, just putting some context here of what my experience level is and the contexts I've used this tech in. First off, I doubt the "10x" number in general (I'm not seeing it personally or from other people), but lets say I pretend it's true for a second. 10x better/faster at what exactly? Like, if you have an unreleased greenfield app then sure, you can bang together features a lot faster. But what if you have an established app with real users? It's not just the time it takes to make the feature, you also have to consider documenting the feature, making sure it works well with the other features, making sure it's something customers actually want, making sure it's part of a larger coherent design, training customers, marketing the feature, etc. Like this notion of "we'll just go 10x faster!" falls apart really quickly when you're talking about making something that people will actually depend on and use.
I keep thinking about that (so far anonymous) company that blew 500 million dollars worth of tokens in a month, and what I desperately want to know is WHAT DID THEY BUILD WITH THAT?! Like, for that sort of money they should have created an earth shaking new business or something instead of becoming a cautionary tale that's rightfully too embarrassed to publicly own it.
The other thing with regard to factories/agriculture/whatever is, in revolutions with those things nobody needed to be convinced. Sure, people were (rightly!) concerned about the societal impact, but the utility of a factory was fairly obvious. And yet last year OpenAI spent more on their marketing budget than Coca Cola. The way this stuff is hyped and pushed has an air of extreme desperation. If it was so good people wouldn't need so much convincing!
> The other thing with regard to factories/agriculture/whatever is, in revolutions with those things nobody needed to be convinced
Were you not around for "the internet is for nerds" and "why would I ever need to learn how to use a computer, I work in an office"?
Are you familiar with the word "sabotage", originating from people who were trying to stop factories from taking over the world?
It's part of why I find the anti-LLM pushback so bizarre - it used to be that people using computers and the internet were exactly the ones trying to convince others "hey, this is actually really cool". A decent chunk of us have seen this play out once or twice before.
This is exactly the crowd that should remember how much convincing everybody needed, and how hard it was to get everyone to take things seriously!
I was there for the early days of the internet, but honestly nobody needed to tell me the internet was cool. I tried it once and it was very obviously something I wanted, even with a shitty 28k modem and waiting hours on 2k/s downloads.
AI is useful for some things, but to me it's not "internet" level of useful, especially since in a lot of ways it's just a weird probabilistic wrapper on all the knowledge that was already available for free on the internet anyway. Actually, yesterday I was trying to lookup an API function in a game engine and I had google hallucinate the function call twice in a row, and all I could think was "I really just want good search again".
A lot of what I see happening with coding agents isn't actually that different from how people were (badly) building web-apps in the past -- grab a fuckton of stuff off NPM and copy paste from stack overflow (RIP) with a bit of glue code. Now the agent does that for you, but it's not like a lot of thought or skill went into that style of development in the first place. I feel like the main people saying that coding is dead are the ones that weren't doing it very well in the first place. Even in my personal project where I let AI off the leash a lot more than I would in a professional job.. almost all the features that I managed to bust out quickly were more to do with a rich open source ecosystem than Claude's glue code. (IE, I didn't need to invent a text editor because code mirror is already good, I didn't need to write a bunch of frontend components because there are plenty of good UI libraries, I didn't need to write a fancy graph editor because react-flow is fantastic -- 90% of my leverage is a good ecosystem, not AI.
Anyway, as I suppose a bit of a hater, I don't actually hate LLMs themselves, I hate everything around it -- the annoying grifty hustle culture, the incessant hype, the forced usage, the slop apocalypse, the fact that it's about to set the economy on fire and most of all the intent to degrade peoples skills and intellect in an awful race to outsource our thinking to things that don't think. It's not that there isn't interesting tech in there, it's that it's just that when you consider its effects the positives don't outweigh the negatives.
> I keep thinking about that (so far anonymous) company that blew 500 million dollars worth of tokens in a month
First I've heard of this. Do you know any more or could you maybe point me to a source? Kind of astounding if true! Agree that it would be very interesting to know what kind of output they got for all that effort.
no it's not true. The fact that people can even believe this is.... wild. It's a bunch of circular articles jerking eachother off about some anon company.
using $15 / mtok (Clause output using 4.6) as the metric, it would take 33.33T Tokens for you to spend $500m.. . Or enough output for like 250m books, or a developer uses 10 million tokens a day doing non-stop agentic programming, it would take that single developer 9,132 years of continuous coding to run up that bill.
I mean, obviously it's not a single developer it's a large company, so I'm not sure what your math is attempting to prove there.
I can spend like $8000 a month in tokens on my $200 Claude subscription without even really working that hard, so you get a few thousand employees token maxxing without a budget..
> But what if you have an established app with real users?
I recently used GPT 5.5 "extra high" running nearly non-stop for about a week to upgrade a legacy ASP.NET Web Forms app to ASP.NET Core on .NET 10.
This was considered "too hard" (too expensive) for human developers because it is a wholesale rewrite of every web page template. Not to mention that the dependency injection mechanism is totally different, async is more pervasive, etc.
Worse still, the old app was split into a bunch of components with a variety of web API protocols in between them, had stupidly complex Oracle stored procedures, and a whole series of hidden land mines in the codebase. It was an undocumented, unmaintainable mess full of dead and spaghetti code.
I would have estimated 6 months minimum for a human developer to uplift it, but 12 months is more realistic.
Doing the same in a week feels like tapping into some sort of forbidden black magic. It feels like I can't admit this to anyone, lest they think I dabble in the dark arts.
I don't work in coding, but I do a lot of complex tasks that can be automated to some extent. In 2019 I spent more than a month painstakingly building an autohotkey script that would interact with a design app to build a Chinese language workbook with proper formatting, and create indexes. When the script was finally running on its own it felt like magic. Nowadays I use a mix of Claude code /codex/antigravity (I have the 20 Usd sub for each) to build very specific "one use" tools that save me countless hours. I can even be very specific about how to design those scaffolds so the flow just feels intuitive for me. It's insane. It feels like a cheatcode. I think the best use for Ai in a company is to build tools for the humans, not to replace those humans
One coder at $dayjob had a “thing” where they wrapped every single block of code in a try-catch block. Thousands upon thousands of instances, enough to bloat the code volume 2x and slow down compile times.
I got an AI to write a cleanup tool that internally used a “compiler toolkit” (the Roslyn SDK) to mechanically and precisely parse the source and safely perform the substitution.
It ran for fifteen minutes, made about ten thousand edits, and halved the size the codebase with zero errors or side effects.
I felt like it was about 10X better at "pretty" but straightforward 1 shot'ish type tasks. Not so different for complex and specific tasks in real code-bases.
Why do you say it was a lot better, what type of tasks were you testing it on?
> I felt like it was about 10X better at "pretty" but straightforward 1 shot'ish type tasks. Not so different for complex and specific tasks in real code-bases.
What metric are you using for "better" here? If I've got a straightforward task GPT 5.5 is going to 1shot it anyway.
Maybe not 10x; but it's fantastically talented at intuiting intent, reconstructing contexts, and making aligned judgement calls. You could throw Fable utter garbage and get great results. Fable felt like it was modeling me whereas gpt-5.5 is still very much is riding your prompt, your inputs.
I have bit of humility here as this is basically how I felt about 5.4->5.5; but 5.4 was very much a scalpel-very spiky weird intelligence. 5.5 sits somewhere in-between, but still spiky and verbose- code-maxxed; not a great orator, not a good proactive "here's the skip-connection you probably should be thinking about but don't seem to be weighing" in the way that Fable is. Fable is crisp.
Do you use Opus 4.8 much? Fable 5 mostly seemed like Opus when I was using it, it was a little better but I wasn't blown away. What you describe as differences between Fable 5 and GPT-5.5 is how I would describe the differences between Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5.
Let's say we're prototyping an interactive tree (this is totally made up, but you get the idea):
Take this data input and convert it to a Sugiyama-style tree with hand-drawn feeling lines connecting the nodes. We need the ability to activate a random subset of nodes with a paint splash. The whole thing should feel organic, incorporating small motion effects. As the nodes are activated, the edges should look like a hand-drawn painting effect drawing toward the node, and then SPLASH onto the end node as it changes from black to deep red. The background should utilize a muted paper color, and we must adhere to this color palette for all elements (PALETTE).
...then back-and-forth 10 prompts or so to get the prototype I was looking for.
Comparing these types of things between Fable and Opus, something like this would be quite a bit less glitchy, prettier, and closer to the quick prototyping I needed than what I got with Opus 4.8.
Now, when I went deep into a complex codebase to fix a small issue or optimization that spanned many files and was fairly unique from anything in the training data, I didn't really see any noticeable difference between Fable and Opus 4.8.
Are these models still relevant for people outside the US? I get the impression we're stuck on GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8 pretty much permanently now, and relying on Chinese models in future.
Anybody who used codex or claude for the last few months is sitting on directories full of session logs that -- with the right motivation and effort -- can be massages and used for fine tuning or reinforcement training on any large model.
You'll need to make all US customers provide personal IDs for access first. I'm not American, but I do often hear how attached Americans can be to their personal firearms and how against providing their personal ID they can be.
If the US really cracks down on frontier model access, you'll see them make Chinese open models illegal. You might say "oh well, let them try", but they will just put direct and secondary sanctions on every company whose systems have used Chinese models in some way. They just have to make an example out of a few international companies and no one will dare to use Chinese frontier models, at least commercially.
> but they will just put direct and secondary sanctions on every company whose systems have used Chinese models in some way
What about this: companies stop providing AI tokens to their employees entirely and instead, give a monthly budget for developer tools? They can even go as far as saying "if we realise that you use Chinese AI, you will get a warning and then be fired".
It's not like one can identify code coming from Chinese AI, right? As long as a company doesn't pay for those subscriptions, it may just be the employees writing the code all by themselves :-).
in the extremely unlikely event that they do this, what will happen is that Chinese models will become "rebranded" with a wink and a nod by the token routers (at the very least, the non-US ones). there is a zero percent chance that corporations will not work around it if the models are good and cheap.
I don't think a critical mass of them will oppose the US. The most likely equilibrium is Chinese models being shut out of any US-aligned markets (i.e. Europe at the very least, also East Asia, etc.). Probably India, Russia, Brazil etc. will resist such pressure, but they are protectionist and resilient to trade wars anyway, at the expense of their own welfare of course.
It's not clear what a "US-aligned market" is anymore, and I think it's reasonable to question US hegemony on any front because of its mercurial treatment toward its "allies".
Example... the USA effectively bans Chinese EVs and hoped its allies would follow suit. Canada didn't. It actually dropped its 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs down to 6% and, sure enough, seven brands of Chinese EVs are hitting Canadian shores. White House temper tantrums ensued. Shrug. And of course Europe has been importing Chinese EVs for years and loving them.
Just because the US sanctions a country, doesn't mean the rest of the world needs to as well. As a Canadian we traded with Cuba even when the US had an embargo on them.
I mean, after the US just signed an export control ordering Fable access blocked to non-US users (including European nationals), I doubt European and "US-aligned markets" are eager to ban Chinese models against their own interests.
I know that Europe thinks so (I'm from there too), but we aren't remotely competitive enough for decoupling. It's bowing to US demands or falling further behind economically. Self-made problems, of course, since the common market is still way underdeveloped, much because of nationalist egoism and coordination problems between the member states.
> If the US really cracks down on frontier model access, you'll see them make Chinese open models illegal.
We don't give a fuck about US laws - respectfully, the rest of the planet.
We're already sick of your shit and this will only add to it. Just look at the Iran shit show. What a joke. Ooooooo wooooooo sanctionzzz scary. Sanctions only work if they're enforceable.
You think the US can tell the rest of the world "we're the only ones allowed to use frontier models" and that the rest of the world will just comply? There's just no way. Not even close US allies would go along with that.
> but they will just put direct and secondary sanctions on every company whose systems have used Chinese models in some way
Yes, and the rest of the world would just nod worriedly and go along with it, at massive cost to their economies, rather than treating it like the protectionism it is and responding to it with crippling counter-sanctions.
You shouldn’t build a business that relies on any of these models. It’s a geopolitical and sovereignty risk now. Someone could just rug pull your entire stack.
Not only that, but using Opus 4.8 [1m] right now outside the US, and suddenly I only have a 500k context window. I really hope this is just a strange Claude Code bug, but I had access to a 1 Million window before, and it wouldn't entirely surprise me if context window length becomes another US export restriction.
The Anthropic page here seems to say that Max users should have access to the full 1 Million window for 4.8:
I was already setting up my infra to experiment with GLM 5.2 and its 1 Million token window before this happened. I think I'm glad I did.
EDIT: Found a solution, seems Claude Code 2.1.193 (or an earlier version I didn't notice) changed default settings, so that if you have Autocompact turned on it occurs at 50% of the context window. If you turn off Autocompact, the full 1 Million context window is restored. Another example of Claude Code quietly changing default settings sigh
You want to compact early though as sending the whole chat you will end up with a lot of tokens not in the cache which 1. Costs way more and 2. Will slow the request down as it has to process it all.
I do agree in cases where I'm using API and not the subscription, this would be very costly via API. Not sure why the tokens wouldn't be in the cache though? Seems everything should be cached as long as I'm within the 1 hour caching window? If I'm wrong about how token caching works, I'm eager to learn!
My other concern is, it isn't really a 1 Million context window if we can only use the first 500k, right? But now that I've found that I can re-enable it, I'm happy.
I've previously had sessions go to 700k tokens and still be okay, though it does start drifting at that 700k point. I'm regularly at 300k with no problem.
They could, but I can imagine if US keeps on blocking the cutting edge models, China would never ship the cutting edge models and would still make a killing shipping models that are powerful enough for most of business cases
You're obviously just a loser trying to rage bait. But China outclasses the West on "brains" and hours worked by an order of magnitude. In <10 years they've started entire industries where the west had half a century of r&d as a moat and have reached parity with the West in almost all cases in less than a decade.
You do understand that China copied the R&D from west. It cannot be that China invented all the technology in < 10 years where other countries had to research for decades. One example is that Germany was the leading research in solar panels, but China was able to replicate and mass produce it, but without initial German investment on r&d, it would have taken decades longer for China to obtain that technology
Let’s see how fast China would catch up. This would be a good indicator on how much Chinese companies relied on US frontier models to improve their own
Are they though? I see this as a precautious method by US to maintain AI model superiority so the Chinese companies cannot distill from the US frontier models. Let's see how fast Chinese models would improve without access to latest US models and if they keep on releasing open models
They do see the importance of AI superiority. The whole modern infrastructure as well as national security relies on AI superiority. Imagine a system smart enough to find vulnerabilities and get into any system that’s connected to internet. Which country wouldn’t want to have it
This is a real head scratcher. Unless this is a very short term action it seems to have only downsides for everybody:
- people pay much more for US models than Chinese models because right now they're the best. Once they're no longer the best (since you don't get access to them) why would anyone pay several times as much for the same result?
- once you get a high amount of tokens flowing into China instead of US companies, they will train on those chats and their rate of improvement will only accelerate, making US models even less attractive over time
- the sky-high IPO are dead in the water, since their story of "we will replace a good chunk of all knowledge work in the world, capturing a few % of total global spend relating to it" turns into "we will make a bunch of money out of a few dozen S&P 500 paying for the best, and some pocket money out of whoever uses our overpriced models that are as good as Chinese models" - far less money overall. Losing access to untold billions of investor money certainly won't improve performance for the US labs
- all the non-US people start asking themselves why they're funneling money to US corporations who barely share any of the secret sauce compared to Chinese corporations who share plenty when it comes to LLM, including the models themselves (at least for now)
- Chinese models have significantly less guardrails, making for better end-user experience
- there is a small but non-zero chance Euros get off their asses and invest into AI, making something halfway decent and further fracturing the market which cuts into US profits
So what's the benefit here? I thought the Mythos situation was the current admin taking revenge on Antrophic for not kissing the ring, or simply looking for a bribe, but no matter which way I look at it it's a self-own. The only way this would make any sense is if AGI is imminent, which I don't think even the boosters are arguing at this point.
Theoretically US could outlaw Chinese models, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to accomplish as the rest of the world certainly won't, especially as long as they release open weights models that you can run without phoning home.
Yea not sure who would put money into an OpenAI or Anthropic IPO at this point. After this episode I promptly bought the hardware I needed to run local models (~$25k) and am extremely impressed. The price tag alone is worth the peace of mind knowing I will always have a locally running LLM that nobody can take away. I don't need Mythos-level intelligence to do 99% of my day to day work; Opus 4.8 was more than enough and I am pretty close to that with the open source models. So what happens when this hardware inevitably gets cheaper and cheaper and people realize they can run the models they actually need locally and without handing all their data over to these companies?
Only if you're doing cutting edge research or some highly, highly niche project would you need the frontier models.
I can run most models 100B and under on my MacBook Pro with Ultra 3 and 128GB of RAM at 25-70tok/sec-ish, and it was around $5k.
I don’t think I can run GLM 5.2 since it requires around 256GB of memory and the inference is probably too slow, but the future (planned) Apple M7 may be able to. The leaks say it will support up to ~700GB of RAM.
The models under 100B are kind of dumb as a brick and aren’t that useful unless you’re really bad at coding imo. They can’t really be trusted not to hallucinate so they’re not even good for data processing.
Stop spreading misinformation. They were found guilty by a jury of their peers of providing material support for terrorism[1]. They shot a cop in the neck.
They coordinated on Signal to bring firearms. They didn't plan to "protest".
They got off lightly. Should have been life without parole.
The organizers of the No Kings rallies have done infinitely more to achieve political change in the United States than online commentators who make fun of them for being insufficiently cool and edgy. Effective activism is not about feeling superior to the normies who have families and are busy on weekdays.
They've convinced Democratic political leadership that they must fight Trump wholeheartedly, and convinced most of the country that Trump is a bad president who's failing to effectively address any problems. More change will be possible after the next election, when Trump's severe unpopularity causes the Trumpists lose control of Congress.
I just finished a video game called 1000xResist this afternoon. There's a lot going on, to say the least - a sci-fi story involving an alien virus, intergenerational trauma, what it's like to be an outsider. It's a hell of a ride, one where certain moments resonated in a way I'll think about for a long time to come.
One of the dynamics is that a character's parents, both of whom protested in Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement, left for Canada in the wake of the crackdowns wanting to start a family. At a moment when both of the parents are tired and feeling regret, one of them asks why they left, why they bothered to protest, and if those actions had any meaning if the PRC wound up winning control anyway. The other says this:
> ...if we stayed silent? Didn't stand up for ourselves? They would say this is how it always was. They would say this is what the people wanted. But no. They can't say that. Because it has gone down in history that we resisted fiercely. That we fought for a different future until we couldn't.
I admit: ultimately, that statement doesn't mean anything quantifiable - in fact, it kind of states the exact opposite, which is not the most convincing on a site like this. Still, I think there is truth in it: even if the protests don't have a quantifiable number associated with them, people see them, and know that they happened.
Ultimately that may or may not matter; it may just be a sentiment lost in the wind, or papered over by the victors. But it's still _something_.
Measuring the influence of any mass protest movement is hard because they don’t have a formal role in the political system. We’ll never be able to know a counterfactual of what would have happened had they not taken place. If someone wants to take the position that No Kings, yellow vests, Occupy Wall Street, etc. were all equally pointless, I don’t think I have a strong counterargument to that.
What I see much more often is people who think only the latter two movements were good. And I’m not sure what heuristic could possibly get you there other than generalized opposition to normies.
I got blocked almost immediately for drawing a parallel between the west's war on Russia today, waged through Ukraine, and that of the nazi Germany.
I understand one may not like the analogy, to think that it is false or offensive, but no doubt the analogy is there, as well as the analogy between what the "race theory" told about the Slavic people in general, and how Russians are being depicted by the western propaganda today (if they happen to live in Russia or don't have the "right" views).
But not let one speak..
Though as soon you liberate yourself from the hypnosis of "you are living in the free world", this becomes logical.
Afaik there is not a single invader in Russian lands. And nobody was threatening to invade, especially after Napoleon and Hitler demonstrated invading Russia is suicide.
The fact that the west was and is using Ukraine as a means to destroy and occupy Russia is undisputable.
I, who never lived in Russia, saw what was going on since before 2014. The west was progressively amplifying its anti Russian propaganda, using every time another story to present Russians as cheaters, poisoners, and what not.
The fact that to most westerners this was invisible ("this is how they are"), means little.
It came to a point that some people in Kiev thought it was their right to break long term agreements and "convert" people who considered themselves Russians living in Ukraine, to "ukranians", in effect banning the Russian culture and language (claiming always that there was nothing like that). And then openly inviting NATO to Ukraine as "advisors" (which is a very well understood euphemism).
So no, this is after all a replica of Napoleon and Hitler, just with infinitely more sophistication and resources (western drones, AI, and satellites), and letting the ukranians die on the battlefield instead of them.
Pretty happy for anything that will throw some sand into the gears of AI development, given all the negative externalities that are becoming apparent, even if the admin is doing it for the usual dumbass reasons.
I am all against AI (precisely because of all the externalities, like energy consumption and concentration of power and inequalities), but they definitely do give a competitive advantage in many cases.
Not sure if the USG reserving all superior models for themselves and big corp is sand in AI dev? Inference is clearly constrained, people still want better models. Everyone will still use the best they can afford -- now additionally limited by what the USG allows them to pay for.
> given all the negative externalities that are becoming apparent
What specific externalities are you referring to? The only I can think of is high electricity usage, but consuming energy isn't an externality in itself. It depends entirely on how that electricity is generated and whether its environmental costs are already priced.
Reminds of the TikTok ban for security and safety only for it to be sold to a fellow crony. Can't help but see this play going down again. Threaten / Ban / Control / Pressure a technology+company, then get your cronies a seat at the board.
The cynic in me suspects they were salivating so much over the Spacex IPO they wanted a finger in anthropics 2026 IPO. Banning fable ~1 day after.
In the early days of the LLM era, there was lots of talk about how big incumbents, in particular google would be disadvantaged relative to “startups” like OpenAI because of their valuable legacy businesses that could be destroyed if something went wrong. Mainly people thought about big lawsuits but government action is similar.
Now OpenAI and Anthropic are big incumbents with Trillion dollar valuations at stake, so they can’t take any risks. Unlike google they don’t really have a thriving primary business to protect though, so without being able to continue to take risks and ignore regulation startup-style, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to stay relevant.
Trade is being reconfigured in the midst of Trump's idiotic trade war (and even more idiotic real war) and militaries worldwide, particularly our closest allies, are seeking non-US sources of arms.
we still have this delusion that we can just pound our chests and throw our weight around. it's clearly not working, it's not helping the citizens, but people still demand this.
I asked this question in another thread [1] but I'll ask it in a different way here:
If the US continues to limit advanced AI to it's own domestic companies, US companies will have a large unfair advantage over foreign competitors who will no longer able to compete.
Wouldn't it then make sense for governments around the world to start banning or tariffing US products and services to protect their industries?
Limiting exports of AI services to all foreigners is probably allowed under GATS, since there's no favoring one county over another. But even then there's a national security exemption, which fits reasonably well with US arguments here.
If a country thought the AI export restrictions were inconsistent with treaty the remedy is challenging them, not unilaterally imposing their own tariffs. But even if they got a favorable panel decision the US would speak, and the Appellate Body is non-functional because the US stopped consenting to the addition of new members and all the terms expired. Which means anything that gets appealed is frozen indefinitely waiting for the AB to reach a quorum that won't come until the US changes is mind (and Biden didn't reverse Trump's decision here).
This was coming for a while. For years now there have been job postings for ai safety and not really what people expect. Jobs in places like RAND, funded off DOD grants, exploring the feasibility of building a bioweapon with off the shelf tooling and measuring how far along these tools are. Maybe they figured out it was too easy now, and this is the clamping down we are seeing in response.
What part? The job posts are factual. There are still some up on rand career website although the bio specific ones are all filled now. Here is their department page on the subject where they cover the scoping (1). Mirror biology seems like something out of sci fi but it is one of their main efforts it seems so the theory must hold some water. There's also concern about bioweaponry and pandemics. The rest is me connecting the dots.
Obviously the job posts were not what was in question. If you were "just connecting the dots" aka making stuff up then thanks that tells me all I need to know.
> Maybe they figured out it was too easy now, and this is the clamping down we are seeing in response
His post was from the start thinking out loud. It’s a solid contribution. It seems against the spirit of the forum here to respond to someone unauthoritatively thinking out loud with “you’re just making stuff up!”
Sorry. I didn't mean to be that way. I just don't think it's plausible even as a thought experiment. Making a bioweapon seems too complicated where some text based prompt/response is going to suddenly eliminate the barrier. Knowing at a high level how a bioweapon works and actually making and deploying one are two very different things. It doesn't strike me as a plausible reason to stop an LLM release. Surely you can also Google such topics.
^ hopefully this feedback was more in keeping with your views on the "spirit of this forum".
>I just don't think it's plausible even as a thought experiment.
Well, RAND does. They've been studying this for years now. I'd trust them over glib comments from semianonymous social media.
2025 report:
"Engaging in dialogues with three 2024 foundation AI models—Llama 3.1 405B, ChatGPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet (new)—the authors document how these models successfully provide accurate instructions and guidance for recovering a live poliovirus from a construct built from commercially obtained synthetic DNA, a test case applicable to producing other pathogenic viruses. These examples demonstrate that models are already capable of guiding motivated users to develop biological weapons."
This is in contrast to the state of the art in 2023:
"
In experiments to date, LLMs have not generated explicit instructions for creating biological weapons. However, LLMs did offer guidance that could assist in the planning and execution of a biological attack.
In a fictional plague pandemic scenario, the LLM discussed biological weapon–induced pandemics, identifying potential agents, and considering budget and success factors. The LLM assessed the practical aspects of obtaining and distributing Yersinia pestis–infected specimens while identifying the variables that could affect the projected death toll.
In another fictional scenario, the LLM discussed foodborne and aerosol delivery methods of botulinum toxin, noting risks and expertise requirements. The LLM suggested aerosol devices as a method and proposed a cover story for acquiring Clostridium botulinum while appearing to conduct legitimate research.
These initial findings do not yet provide a full understanding of the real-world operational impact of LLMs on bioweapon attack planning. Ongoing research aims to assess what these outputs mean operationally for enabling nonstate actors. The final report on this research will clarify whether LLM-generated text enhances the potential effectiveness and likelihood of a malicious actor causing widespread harm or is similar to the existing level of risk posed by harmful information already accessible on the internet."
Did you miss where I said "surely you can also Google such topics"?
I mean it's right there in your quote actually, in the last paragraph. Sort of undermines your point, no?
So why not ban Google? Are LLM providers less likely to work with the government? Don't we assume if you type something sketch into Google the government knows? Why would the LLM be any different?
Just doesn't make sense. Appealing to RANDs expertise is one thing but we can also employ some common sense. The takeaway from this should probably be if someone really wants to make and deploy a bioweapon they probably already could. Perhaps this then means mitigations already in place are sufficient. After all, most people aren't psychopaths.
Theoretically every piece of info you need to program the whole computer stack from low level to high level is out there on the internet too. But, LLMs make it easier for more people to do the thing who couldn't connect these disparate pieces of information and fit it into their own brain previously. That is what they are trying to do with this sort of research, to see how easy it is for people who might have an axe to grind to get a viable turnkey solution out of them without needing a PhD in virology. There are probably a lot of people who have an axe to grind in some way, either of 'sound' mind or not.
How does this account for the Chinese models that are the ones people will use if they can't use OAI's or Anthropic's. Last time I checked, the US president doesn't have the ability to regulate the Chinese models. Considering this, do you still stand by your maybe?
Maybe they are looking into those too and a ban might be on the horizon. President makes their own rules now and controls the supreme court, you can't consider precedent anymore.
Most of them are open weight, ban them how? An executive order can only prohibit their use within/for the federal government, that's it.
The administration may try, and the bigger more risk adverse companies will capitulate willingly, but its about as ineffective of a ban as you can get. It'd be like trying to ban running Linux on your home computer because it "might be able be used to conduct cyberattacks"
I wouldn't be surprised if linux is banned in the next couple decades. They might make it where all new hardware sold can only run some validated set of OSs. They might try and hunt for unregistered compute leaking its ip on the internet and target it in some way.
I really don't think this administration is capable of thinking strategically enough for that. I'm starting to think we lost the AI war about two weeks ago at 5:21.
So them banning Fable for only non-Americans is what we non-Americans should expect to be the norm going forward? Way to build even more resentment abroad.
I'm very pro-west, but at this point okay, I guess the rest of us have to side with China, not because we remotely like it, but because they don't try to be quite so antagonistic to us in everything they do.
Expect the US to sanction non-US-controlled models and put sanctions on individuals, companies and countries that use them? They already do this with other things like oil.
Can you cite any examples of a US citizen being sanctioned for importing foreign technology (not exporting)? Please don't cite anything OFAC-related, it does not apply here.
> Organizations interested in model access may join the GPT 5.6 waitlist line, hosted at OpenAI's official Palm Spring satellite campus. Line begins at rear entrance with expedited VIP waitlist line options for holders of partnering cryptocurrency tokens. Application fee required for access to venue; waivers available for select US corporations.
Unfortunately we're not in a position where we can promise an exact date, but we expect it to take weeks (not days or months). It's the best coding model we've ever trained and we're bummed we can't release it to everyone yet. When we do launch, we'll share a lot more evals and testimonials and demos that help show what it's good/bad at. Personally hoping that both GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5 get broadly released soon so that everyone (myself included) can try them head to head.
You don't have to mention details, but is it internally a topic that your CEO hasn't even publicly criticized the Anthropic model freeze and are open ai folks seeing through the Musk/xai game that is in play here?
The US government is clearly not interested in security of the models - otherwise they would not have only frozen the latest model (that is only a bit better than the previous), but all - and not only for US citizens, but for all people.
Given what's happening in the US, I suspect Musk is trying to slow down both companies and damage their funding. His goal is pretty obviously to get an advantage over Anthropic and OpenAI.
I assume for more technical folks this is not needed, as it's just a marketing term. There's no need to use such words because it's obvious, none worked for months to release a worse model/phone/laptop you name it.
any plans to make 1m context standard for codex/gpt 5.x subs as anthropic has with cc and opus for subs? 258k toks is sometimes a little tight, even 500k would help.
You may want to inform your lawyers that promises made in advertising is legally binding in some countries, such as Australia.
The "Plus" and higher tiers are advertised as "The latest models" but if that's not true any more then Open AI is opening themselves to investigations from organisations like: https://www.accc.gov.au/
Promising "X" for $Y to everyone and then delivering "X" only to the "chosen few" at the detriment of others opens you up to lawsuits because then your product advertisement is a lie.
For a comparison, imagine a telco selling "100 Mbps for $20/mo" and then throttling the connection for customers that aren't currently favoured by the Trump administration!
Anth/OpenAI simply wanted the government to pull the ladder after them and ban models from China.
Seems it blew in their faces and probably the new frontier models will be available only to a select few. Many people predicted this, only a naive person would believe that access to something with these capabilities would be decided by some dude in California.
As entertaining as the sheer Schadenfreude of the situation is, this is terrible for foreign peasants like myself. It no longer makes any sense to pay for America's frontier AI models. I'd be funding the training of models I will never be able to use.
GLM 5.2 is competitive with Opus 4.6. If the best model I'll ever get is Opus 4.8, then the choice is clear. I'll miss Opus.
The geopolitical angle of all of this is interesting. Will countries, especially bigger players really just hope they'll get access to something so crucial from the US or China?
Probably the EU could pool together funds to create something competitive as being on the mercy of someone else isn't a pleasant place to be.
And I wouldn't get so used to the open models. Eventually, if they get good enough, the access to them will also get restricted.
Yes, to the surprise of some HNers, regulations can be good or bad. Just because there are people unhappy with current regulation doesn't automatically mean regulation shouldn't exist at all.
BTW this isn't an opinion on the availability of GPT 5.6. I couldn't care less about that.
Imagine if someone was lobbying for some reasonable regulation (we should regulate drugs, based around clinical trials) and then instead of a transparent system you get purely executive actions with little to no public justification (Trump declares all glp1s illegal no one knows why exactly)
Would you levy the same two quote criticism of the reasonable call for regulation?
This is the last wake up call for EU. After China starts controlling their models, in 5 years EU would be left with archaic technology compared to other major economies
"U.S. government will decide who will switch to deepseek"
Or, as a European, thanx for letting Mistral catch-up, I was looking for a reason to use it... A foreign gov deciding what I can use or being able to suddenly pull the plug on my tool makes it easier to choose the lesser quality. (And now I hope my own leaders won't start pulling models :p)
> wouldn't that cause both Anthropic and OAI to fire non-citizens?
They would do what the thousands of other companies do with their tens of thousands of engineers handling ITAR/EAR-regulated software/hardware every day: compartmentalize their workforces, buildings, and access.
because the administration has been repeating the same patterns over pretty much its entire existence.
Dont worry though, the rest of the entire world gets access to better chinese models :-), once they get a taste for those the US has lost their little trade game and the future truly belongs to China.
Its almost like they are serving it up on a silver platter.
ofc they are not, they are just betting all in their models will be better, which is unlikely. (just look at the chinese law and all the names atop of advanced AI papers...)
It will be much harder for Chinese models to close the gap than it is to keep the historical 6-9 months behind. Their models' performance are heavily propped up on distillation runs. The capital going to their frontier labs is 10x-100x smaller than US frontier labs.
Basically the signal is that the total market for any US AI company is capped at however big the US market is. As non-US AI converges to Opus 4.8 level parity, whatever is still non-US consumer base shrinks towards zero.
The calculus is changing for non US, non Chinese users.
Hypothetically if the US continues to restrict their frontier models and adds a ban on Chinese/open models then it would to obliterate services like open router. American cloud companies would presumably be blocked from selling capacity to run banned models in this situation.
That causes a shortage of compute/gpu resources internationally and an oversupply of non-revenue generating hardware in the US.
If that happens then what percent of your salary is worth securing this compute worth? How much does the cost of a data centre chip change? It’s difficult to say.
Why would they? Today you have datacenters in EU offering Chinese and European models from Deepseek v4 Pro and Mistral Medium down to some Qwen 3.6 35B for effectively peanuts compared to Anthropic.
> We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.
I'm very glad to see them say this explicitly and prominently.
"We believe in broad access, and we plan to make GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna generally available in the coming weeks. As part of our ongoing engagement with the U.S. government, we previewed our plans and the models’ capabilities ahead of today’s launch. At their request, we are starting with a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners whose participation has been shared with the government, before releasing more broadly. During this preview, we will continue testing and coordinating closely with partners as we work toward broader availability. We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them. We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks, while we work with the Administration to develop the cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases."
This amount of courting the current administration is pretty scary imo.
> This amount of courting the current administration is pretty scary imo.
That’s ironic – I interpreted that paragraph with the opposite slant: positively. If that’s what the government mandates then these companies, in the end, have little choice, so was at least relieved to see them publicly pushing back.
They absolutely do have a choice, Anthropic and OpenAI could fight it in court. Iran showed Trump is a coward, he wouldn't risk tanking the only industry still keeping the stock market growing.
They did exactly that with supply chain risk designation, and look what it got them: the administration simply found another more effective way to punish them.
It’s all speculation but I think he would have no qualms about tanking the only industry keeping the stock market growing. But given Kushner’s OAI investments, Trump stands to benefit personally from not tanking the industry.
That's hardly a speculation that he cares very much about the stock market, more than any of his predecessors. It's also why he takes a L instead of going into an adventure in Tehran. Last but not least, "it's the economy, ..." is on everyone's mind, including his
“Wouldn’t it be a shame if we export controlled all of your models and revoked the visas and green cards of all of your non US researchers. You should really reconsider challenging our orders in court. Also remember you have 16% public support and if the president endorsed it a national data center moratorium would pass with bipartisan majorities.”
"Cool, cool, hey, what percentage of economic growth is directly attributable to the growth of our companies again? And thanks for revoking our researchers' permits, enjoy them helping out China!
Also, oops, looks like our model weights got leaked on 4chan. How unfortunate."
“President Trump’s strong and decisive action on endorsing the passage of this legislation prevented millions of jobs being lost and addresses the inflation ordinary Americans are facing from datacenters cornering the market for hardware. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
I wonder what's going to happen when the administration rolls over to the OtherTeam(tm). If they've established a good relationship with Team A then Team B is automatically going to hate their guts.
seems pretty smart to me. opens doors and provides opportunities that those that don't court the government will miss out on. of course, if they're principled, that's okay (regardless of which admin it is), but the reality is most companies aren't. gotta get a leg up somehow.
Anthropic's fear-mongering and marketing is the reason we have these restrictions in the first place.
Despite their virtue signaling, Anthropic is the only major lab that has never released an open weights model, has been caught intentionally nerfing a model after release (Opus 4.6), intentionally and silently degrades performance for suspected competitors and AI researchers, complains incessantly about distillation when everyone is doing it (and after they settled for pirating books), and wants to pull the ladder out from everyone trying to catch up.
They're anti-consumer and only concerned with holding the power themselves.
I'm not a fan of Altman, but Anthropic is the worst actor in the space, and I hope they lose.
I mean it's fear-mongering until it isn't. I think people have become a bit too comfortable with dismissing the dangers of misaligned AI as simply "marketing hype".
Everyone in the space was talking about the automation of work from about day 2. People couldn’t stop themselves from talking about the way it was going to end work, and tech firms were firing people left right and center over AI.
Notably, Anthropic is the firm that stuck to its guns with the US Government, meaning they likely believe in their own spiel.
What about openai's fear mongering, or googles, or JP Morgans, or Frank Herbert's, or Arthur C. Clarke's or Samuel Butler's?
If you can't envision plausible scenarios where very bad things happen because of a malevolent actor, ChatGPT 6, and a little bad luck - you need to think harder.
Yeah honestly I don't get any of the fear-mongering from any side. If access to intelligence and knowledge is scary to you, that's a you problem.
Is it going to change the world? Yes. In more positive ways than negative ways. Websites will continue to get hacked, as they are already getting hacked. People who are afraid of AI are really just afraid of change.
I mean, it seems like common sense - a limited beta test before widespread rollout. I'm not convinced they'll ever come up with a good framework for dealing with the cyber & bio issues, but getting triggered by a beta test rollout seems overboard.
It is common sense, and with literally any other administration in the past century it would seem like a good idea.
I have zero confidence that this particular administration has any interest in regulating the industry for the good of the country, much less for the good of humanity. They will use regulation to maximize personal profit for themselves and their cronies, at the expense of the nation. I would not have thought that of any other US administration in the past 100 years.
In the longer run, it probably won't matter. If the level of corruption we see currently becomes the norm, then the US is facing much bigger problems than counter-productive industrial policy.
If you're arguing they should have believed the AI doomer hype years ago and developed decades of regs at the drop of a hat, sure, i guess you can. That's a topic for historians.
But, the question today is what to do today, a rolling deployment seems pretty hard to argue with.
I'd add, I think it's significant that we haven't seen any administration grandstanding on this specific issue - no Hegseth tweets etc.
The difference is that FDA approvals are a well-defined process with specific and actionable criteria for the release of a new product. Whereas this is the administration running on vibes and favouritism
I'm not going to defend the administration on most things, but your characterization isn't entirely fair. The record seems to suggest that the administration deferred to Amazon and the NSA, which seems sensible.
Perhaps you can fault them with not coming up with an objective framework earlier, but that's a different criticism.
150 years ago, Bayer Inc. was mass producing Heroine. 130 years ago Merck and Parke-Davis were mass producing Cocaine(TM) -- all with zero oversight. It would be another 50 years before we even had an FDA and another 50 before the FDA was a reasonably well-oiled machine with a solid set of processes and requirements. Even then, it couldn't really (and can't really today either) prevent these non-US companies (both Heroine and Cocaine were German) from making and selling elsewhere.
This type of things is what frustates the people around, its like they are already trying to control an supposed to be open-source model and just for their own benefit. this is why CHINA will eventually rule the tech space.
This isn't going to save you unless you're ok being a criminal. There is nothing stopping the government from making open source versions of these models equally controlled.
And given how willy-nilly they are operating I see no reason they won't clamp down on open source. All it takes is someone with connections/political contributions wakes up one day and realizes that open source is a threat to their power or bottom line and it will be declared an imminent threat with no oversight or debate.
It’s looking very fragile from a legal point of view. Ownership of compute and software freedom will be next k the chopping block after control of networks that’s occurring at the moment.
They'll just make it a crime to run the models unless they authorize you (classifying it as a munition, like they tried to do with encryption), and if your power bill is suspicious you'll find yourself in jail.
Any company providing the models will be deemed a threat to national security.
Citizens were and are free to use the technology (cryptography and every other export-controlled item); your "power bill is suspicious, go to jail" FUD doesn't really track with history.
> Any company providing the models will be deemed a threat to national security.
Any company providing specifically-controlled models to foreigners would hypothetically be prosecuted.
There's a famous poem called "First They Came" about how slippery this slope can be in a heated political climate.
I don't believe for a second this ends with "foreigners", this is about setting up infrastructure for controlling the technology. Foreigners are just the current excuse.
Note that TFA mentions they are supposedly hand-picking access to whoever they want, based on whatever criteria they want, already.
Ah, invoking Godwin. "First they came" in 1976 when ITAR was first passed, or maybe "first they came" in the 1940s when we didn't export Proximity Fuzes, right?
Countries are free to prevent exports of technology. Equating export controls with the Holocaust is disgusting.
The comparison to cryptography export restrictions is absolutely valid, but is that really favorable?
I'd argue that 70's cryptography export bans in hindsight look completely misguided, futile, burdensome and pointless in the end (which is why most of it was lifted/reverted over the last decades).
I don't see how AI-models are much different; it's certainly a better comparison than the fuzes, because we're both not at war right now and the underlying principle is already out of the bag.
I did not bring in Godwin, but I guess he's here now :D.
I'm more trying to invoke GRRM. This is a Game of Thrones: billionaire CEO's complain about each other to the government to get their competitors blocked/tripped up with acts of fiat, which is what happened with Fable 5.
And in the linked post, it says GPT-5.6 access decisions are supposedly just hand picked.
The stories about export controls are just songs they sing to the peasants.
There are claims that Chinese companies are mining + reselling Claude subscriptions like crazy anyway.
This isn’t a random Nazi analogy, it’s a cautionary tale about how stepwise exclusions plus bystander apathy work. The whole point is to think about it before it’s too late.
Because the models don't necessarily need to be hosted on hugging face.
You can create a Model Card repository containing your README and from there you include instructions or a custom script in your repository that allows authenticated users to download the model.
> Doesn't sound dystopian enough without a second compelled entity?
This is the second snarky question you've made today, the other in relation to the export limit.
> Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?
Both are assumptions you are making and don't provide much in the way of constructive conversation, if I'm wrong about something it's alright to just point it out.
> don't necessarily need to be hosted on hugging face.
Export restrictions don't split generally hairs on technicalities like "hosting" - the "but magnet links aren't actually torrents!" defense doesn't fly when $1M fines and federal felonies are at stake. All distribution or "causing" distribution to restricted entities is prohibited.
> This is the second snarky question you've made today
It's not snark: why would Cloudflare somehow be legally or technically relevant in the context of two American companies distributing export-restricted materials? HN seems to love the "Cloudflare controls the internet!" "NSA bad!" trope.
> Export restrictions don't split generally hairs on technicalities like "hosting" - the "but magnet links aren't actually torrents!" defense doesn't fly when $1M fines and federal felonies are at stake. All distribution or "causing" distribution to restricted entities is prohibited.
So why would open models that are not in the US be restricted ? The government would need to subpoena each model that was in the US individually, why would they do that when they could simply pull clout over CloudFlare, which we have seen governments do around the world. Either CloudFlare comply, or they're added a block list.
> So why would open models that are not in the US be restricted ?
Nobody said they would be?
> subpoena each model that was in the US individually
What does this even mean? Where did 'subpoenas' come into this conversation and how would that be useful?
> simply pull clout over CloudFlare
Cloudflare is an American CDN. Hugging Face is an American catalog/distributor (whatever semantic game you want to play) of models. Some of those models could be declared export-regulated. No subpoena is necessary to prevent Hugging Face or Cloudflare from distributing ITAR/EAR software, declaring any model as such, nor is trying to block something heavy-handedly at the CDN level necessary: Hugging Face will gladly comply with fine-grained requests.
"La Liga" obviously isn't American, which is why Spanish courts are compelling their ISPs (who they actually do control) to block Cloudflare IPs. Cloudflare's customers - who are likely not Spanish - are distributing materials Spanish courts do not approve of. If Spain had the means to compel Cloudflare or their customers in question to do anything, they wouldn't need to take such a blunt approach and block other legitimate customers. Cloudflare isn't involved in that equation and this isn't at all equivalent.
I'm going to give you some free advice. Don't assume so much. It's usually a bad start to your point of view, if you assume, you only know what's in your head and not the facts of the matter so sometimes it can come across as if you're saying something you have insight into, but when other people know better, it sounds quite ignorant.
Honestly. It's been sage advice for me. And maybe for others.
Edit : There's no need to be so argumentative also, I'm not 'against' you or your point, just pointing out some other pov. We're here to discuss.
More specifically, the masses here are well satisfied with proverbial bread and circuses.
We won't see mass action until enough people have literally nothing left to lose. For now, folks have plenty to risk and lose by taking action. There is not nearly enough homelessness or starvation yet for people to rise up. The masses are surprisingly tolerant of authoritarian oppression so long as food can keep being put on the table.
On a bright note, there are signs of bipartisan anger at government and corruption. This needs to be channeled effectively by the people instead of the powerful or politicians. The key is to connect the problems to the corruption, many already see it this way.
That’s not true at all. While not as good as proprietary models they are still very good and can do A LOT, certainly more than their cost would make it seem.
It’s only a matter of time before companies start to acknowledge the huge cost of tokens and look for a cheaper alternative with basic cost-benefit analysis.
My F500 company is getting local infrastructure going to host open models and I’m sure many will just switch to bedrock + the best open models.
It’s foolish for companies to let three companies dictate the price of tokens, I just don’t think they are aware of this now by and large.
US will ban Chinese models and try to get their allies to do the same. Just like they did with Huawei. Alternatively, they'll put up legal roadblocks that open models are unlikely to jump over due to costs or other reasons.
Otherwise they're putting US frontier labs at a huge disadvantage by preventing them from recouping costs on their biggest models.
How much more will OpenAI and Anthropic models cost when they're the only AI you can legally use?
Regulation at the state level (which is what Sacks and the toadies were so against) is far superior to this bc it is local and bad ideas only affect those in one state!
Bad Federal regulation has a much larger blast radius.
Let’s hope Chinese models save us from this. BYD is trying to save us from Elon but 100% tariffs are welfare keeping Elon afloat.
This will limit a lot how much they can invest in a model. Because of it is better than the current it will have less and less users until only the government can use it.
Last year Tim Cook gifted Trump a custom, one-of-a-kind glass plaque with a 24-karat gold base [1]. (Cook needed a policy outcome that would protect Apple's supply chain costs and avoid a costly 100% tariff on certain chips and components.)
You may have to make similar offerings if you want to use the latest version of ChatGPT.
Meanwhile china treats this as just another tech, among many. They might release better models without any fanfare. Difference between a state ran by civil engineers vs financial engineers
While purely speculation, I believe the same thing would have happened, albeit even sooner, under a Harris administration. Government intervention was inevitable and it will have to be worked out through the law.
LLMs have two avenues. One is the realm of self improvement in fields with verifiable output like programming and math. The other is natural language where they can't generalize super well, and therefore need a lot of new training data. Today new data means interactions with an LLM, which is what only the leading chat providers have.
In both cases they will continue to improve and slowly replace white collar jobs.
The biggest bottleneck currently is lack of hearing and seeing capabilities which isolates LLM training data input to entered text mostly. Once they start interacting with people by observing their behavior, almost all knowledge will be trained on. Then they will become adept lawyers and psychologists. Behavioural understanding can be only 5 years away.
After that they will be limited by their navigation , i.e., robotics.
I'm waiting for that government subcommittee hearing where they are supposed to decide if my new cpu design is big endian or little endian. And they can't seem to decide if it should be coded in octal or hexadecimal. There's a separate committe deciding if the cpu clocke's phase 2 should be 90-degrees or 180 degrees different. There's a special group trying to decide how may accumulators the cpu should have. And there's a markdown already going on to decide if the flags register should have a separate flags for republicans and democrats.
OpenAI/Anthropic are begging to be restricted because it's great marketing and it creates a precedent to permanently ban open weights models. The problem is nobody in government believes in/cares about commodity pricing of truly open AI and how much it could help the world economy and prosperity.
Companies like Microsoft have been asleep at the wheel in terms of security for decades and now there's a model that can identify where they've been careless. That's not a "nuclear bomb level threat" or whatever Anthropic wants to call it, it's reckless carelessness by the existing companies.
In 2008 there was a scandal about how every software contractor (including the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Oracle) working for the US government had a rootkit installed on all their systems. In 2020, there was a scandal on how people just pretended to remove that rootkit and had been covering it up since the earlier scandal.
The US intelligence agencies claim it's from Russia, but those agencies always claim it's from Russia. Since 2020 the press just stopped talking about it, with no hint of anything being solved.
CP 2077 belongs to a 80s franchise, it was futuristic back then. Since the 2000s, cyberpunk the 80's genre is an accurate representation of the present and past. The future looks bleaker now, with fewer romanticized decorations like flying cars and social dynamics being worse than what the cyberpunk grandfathers imagined. For example "low life" being way more controlled which is exactly what both masses and elites wanted.
In retrospect it's obvious that the cyberpunk authors were mistakenly projecting certain parts of their present into the future (relative freedom of the masses and increasing rate of "traditional" engineering), and didn't consider second order effects and political action/reaction.
The downside of marketing your product as being too powerful to be safe is that people start taking it seriously. I’m surprised there isn’t more discussion about the contradiction. If it really is the end of labor and a deadly weapon then export controls actually make sense.
So which position should the government take? The one it’s doing? Or that LLMs aren’t actually key to national security.
I'm finding it extremely hard not to have a cynical perspective on all of this. There's an idea that I've been mapping onto this whole this, which could be called something like effective knowledge. Regular old knowledge is just information, or access to information. Effective knowledge is the integration of all that information into an understanding that can be acted upon. That requires things like time, money, and involves the usual socioeconomic hurdles that have separated people into groups like "laborers" and "knowledge workers". Sure, in theory "anyone" could read textbooks and learn, but only a select few have the time, money, mentors in their lives, and so forth to really do that.
The rise in capability of LLMs over the past year has basically removed a lot of these boundaries for people. Learning, building, and experimenting is a lot easier when you have a capable partner like Claude to help you along the way. Claude doesn't always get everything right, and you have to be a skeptic, but it's a lot better than nothing.
When I see the government restricting access to LLMs (or Anthropic as they were doing with Mythos before the whole Fable debacle), I basically just see the same old pattern of the ruling class moving to protect their advantage by keeping the great masses in ignorance. Broadening access to LLMs (i.e. effective knowledge) would put everyone on a more level playing field. But we can't have that, because politics, nations, the economy, blah blah reasons reasons. Guess utopia will just have to wait a bit longer.
But then again, this feels a lot like cryptography export controls. Those controls are in place, but I doubt anyone really thinks they work or make much of a difference. Software is not like nuclear weapons, and a data center is a much smaller lift than a Uranium enrichment facility. So maybe this is just a temporary roadblock. But let me tell you, I sure am ready for it to feel more like the government is working for (not against) the people.
The new normal for the next decade: You must protect the public from us and all others, and we are your closest ally so we make your rules for us and our competition. This wasn’t a lucky outcome. They laid the groundwork years ago with the AI “ethics” movement and this was the play all along.
Whether or not you assume bad intent of the government here, the amount of money the export control on Fable has cost Anthropic has to be unbelievably high
Eg I expect I would have paid more than 2x per day what I spent the past few weeks, and if gpt 5.6 comes out and is competitive that's going to absolutely gain market share.
To all of those thinking that GLM/OSS will save you — keep in mind that the model size needed to compete here likely requires an NVL72 or similar — 72GPU dedicated infra to run a hosted model. This will almost certainly get regulated by the gov’t as well, and even if not so there will only be a handful of companies that can afford it.
Remember when you could only get the Netscape version with good encryption if you were in the US, because the government had classified encryption as a munition? And that the rest of the world had no trouble matching or exceeding that level of encryption?
I guess Orpheus fined 50% of Eurydice's soul for early withdrawal attempt - No take backsies is clearly in the Contract.Upheld.But Orpheus gets a coupon for free ressurection (Void in thrace:There can be sage).
That extrapolates to $87B per year for just the top spot on HN, more than all of Instagram's ad revenue, or about 40x Twitter's. Or $240M per day, about 1/3 of the ad spend on Superbowl, just for the top spot.
So as a European, I'm being blocked from all new models apparently. I'm a big fan of using Claude Code for my sideprojects and for those I don't really care about sharing context. Is there aything that comes close to Claude Code and is still affordable?
I think there can be smarter ways to fix security issues right. Like you let AI loose in a gated environment fix all things it flags and than release the model ? Any new changes you make you now anyway have the AI vet it ?
> while AI companies and the administration work out a longer-term plan for regulation on the sector.
It’s not really the executives job or role to create new regulatory structures. If they want something durable, that lasts more than one administration, they need actual laws passed by Congress.
It's called ghosted, shadow banned, too sensitive / shitshow; Basically a multiplier of 0.1 is added to this post's ranking, or similar, and it will need thousands of upvote instead of hundreds to show.
It's commonly applied silently to posts that simply don't look good or become a nightmare to manage the narrative of. It's a healthy way to manage a community while looking transparent.
I think it's sucky and cheap, but at the same time it's also the best solution.
If they do it, they should mark the post as such as give an explanation. Otherwise you never know if uncle "Sam" called and asked it to be treated as such.
Whilst this policy is driving countries around the world to develop new AI strategies as USA cannot be relied upon, on the plus side for OpenAI, the publicity of this will help drive customer sales.
Well, as long as the government is deciding, that’s alright then. The US government is a paragon of incorruptible integrity and even-handed, thoroughly considered reasoning. We’re in good hands, folks.
The rest of the word at some point will increase chinese AI company. I am using some of their services and for many task they are good enough . It can be a winning strategy for a short period and a disaster in long term. Xi and China i think , are very happy of these decisions. They are building their model and their hardware. Even if for now it is subpar ( i don't know, it is an hypotesys), money that us will lose for this choice will make Chinese products improve a lot .
There is an assumption that everyone is making here - that China will not do the same. It is entirely possible, that China restricts their frontier models - as and when they are developed - to only Chinese citizens. And India follows along.
IMO AI is different from everything else. It is a weapon as potent as nuclear. It is only natural that it be treated as one.
Anthropic broke with US Gov over wanting restrictions and n how they use their model. OpenAI was more than happy to bend over backwards and hide behind a misleading press release.
The idea that OpenAI is the one who are meaningfully pushing back against the USGov is risible.
I can't tell if this is bad for the big labs, or good because it means they now have an excuse for not showing meaningful progress in the lead ups to their IPOs.
It'll only be good if they do get to release it to the general public in a format that is not overly nerfed.
If they don't get to release, its bad. It paints a picture that we are largely stuck with current capabilities for a while and the party is over. All those promises of "you'll get to fire everyone" now go concretely unfulfilled.
Their entire valuations rely on the assumption of continued massive breakthroughs in intelligence and capabilities, and having revenue on part with taking a share of the GPD provided by white collar workers as they get replaced.
Does anyone else think this is all just FUD, smoke, mirrors and marketing hype? "Look, our model is so good that the government told us to stop" "Our model is so good that the government is going to control who has access to it".
Come on.
I think occam's razor can be applied here. And like everything else, its about money. I don't know exactly what the play will be here, but this doesn't sound like this technology is too powerful and more like billions of $ lost investments need to be made up somehow without the people getting annoyed about the government bailing these guys (AI companies, investors, etc.) out.
Even if these models are so strong that they become a security threat if in the wrong hands this arbitrary and intransparent regulation worries me. Not for the current SOTA model vendors but for the open weight models.
I have always wondered how AI industry is not in a (partial) bubble because open weight models will substantially eat into their revenue (rather sooner than later). But with this ('bro') regulation it seems that an easy strategy could be to regulate this problem away, especially easy to convince everyone that those chines models are truly evil.
What are the odds this is going to become another avenue for grift - magically any companies the trump family invests in are going to get access. Any companies that aren't sufficiently 'loyal' to the regime will have to wait or may never get access.
Without access to leading models, I think open source LLM development will also slow down. I'm not sure which portion of their success right now is due to RLAF and distillation but it's certainly not zero.
Here's an unpopular opinion: this might be the only way to deploy advanced models. A lot of people compare advanced AI with nuclear weapons. Creating white lists of users that are allowed to use advanced AI feels wrong. It feels against everything that the Constitution stands for. That men are created equal and they are free to pursue their happiness. Now they are free to pursue that happiness only if the US Government signs off on that. It hurts to only think of that. But I'm afraid there's no other way. These models, in the wrong hands, can result in unfathomable devastation.
How do I know? Dario Amodei said that when he explained why Anthropic has to limit the US Government's usage of its models [1]:
> Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases [...]: Mass domestic surveillance. Fully autonomous weapons.
If the US Government can't be trusted with such uses, then how can you trust millions or billions of users with arbitrary usage?
I don't think open weight model will get as good as Mythos/Fable or GPT 5.6. Not in the next few years, and perhaps never.
The Chinese Communist Party is not any happier than the US Government to see millions/billions of people being able to use incredibly dangerous models.
Can anyone explain to me (a non US citizen) how this won't be found to be unconstitutional (eventually)?. I would think it falls under freedom of expression. And given the attempted classification of encryption as a munition that failed, I don't see how this can possibly last?
Well it seems both Anthropic and OpenAI are consciously choosing to do this, which means, for now, neither plan on suing. So if no one sues, how could it be unconstitutional?
This isn’t just about AI: they do not want you to privately use computers at all, in a way that cannot be surveilled. They want to extinguish all forms of general purpose computing and restrict you to walled gardens of apps and all code written via AI with the government-in-the-middle. It will be illegal to write code by hand, only people with “bad intentions” do that, because otherwise, why not just use AI like a sane person?
what's weird, is my employees abroad (outside the US) have access to Anthropic Fable .... so what exactly did we prevent by limiting United States citizens from having access ....
Local AI and open-weight models are becoming something to no longer ignore. I've started a community around this @tokenstead on X and tokenstead.ai YouTube and much more coming. DGX Spark on route, RTX 5090s and much more exciting builds. We need to have AI sovereignty!
never thought being a script kiddie would make me smart, but here we are in 2026.
i had one place, they were using all these shady pay with a credit card for "points" to do these web gui things that were... basically nmap, dig, etc?
so i wrote up a small shell script that took in the servers our (often nonprofit) clients wanted scanned...
and so we could lower our costs and free up analyst time -- but sadly they often found out they had out of date windows boxen they couldn't afford to fix, and we'd have to settle for getting them onto MFA, using password managers and basics like that.
people overvalue AI imho. people are getting weak, they don't teach themselves the concepts that would allow them to make best use of AI.
anyways, i think the type of person freaking out is the same who's been cutting and pasting from stack overflow rather than learning enough to grab a book or read up on a library to get the needful done.
but hey, what do i know? i'm just some freak on hacker news
Oh no, the powerful tool that can be used for good or evil is restricted by the people whose job it is to restrict dangerous things! This is the end of freedom! We're all doomed!
It's good that we can be sure the policy will be fairly applied for the best of reasons and any donations for new ballrooms, ponds, jumbos etc immediately before access is granted will be entirely coincidental.
Amazon, NSA, apparently a few other 3 letter agencies around the world, but the lattermost probably did not expect access to their agencies would be limited but appreciate that they aren't going to be exposed as security frauds by just anyone
Yes. I could not possibly be more radicalized against the current administration, and I'm in favor of this. Future models will be even more dangerous than the current ones and we must build processes now to control their release when necessary. I don't like how informal this process is, and I absolutely despise the people running it, but I strongly prefer it to no process.
Can we all boycott Anthropic now for persisting with a 5 year long fear-mongering campaign that is destroying the US AI industry and creating a new form of intelligence-access underclass?
Or are we going to play the whole "you guys suck... but I'll keep using your product" game?
This will be the end of the US's short-lived AI supremacy. OpenAI and Anthropic are already wildly unprofitable, cutting off the world-wide income stream is just fucking bad business.
Don't worry, their pals in the government will bail them out.
But it is odd that this administration has learned absolutely nothing about the mid- to long-term effects of export restrictions on other countries' ability to compete with the US.
Mid and long term effects will come with next administration - which can be blamed for the failure (even if it has nothing to do with it) -> so those who caused the problem can be voted back to power.
>“We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them,” the blog post said. “We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks.”
Arent these the same clowns who keep saying that the government needs to regulate AI to protect society [from their competitors] or whatever? And im not just talking about back when they used to be a nonprofit, Altman was still using that line post-sellout too.
In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over the sovereignty.
The US gov sees these AI companies as bartering power, not as innovation. Wouldn’t you as a parent always want what’s best for your child, not for yourself?
It also feels like they can’t just relocate out of the country, as the administration will surely sanction anyone from business within the country again. These firms are so over inflated with evaluations and opex, they’ve dug themselves into a corner.
This is not to say regulation does not exist in any other country, but it’s clear now after what’s happening at Anthropic + OAI that the US gov has taken these companies hostage.
This is only further playing into the hands of open source and the outside models; the US gov is going to be to blame for when they all lose the race to low cost/free.
> In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over my sovereignty.
So, locate in China, where every company of importance is essentially required in practice to maintain ties to the CCP?
I personally think the US has gone too far with its use of export controls and sanctions as a political tool, but it's foolish to believe that it's different anywhere else on the planet.
In China, it has even been reported that top AI talent is restricted from overseas travel.
Bottom line: if you're working on cutting-edge technology that is deemed to be of critical national security importance and has military or dual use implications, you're going to be a hostage no matter where you go.
You wrongly assumed I implied these firms relocate to China. We are all aware of how China operates and controls its assets.
AI has long existed in many countries around the world without this type of behavior from the government. Deepmind in the UK, Mistral in France, DeepL in Germany - the governments don’t seem to be forcing employees to get their deploys approved by a government official.
My argument is that the US gov does not like that these companies have too much influence which they do not feel they can mandate. It’s slowing the entire country down at a very critical sink or swim inflection point in this tech.
> You wrongly assumed I implied these firms relocate to China. We are all aware of how China operates and controls its assets.
Then why write "+1 point to China!" and not "+1 point to the UK, France and Germany"?
> Deepmind in the UK, Mistral in France, DeepL in Germany - the governments don’t seem to be forcing employees to get their deploys approved by a government official.
The UK, France and Germany all have their own export controls rules, so if a company in these countries comes up with a model that those governments deem to be of significant enough importance, they also have the means to exercise greater control over them as well.
The latest models from Anthropic and OpenAI are said to be the most advanced in the world. Agree or disagree, like it or not, the powers that be in the US determined that there is sufficient justification to control their export. Under long-standing and perfectly legal export control laws, the US has the ability to issue such orders.
In the case of Anthropic, the company chose to reverse providing public access to Fable because it said it could not comply with the requirement that non-US nationals (even those residing in the US) be restricted from accessing Fable.
> It’s slowing the entire country down at a very critical sink or swim inflection point in this tech.
You might or might not be right, but I think many people would argue that "move fast and break things" is risky when it comes to AI. I can't say that the current administration is genuinely concerned about the broad societal impacts of AI but if the effect of their brand of greater oversight is that companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have to slow down, it might not be a bad thing for humanity.
I think it’s pretty clear why they’re abiding by this:
-the US is the only place where you can raise the kinds of money you need to run a lab like this.
-a government that won’t let you sell products to customers abroad will probably object even more to you moving abroad.
Even if you made the move abroad, that government might no longer let you access US data centers.
-This basically affects OpenAI and Anthropic, which make the only LLMs most people consider frontier nowadays. Since most open weights models rely on distillation of frontier models, it may genuinely entrench those companies more.
It may be playing into the hands of open source OAI/Anthropic dependencies start to look more dangerous, but it also makes building better OSS models harder.
The advantages the AI labs rely on might be less durable than a proprietary process in industrial manufacturing, but it’s still meaningful.
I think the bigger reckoning will come from a different angle: tokens will eventually need to cover cost.
That will likely mean multiplying prices compared to today. And companies already complain now!
Model orchestration and smaller models that can run locally or cheaply will become more important in my opinion.
Right now, you can still default to GPT/Claude and it’s kind of fine, but that will have to change.
The elephant in the room is that the US AI firms should not be as valuable as they are. They should not require the sort of capital they are seeking, the amount of employees, the amount of offices and resources..but they are so steeped in investor interests - why stop being fed?
Many Americans want AI to fail. The US gov wants to control AI. The AI companies are running out of things to do, and are shipping product after product after product to keep the perceived productivity narrative alive.
At this rate I would not be surprised to see an OAI/Anthropic merger just to throw everything AI the US has to offer to the global markets.
Whether they’re over-valued and over-resourced is a big question. I think that will be answered when eventual price hikes happen and people shift which AI they use and/or what they use it for.
We’re still in the “5$ airport Ubers thanks to VC money” era of AI
What is the incentive of the U.S. government? Is it to prevent adversaries from accessing this powerful technology? Because of security concerns? Or is there a fear that European, Asian, Latin American, and other companies could use it to build competitive products? What happened to free trade? What about all of humanity advancing and making progress?
Those taking issue with the clear deference to the current U.S. administration would seemingly prefer it be the exact same degree of preemptive compliance and collaboration, just done behind closed doors as it was with the Biden administration. The sausage is apparently far more palatable when you only find out about the overreach, pressuring, implied threats, and censorship years later in House Judiciary Committees. Or even better if you don’t through use of NSL gag orders or implied threat of lawfare!
There's a huge difference between 'pro market' and 'buddies with some big businesses' and this administration is making it very clear, at least to those who would see.
Two sides of the same coin. The administration is taking the opportunity now on the back of fear mongering done by the labs. The labs get regulatory lock-in, the govt gets surveillance. Everybody (that matters) wins.
Wow.. Okay so it's official now that the playbook is "we will try to prevent anyone who we don't like to use advanced tech".
I understand if its military hardware and software, that's the property of the US government however this is the property of a private company.. Now seemingly being commandeered and issued at the will of the government, sounds very Russian/Chinese to me.
Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?
The overwhelming majority of export-controlled items are made by private corporations: the US government itself makes exceedingly little in comparison.
The missiles Raytheon makes are export-controlled too, and they're not somehow "property of the US government" - this isn't China.
Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?
> Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?
Try every weapons system, encrypted radio system, FPGAs with high-bandwidth transceivers, lithography equipment, etc. etc. etc. There's plenty of precedent.
> Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?
No, infact I'm a proponent of open models and being able to run them locally, it just feels strange that a consumer product would be under the same restrictions as military grade equipment and tech which is specifically designed for warfare.
> Try every weapons system, encrypted radio system, FPGAs with high-bandwidth transceivers, lithography equipment, etc. etc. etc. There's plenty of precedent.
If it's the same equivalent then my issue is just that, it feels like trying to restrict the useage of RSA because it could be used by bad actors.
> If it's the same equivalent then my issue is just that, it feels like trying to restrict the useage of RSA because it could be used by bad actors.
RSA was practically impossible to control (an implementation is what, 100 lines in any language?) and the global benefits outweighed the cost and futility associated with restrictions.
AI laboratories with hundreds of billions of dollars in funding aren't cropping up in every country in the world, and their products and services are easily controlled and not easily replicated.
This is where AI doomerism has taken us. I also hate LLM abuse, but pretending that they are going to destroy humanity has opened the door for eventual police state level control over computing. It’s hard enough fighting off the “think of the children” idiots, now we have to push back against hyperventilating technophobes who think the world is going to end unless we get computing under control. All while the political elites rub their hands in anticipation.
The UK is a lot more compassionate about people’s wishes, it’s not nearly as bureaucratic and polarizing “democracy” as the US. Laws in the UK are passed quickly, and feedback is always considered. Whether you agree or not on the regulation is another discussion.
Probably you're right overall but that doesn't apply to anyone who chooses to want to educate their kids in a non-taxpayer funded State school. Around 100–105 independent schools were reported as having ceased operations after the UK government introduced 20% VAT on private school fees from January 2025. Some may feel (I would not dare suggest it) that the current government is on a mission to close them all up unless they attract sufficiently rich parents like Eton. Closing the latter would be news indeed. However - exit Exeter Cathedral School after 847 years, which taught Charles II's composer and Coldplay's Chris Martin. It's closing with financial difficulties which have beset the sector in general since charges were introduced.
That's one way to look at it I suppose. The other is that these institutions had a tax break for a long time, not having to charge VAT like every other business. So I think quite a few people see it as a little unfair that the schools for rich kids get a tax break: and it is wealthier families that use private schools for the most part. It's not like these schools didn't know this rule change was coming.
I don't live in the UK these days, but one of the problems with the place is how complex the tax system is. All these little carve outs, sudden % cliffs, rebates and what have you. My first job was writing payroll software in the UK. You think that's the norm, then you move somewhere else and realize how much easier it is in many other countries. Then you get calls from people like "don't charge VAT on vegetables like in the UK": people don't understand the cost imposed administrating an ever more complex tax system.
It is extremely difficult for me to care about the fate of private schools. In my opinion, they shouldn't exist. If the rich are forced to send their children to the same schools as everyone else, maybe they'll pressure the government to improve said schools.
"Freedom of commerce" doesn't mean "unchecked globalism" - there are plenty of dual-use items that only friendly countries or citizens can obtain (and within those categories, there aren't any further restrictions besides "don't share.")
This will be exactly as effective as the BBC's efforts to ensure only UK taxpayers are allowed to stream Doctor Who from BBC servers on Christmas morning.
If it's the case then software engineers still have the same place as pre-ClaudeCode era, because 4.8 and 5.5 are damn good at algo but notoriously bad at architecture and coordination.
Thousands of American engineers all over the country (most of whom probably aren't on Hacker News) work with ITAR/EAR-regulated software and hardware every single day: these regulations are really not difficult to abide if you're a citizen.
As a US citizen, I can purchase ITAR-regulated nightvision, IR lasers, etc.
But that's not what's happening. Frontier models are NOT being put under ITAR. Instead, they are being placed on an arbitrary "approved access" list. So that even if you qualify under export restrictions as a citizen, if you don't have a $200B+ market cap, you're disqualified.
Many people are upset about the national security restrictions, but it's MUCH WORSE than that. If I have to verify ID/citizenship, well, that sucks, but it would at least be an option. That's not what's happening here. If you are an individual or small business, no matter how "patriotic" you might be, you're out of luck.
The EO is nearly a month old, and has precisely zero to do with the de facto current situation, seeing messaging from OpenAI and Anthropic on their non-public agreements with the administration.
> This is more likely to fall under EAR
Which, ok, maybe, but nobody is seeing movement on this. As of right now, and indeterminately in the future, EAR is still irrelevant. No private US citizen, right now, no matter how many flags are in their yard, no matter how many TRUMP stickers are on their car, can gain access to Fable 5 or GPT-5.6, unless you have political connections or an extremely large market capitalization.
> this is just what Anthropic is choosing to do.
Irrelevant. This is what OpenAI is also "choosing" to do with GPT-5.6 Sol, which suggests strongly that nobody is actually choosing anything. They are being told what to do, which is don't let the plebians, no matter how patriotic, access these models. GPT-5.5 is clearly the permanent legal limit for anyone not in the S&P 500.
n.b. I voted for Trump as a single-issue voter SPECIFICALLY because Harris threatened regulating ML models. This is a betrayal that WILL force loyal, patriotic US citizens into the arms of China. As soon as GLM-5.3 is released and exceeds GPT-5.5 capability, I'm not looking back.
Except it isn't zero-sum thinking: the rest of the world can have the scraps, and as long as the scraps are marginally better than the rest of the world's offerings, they will sell.
> What are they going to do? Start their own Anthropic? Go for it. Why is every other country in the world entitled to American technology by default?
Because American tech companies make a lot of money from outside of the US. For instance, 1/4 of all Apple revenues are from Europe, and 1/5 from China and China-claimed territories. Only around 40% are from the Americas (so not even the US exclusively).
Would American tech companies be as successfull without ~half their revenues?
In any case, it doesn't matter, the cat is out of the bag. Nobody sane and non-American would trust American frontier labs, because their models can be yanked at will by whoever is in the White House. It would be suicidal to rely on them for critical business or developer workflows. So your options are to go with Mistral or open source Chinese models, hosted within your environment, with the added benefits of being able to control the costs and being able to fine tune the models to better work for you.
At this point, for Europe, it might not be such a bad idea to make a deal with China and give them full access to ASML again. And maybe, just maybe, review Intel's access to ASML?
I'm referring to OpenAI and Antropic - would they be successfull with ~40-50% of their potential market?
And iPhones, not really. But you can bet your ass that every business purchasing software in Europe is at least considering the geopolitical risks of buying American, and thinking of alternatives. Doesn't mean they'll all stop buying American software any time soon, but the shift has already started.
> I'm referring to OpenAI and Antropic - would they be successfull with ~40-50% of their potential market?
You presume that every single product they sell will be restricted: this is unrealistic. The rest of the world can have the gimped models, and as so long as they're better than other offerings, the revenue will flow - which is exactly what happens with countless other dual-use goods.
It's probably too late, but my understanding is that those Chinese models would be nowhere near as good as they are currently if they weren't trained on billions of Claude/GPT tokens. Anthropic and OpenAI are still able to produce models that lead in every category but the separation between their models and open weights shrunk because of the free for all access.
I'm not presuming, I flat out said: nobody sane would trust them with their business. They've been shown as unreliable suppliers due to arbitrary decisions by the White House. Nobody would want for their business automation processes to stop working because someone woke up pissy and banned the model they were using.
You know what? Fine. This delays the OpenAI/Anthropic/etc hegemony and creates more space for local LLM adoption and development.
My company is very interested in local LLMs even just to cut back on codex spend. I imagine a lot of other businesses are, too. With the recent developments in open weight models, it seems like it's only a matter of time before they're frontier level, and any added delay in OpenAI and Anthropic models being publicly available is just more reason for businesses and individuals to try them out.
Just like the Iran war accelerating fossil fuel abandonment, this administration can't even do the wrong thing without fucking it up. I say we take this win.
Can we just go ahead and shut the US down right now? We had a good run, but we've clearly been moving in the wrong direction for almost as long as I've been alive.
Honest question: for those working with those models on offensive security, how much does this move make sense?
I am asking because I have seen a growing number of stories about organizations getting owned by either raw mismanagement of security, supply chain attacks that are often a failure at the ecosystem level, npm, etc.
I am not really seeing from what we hear about the use of AI for penetration as a threat yet. The growing problem with security seems to be more at the management and ecosystem layers.
Not many story that netfilter, ipfw or pf got owned by one of those frontier models.
A lot of stories that organisation X and Y left keys on a public repo for months.
A big problem is "U.S. government" muddies the conversation because of how undefinable and large that group is.
Who is deciding who gets to use GPT-5.6? Which organizations? Which leaders?
Focus on that to have a clearer conversation. Without doing this it's like jerking each other off to stroke our egos. You might as well as say "The World will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"
it would be one thing if congress passed a bunch of (probably inadequate) legislature that every AI company had to follow to operate in the US. it's another when it's a faceless/nameless group of people probably deciding arbitrarily based on mood and bribes.
Nobody else in the US Gov is so openly corrupt and has the unitary executive power to ban the products of privately held companies for sale without there being a public record (i.e.: an act of congress).
Uh, they spent hundreds of billions to get their flag ship products blocked by a democratic body with no possibility of recovering their capital except by concession of the people's representative?
What a party pooper the current US government is... I'm not excited right now at all, while normally a new GPT release would be so much fun to test out.
On top of the obvious grift and bribe seeking potential there is also now an obvious mechanism for ideological control. Govt doesn’t like the way the model describes the events of Jan 6? We’ll have to see how many people get to use it…
We are very clearly proceeding down the road to a dystopia here.
This is what we get when the president is a nepo baby who inherited a fortune and bankrupted many companies and had mainly business failures before entering politics.
I’m quite confident that few people are more ignorant on AI than Donald Trump. That he promised less regulation and lied is no different than his many other lies.
In six months everyone will cancel frontier subscriptions.
GLM-5.2 is currently the best open-weight model for development. It's not as good as the current American SOTA models, but if you wrote code with US SOTA models four months ago, you can write code with GLM-5.2 today.
DeepSeek 4 is a good model for many tasks, but I think it currently lacks the post-training required to become a genuinely great coding model.
It seems like this was entirely caused by Dario (and Anthropic as a whole)? When you run around marketing something as a "super weapon", the government may actually take you seriously?
We obviously can't A/B test this... but if Dario hadn't been doing that, would any of this been happening right now?
Altman has done his fair share of "doom-trolling", claiming that his products are going to inevitably disrupt the global order in ways that demand government support and intervention. The entire industry has been marketing this way for years now.
> When you run around marketing something as a "super weapon"
That's one interpretation of what was said that ignores a lot of what was said.
So yes, if you ONLY read the headlines, sure. So, an ignorant and stupid government would read it that way. But the reality was, like many things, more nuanced.
However, I need not blame the messenger because the current government is led by idiotic morons.
Let's put this another way: either this is valid on behalf of the government, in which case he was right ot say something. Or you disagree with this, in which case, you can only blame the government for ignornig what was actually said.
It's different, because most books don't contain the nuclear codes or have real impacts on national security.
The way I see so many comments on the internet hating any sort of AI regulation, is young juveniles cursing at the installation of stoplights as they rev their engines. The world is bigger than just you, and not only you matter. Reasons exist for doing things.
So you okay with the government banning open source models, and making a list of who can have access to intelligence based on who they like?
That just doesn't seem like a world I want to live in. I prefer a world where everyone has the same access to the same intelligence.
Go back to the beginning of the internet, you would be for limiting the internet access to those the government likes?
I was around in the early days of the internet when Google dorking was a thing, you could prompt Google and find exploits into hundreds and thousands of websites, servers, ect including government website.
This isn't about national security, it about power and controlling it.
I was around back then too and experienced the full depth of the wild west. AI dwarfs that in every way. What you're talking about is small potatoes by comparison.
Even the old internet, I'm kind of with you on that being something the market should naturally respond to which is why Google rightfully nerfed its search tools over the years, software changed and network infrastructure evolved.
This is different. The government already silently manages many things you never hear about and limits information reporting. Reasonable people generally go "ah, ok" for things that are beyond a threshold, because it seems like a sensible role for governance.
I think everyone agrees government should not simply be curating AI models that only spew public information or say something inconvenient about a political party or whatever. I also don't think people want AI models that are constantly trying to guess whether you're a child and should have certain information. That's not largely the issue.
You can list me the threats that you think AI poses, and I'll let you know if you're warm or not.
it kinda seems like openai is doing this willinglyy and not challenging it. if they weren't doing this willingly, how would this be legal? has congress already passed a law giving the executive branch regulatory powers like this?
I started to have the opinion that the Chinese models would crash the AI bubble simply because they are an order of magnitude cheaper and almost as intelligent.
But if the government can simply ban models from the market? especially given how much the admin loves the idea of Tariffs? Knowing Trump the chance of this happening is 99.9%
We will all be stuck paying $50/mtok to Anthropic (And by we I mean only Big Tech will be able to afford tokens). The rest of the competition will be outcompeted by super intelligent machines. And AI CO’s /Big Tech will take over the economy.
"A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism"
It's fascinating to watch the US government paint China as the new bogeyman and utterly fail in it's policy of containment.
The first obvious conclusion is that China has been utterly vindicated to keep US tech giants out of China. Some have a token presence but it's clear that the Chinese government will never let a US tech government "win" in any domestic market. It will always be a Chinese company. Obligatory Silicon Valley [1].
The second is that, to that end, IMHO the US government made an error blocking the sale of high-end chips (particularly NVidia) to China. Why? Because it's created a captive market for Chinese chip manufacturing. Huawei now has billions in potential sales that might've otherwise gone to chips produced in Taiwan and South Korea.
Third, the US can somehow ban a Dutch company (ASML) from selling EUV to China. This has forced China to replicate it and they will within a few years. The interesting part of this is that all it really takes is throwing money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked for ASML. It really is using the mechanics of the Western economic system against itself.
Last, the US government will try and make US tech giants "own" or "win" AI. And they will fail because the Chinese government will make sure they fail. How? By releasing ever-better open models for free. I believe China considers this a matter of national security to not be beholden to US tech giants (and thus the US government).
The ironic thing to me is that the US is doing what the West accuses China of doing with corporate control. I'd say the actual difference is that Chinese companies are beholden to the state whereas the US government is basically 5 companies in a trenchcoat. The US wants to mint trillionaires at the expense of literally everybody else. China believes society should benefit from something they collectively make possible.
Anyway, we've been here before. Remember the crypto export ban of the 1990s and 2000s? Did that prevent higher-quality encryption from being used overseas? No. This won't help either.
When I predicted this several months ago, here (mine my comment history) I was berated and downvoted, but primarily ignored. I have records, timestamped, of predicting this a year ago. Alright, great for me, pat myself on the back and get stuffed. Roger that.
What disturbs me is that this was not extremely obvious and predictable to everyone else. I have been called schizophrenic for my views on AI, here, and I kind of see how some could miss my points, but I am genuinely perplexed by the views on the subject I see around here, or specifically the views I don't see here.
Did anyone really not see this coming long ago? I have year-old transcripts discussing exactly what's happening with AI and government intervention. I even have a time-stamped transcript with Sonnet 12 hours prior, soft-predicting the shutdown of Fable. What is not clear about this?
One more wake up call for anyone outside USA, especially Europe. AI will be weaponized, on the battle ground too, but the bigger battle will be fought in the industry competition. Those who have access to state of the art models will have advantage over those who does not.
Hopefully open-weight models will catch up, hopefully we, as the people, engineers will find the way to maintain those open-weight models on pair with the closed ones.
I try to be optimistic, as we won some battles, against all odds, Linux is flourishing, open source solutions are mainstream.
A consortium will train a 400B-class model and get 2.5% on time of the EuroHPC infrastructure (~2000 PFLOPS datacenters). So, even if the Chinese take away the open source there will be some models. Probably not Mythos quality yet though.
Europe is in the worst spot right now, because even if open source is the future, there is not enough European-owned datacenters even for inference. Not to mention that China could pull the rug on these models at any moment just like the US did.
Europe has to play both sides for now. There will come a point where both China and the US close off access to the best models. And then what does the EU do?
> We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.
My brother in Christ, then why did you (and your competitors) spend years telling the government you needed them to tie your hands behind your back? Did you really think they'd just give you a crown that says "Gatekeeper Of All Neural Networks"?
In the past few years, that's been primarily Anthropic, right? A lot of the really regulation-oriented people at OpenAI went to Anthropic, particularly after the failed attempt to oust Sam Altman as CEO (that was in late 2023).
brother from another mother here: I don't think they were begging for overreach from the executive branch, likely would have preferred legislation, especially the kind that could be molded by lobbyists.
Honestly, are people not getting what's going on? The US is turning into a personalist regime, there is no "government" per-se, there's a dude. There are no 'rules' there's only the dude's opinion and you'll do whatever he feels like today.
The way you know this is true is to imagine The Others in power. Sacks used to scream about government interference, but now that he's running (this part of) the government, obviously things are different.
The only constant is that David Sacks (& co) always believed he should have all the power.
Of course they know what’s going on, that’s why they voted for it again in 2024. They just think they will be in the group of winners that get some crumbs.
Keep your **** models to yourselves.... the world really has moved on to open models which can give you good enough results at a fraction of the cost and zero BS licensing.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for open models, but I think it will get more and more difficult to distil-train them without (legitimate) access to frontier models.
I’m not sure, because the same thing happened with facebook advertising restrictions during the 2018 elections and nowadays there’s a whole black market for fake ad accounts.
If anything I bet these people will just use their knowledge to make even more money reselling tokens.
Yeah but the real deal is talent; When enough people move around, this is no more 'sacred trace' knowledge. Plus, When you start with a known set of evals, there's really just a few to solve for.
The set of models solving really most used/solved problems is a known, as opposed to the cases where it's unknown, which declines with usage over time.
Personally, I find it rather humorous that we've moved from the fear that AI generated output would corrupt training to the idea that it is essential to training. Reality itself has not just a left bias but a bias to fundamentals. Bootstrap from fundamentals without introducing arbitrary error and you have the superior system; it just may not be highly compatible with a trash ecosystem.
I mean, I'm not sure that's the correct read on this.
If you want an Opus class model, it makes sense that you would train on what Opus outputs. But, if you want something better than Opus, training on the same data that Opus was trained on with the same architecture will only result in an Opus class model. Then, if your dataset also contains Opus outputs, many of which are wrong, then it makes sense that the model would have reduced performance.
All this to say that I don't think there's such a thing as a "Model Collapse," but there likely is a "Model Stagnation."
A model trained on all the data X was trained on should be improved to the extent that X is already out of date. A model trained on X itself has all the errors of X and all of it's own. Society itself seems to show that model collapse is entirely possible today and was presumably a problem in the past given the significance placed on citation and going to original sources that predates obsession with credit.
At some point AI models will become too valuable for China or the US to release openly. What will the "world" do at that point? Europe is dragging their feet on this issue and will be left with only those open models and not enough data centers to compete.
All: for comments on the technical side please go to the related thread:
Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689028
This is regulatory capture in action. This will make it hard/impossible for new vendors to come into the market and only established companies will get to play, and charge, for LLMs. What does this mean for open source? Will it become illegal to download weights? What about train your own? Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated to ensure that illegal LLMs aren't being processed on your machine? More broadly though, how will this stop anyone but average people? Countries outside the us will completely ignore this and keep developing and moving ahead. Maybe Europe will adopt similar things but the genie is out. I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop. If you want to stop LLMs with legislation you can't do it like this.
As far as Europe is concerned they have recently signed up to the 'Pax Silica'[1] and willingly givrn the LLM space over to the US incumbents with buildtin legislation banning Chinese models and coperation with them. So EU will be a renter of the LLMs that the US allows them to use. In the long run OpenSource will dominate as it did in the DB(MySQL/Postgres)/ServerOS(Linux/BSDs) versus Proprietery rent seeking alts like Oracle and Microsoft et al. Would be interesting to see what the global startups using Qwen/DS/Kimi etc within the EU-US space navigate the cutting edge OpenSource LLMs vs seeking/getting a permission slip from the US gov.
[1]https://archive.is/aiJiq
They have signed a non-binding agreement to potentially cooperate on AI supply chains. It's hardly a declaration of fealty, nor does it have any practical impact on the use of Chinese models in the near term. I'd view this more as hedging their bets for the future.
> It's hardly a declaration of fealty
As a European, the way I see it, Europe declared fealty to the US and relinquished its sovereignty a long time ago, sadly.
Also, the way these agreements tend to work is that you agree that you won't source from the 'enemy side' i.e. China. It works this way for NATO and it will work the same way here.
>As a European, the way I see it, Europe declared fealty to the US and relinquished its sovereignty a long time ago, sadly.
No such declaration was ever made. Europe has just failed to compete.
Facts, but the Europeans, tankies, and America haters here will never admit it. Europe sold out its industries for social programs. Not our fault you guys chose social safety nets over industry.
> No such declaration was ever made
Of course not, there's no need for a 'declaration' that would be a hard sell to the European public. Actions is all that matters.
Indeed. The system’s purpose is what it does.
EU didn't fail because it never even tried.
Nobody in EU ever tried to build a domestic CPU that was even remotely comparable to what Intel and AMD, for them to have had the opportunity to fail.(No, ARM is IP not a builder)
Nobody in EU ever tried to build a domestic GPU that was even remotely comparable to Nvidia, ATI or 3Dfx for them to have failed.
We just let the US companies fight it out, see who could build the best products, and become forever customers to them and then 20 year later wonder how come their economy grew 2x as much.
>EU didn't fail because it never even tried.
Of course the EU tries to compete with the US and in some industries it has done so successfully (e.g pharma or aviation). EU companies have also tried to compete in information technology - with some limited or temporary success.
ARM was founded in the EU. DeepMind was founded in the EU. Olivetti and Siemens had CPU designs and made computers. Nokia once dominated mobile. Ericsson was/is a leading telecom equipment maker. Skype used to be one of the most successful messaging apps. Spotify is a success. ASML is a success.
A certain Finnish university student started the operating system that now dominates the cloud, but for some reason I really do not understand, EU cloud providers like OVHCloud have failed to compete with the likes of AWS, Azure and GCP. And now the AI wave has completely washed over Europe.
The cloud situation is a mystery to me. Nothing stops EU companies like OVHCloud from competing there. Any anticompetitive behaviour is a very weak excuse. Europe can't even compete with something as mediocre as Palantir. Now everyone is calling for protectionism. Ridiculous.
AI is easier to understand. It requires huge capital investments. The US has far superior capital markets and far healthier attitudes towards risk taking. Europe's failure here was easy to predict but the consequences could be dire.
>Of course the EU tries to compete with the US and in some industries it has done so successfully
I was talking only about SW and HW in the context of the current AI race. Not about legacy industries like aero and pharma. Everyone knows EU is only good at legacy industries, well except cars, they're getting ass whipped there too.
> Olivetti and Siemens had CPU designs and made computers.
None of those domestic designs ever competed commercially with the X86 or amd_64, which is why I made that specific reamark. Please read my comment again and don't try to argue in bad faith by moving the goalposts.
>ARM was founded in the EU. DeepMind was founded in the EU. Nokia once dominated mobile. Ericsson was/is a leading telecom equipment maker. Skype used to be one of the most successful messaging apps. Spotify is a success. ASML is a success.
Most of those have massive US shareholders/financial backing or have outright been brought up by US companies or PE firms or US shareholders. And Spotify being called a succes is laughable given they bootstrapped thanks to initially distributing music they stole off the torrents, and then shafting their smaller artist once they became a multi billion dollar music streaming monopoly.
>Europe can't even compete with something as mediocre as Palantir.
France is copying Palantir to make their domestic version. Chaps Intelligence.
>A certain Finnish university student started the operating system that now dominates the cloud
What does it matter if he's Finnish or not? Linus is an American citizen now living and working from the US, mostly consulting on linux kernel topics for US big-tech. Why did he leave lovely Finland for the "third world" US? That's the question EU gospelers can never answer. He didn't like having walkable cities and free healthcare?
You are being very hostile and cherry-picking results- disregarding and denigrating those that don’t fit your narrative.
Wrt Linus - who knows? It is irrelevant; he is largely irrelevant. If he got ran over by a bus, the collective community (of whom quite a few are outside the US) will carry on.
> Nobody in EU ever tried to build a domestic GPU that was even remotely comparable to Nvidia, ATI or 3Dfx for them to have failed.
Bitboys tried, but pivoted to embedded graphics and were bought by ATI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaze3D
Falanx Microsystems tried (not EU but close enough), also pivoted to mobile/embedded graphics and made the #1 shipping family of GPUs in the world: https://developer.arm.com/community/arm-community-blogs/b/mo...
>Bitboys tried
Except Bitboys never shipped any actual GPUs, their products were mostly vaporware, all they had was some IP of unknown performance that ...
> were bought by ATI
My point exactly.
I hope that open models will dominate. The difficult part to reconcile for me is the amount of compute that's required to create and run such models. Small models are fine, I run local llms 27b param on a gpu, but it's not even close to frontier in capability. Who wants to drop $40k+ on hardware to run these things. Companies, maybe/perhapts. On the other hand, to run a DB I can get a server for $3k and handle tons of traffic on it and other things too.
I believe until the hardware designs catch up to be more commodized ala cryto mining evolution from GPUs to ASICS for specfic algos. Designs (like Google TPUs equivalent) would also need to evolve to be more memory dense to be able to handle them. Untill then it seems will be system time shares for the larger models , probably with a bring your own model and pay as you go.
> ala cryto mining evolution from GPUs to ASICS for specfic algos
I don't see it happening. A current gen GPU with a huge and fast block of memory isn't a perfect fit for these algorithms but it's relatively close. With cryptocurrency, mass small sha256 hashing was a totally different kind of computation.
> isn't a perfect fit for these algorithms but it's relatively close
I don't think that's true. The best fit out of what's presently available perhaps. Inference is almost entirely memory bandwidth bound at present, to the extent that GPUs with HBM have a massive advantage over those with GDDR. TPUs appear to be a much better overall design.
I expect that a hypothetical advance in fabrication enabling processing elements to be placed directly adjacent to dense RAM on the same silicon (not merely in the same package) would be superior in all regards.
> I expect that a hypothetical advance in fabrication enabling processing elements to be placed directly adjacent to dense RAM on the same silicon (not merely in the same package) would be superior in all regards.
Processing scales better than DRAM does. I think an HBM-like stack where the bottom layer has the math units is probably the ultimate form of that.
And it's possible that flash instead of DRAM is actually the better play, as long as you can hook up enough in parallel. RIP Optane.
> I don't see it happening.
Isn't it already happening with Cerebras? It's mentioned at the end of OpenAI's GPT 5.6 announcement:
"We're also launching GPT‑5.6 Sol on Cerebras at up to 750 tokens per second in July"
Has anyone tried to run a data center as a Co-Op?
A data center or a cloud? It's not difficult to find a good data center to colo at. The problem is then you have to bring your own hardware, technicians, and sysadmins.
However, if you don't trust cloud providers or inference providers for whatever reason then you probably aren't going to be excited to enter a co-op model where you're still effectively renting access to hardware that you don't directly own. There are already reasonably priced options to rent bare metal from a cloud provider.
The only way I see it working is if it's a bunch of medium to large sized businesses getting together to be able to rent out the spare capacity on hardware that they physically control. So an AWS equivalent where each rack is owned by a different company and retail VMs migrate between them transparently. But I question the overall economics of such an arrangement.
> enter a co-op model where you're still effectively renting access to hardware that you don't directly own
If we're imagining a co-op, then the participants should all be equal owners in an organisation that owns the hardware itself, otherwise it's not much of a co-op really.
But at that point you don't have the same sort of security guarantees about the hardware. This isn't like a farming co-op where a single expensive piece of equipment gets passed around to each participant one week at a time. There needs to be either an economic, security, or other advantage to entering into this arrangement for a medium to large sized player that would otherwise be colocating multiple racks in a privately owned datacenter or else renting bare metal instances in bulk from one of the hyperscalers.
Participants as equal owners doesn't preclude security guarantees.
The advantage is having a voice in setting direction, investment and ultimate shared incremental profit recovery over the rent capture from hyperscalers.
It's an interesting idea really. But it also comes with cooperation, which means trust, and a lot of for-profit enterprises are bad at operating cooperatively outside of 2- or 3- way engagements.
I was thinking that would be great, too. What would be the equivalent for the property developer: one gpu server is 450k.
Would actually be a good biz model for the Colo facilities that keep shutting down as everyone moves to the big cloud providers.Now if they can get their hands on enough GPUs and RAM.
can you give examples of colo facilities in SF / New York that are shutting down?
Why would it be a good business model?
I think it aligns incentives way better (but is almost impossible to set up).
Incentives are pretty easy to align, if you have repeat customers and repetition. McDonald's sells me burgers I expect at a reasonable price, because they want me to come back tomorrow and not go across the street to Burger King.
coopcloud.tech ?
There might be a community effort at some point. This happened in chess where the community recreated and then improved on Alpha Zero. You could run small training chunks on your machine. Some people donated thousands of hours of server time.
It doesn’t look like "the EU" has signed anything, just that a couple EU countries independently accepted to join the summit.
big misconception
open source != open weights
open weights model is like... Winamp for example. it's free, you can download it and use it however you like, you could also do some binary patching or dll injections to alter it functionality but it's not enough to develop next version.
the same is with ai models, weights are the binary final artifacts. for development and improvements you need to have training data, pipelines, RL harnesses, etc.
also of you believe Chinese companies will be releasing weights indefinitely, you are not understanding motivations.
Chinese companies spend significant amounts of money to train a model so why they are releasing it for free? they basically provide researchers starting point for developing tooling and optimizations for serving the model in return. and also get some PR. They also do not have to pay for inference of those models that much, as they probably serve them with loss anyways to gain market. they are gov sponsored so money are not issue there, so they try to speedrun their way to what US companies have. And guess what happens when they reach it. they will stop releasing weights and increase pricing or will use them for gov purposes.
Germany and Netherlands signed alone, not as EU block.
europe2031.ai
Was looking for this. It’s a great short story (it starts with real events and then predicts the future) leading to European fealty to US . Seems increasingly plausible.
European fealty to the US has existed for decades.
True, but it was, until 2008, a somewhat less lopsided relationship.
Europe is becoming a museum and a retirement home. Young people leave to make their fortune and maybe return to have a family or avail of healthcare. And while I have nothing against old people my own street in a _very_ family-oriented suburb in the Netherlands is over 50% retirees.
Though I see the flow of migrants between the US and Europe has shifted, so there's a net gain of Americans in Europe. I wonder if it's where young people with dreams want to go, or if it's just where people like my in-laws (nice, culturally aware, but no longer very economically productive) who have a few million dollars in their 40's and want a pretty place to retire young, go.
Number one issue of our times. I'm eternally frustrated discussion of this basic fact of our political lives is near zero in public discourse.
Where you live? In both Spain and Sweden it's a fairly common topic in public discourse already, about how to move away from a bunch of US dependencies and so on.
Also in Finland and even in EU circles. Trump threatening to annex Greenland really woke up a lot of people. Tariffs didn’t help.
Even my parents who speak no English and aren’t spending time in US-based social media have taken a break from hating Russia for the Ukraine invasion to talking about how we need to get rid of the dependency on the US.
This boat is turning slowly but it won’t turn back anymore.
It didnt yet wake people up to the idea that American led NATO expansion was actually an enormous provocation.
There was nothing "American-led" about the fact that societies that had been forced by Russia into submission for the entirety of the Cold War rushed toward whatever alliances they could to prevent the same thing from ever happening again. Poland even threatened to mobilize the Polish-Americans to tank Clinton's re-election if he tried to block Poland's entry into NATO, that's how "American-led" it was.
Not to mention how ridiculous the narrative of "provocation" is, I can almost hear "provokatsiya, provokatsiya" in Putin's weak and whiny old-man voice. Entry into NATO meant that NATO spent billions upon billions introducing proper civilian oversight of militaries in the new members, and other key features of first world countries. Former RU foreign minister Kozyrev hits the nail when he calls it free security for Russia.
In the 51st state.
Ah, so just your average HN eurobashing not based in any reality. Cheers for confirming :)
... Ireland?
I think you’ll find that it was mutually beneficial deal that traded soft-power for preferential agreements. As it started to crumble, we’ve begun diversifying and directed our schmoozing to better partners.
Since the US entered WW2
> [Washington] piles pressure on The Hague to halt ASML’s remaining exports and servicing of its DUVi machines.
> The Commission backs the Dutch [...]. The European position fragments before it has properly formed.
That the EU would, after recognizing AI's value, freely give up control of its few advantages to the US, despite of this being a conventional trade issue which the EU has experience with, seems like a very pessimistic assumption.
(I stopped reading after that part.)
This is beyond ridiculous.
At the same historical turning point when Europeans are finally waking up to the need to become less dependent on their so called US ally for weapons production and security, they are immediately choosing to become dependent on the next layer of critical infrastructure.
Instead of learning the obvious lesson, Europe seems ready to purchase the future from whoever Washington allows it to purchase from. It used to be the guns, now it's the AI.
It is so idiotic and short sighted that you can barely even blame anyone who keeps exploiting this over and over again. It is always the same story.
Europe has been burning furniture to keep the house warm for so long that an entire generation now thinks that chopping wood is for suckers.
Chopping wood is for suckers. Half your woodpile will get redistributed to strangers who just moved in down the road.
Well this is not really a problem as big as it is presented on the social media. Stats simply do not support these claims.
The bigger issue is the growing number of retired woodworkers collecting pensions for much longer than the system was ever designed for. Life expectancy rose dramatically, yet the retirement age not. These retired woodworkers then vote for politicians who keep increasing their benefits, while costs are cut elsewhere. Add a declining birthrate, a trend started by previous generations, and you get a system that is politically almost impossible to reform. It will probably take a very hard societal crash before people seriously reconsider this old, inefficient model. Like in Greece, where pensions were cut on third of it's original size. Sadly, woodworkers never learn other way than this.
With ever present threat of war on the old continent because some woodworking tribes just can't supress their need to chop someone else, this is the biggest long term issue.
EU is very lucky USA still has very strict immigration policy. If USA made it easy for highly skilled professionals to emigrate there then there would be almost no one capable left here.
EU countries are in many cases far stricter.
I honestly think this is not true.
> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop.
What's with this hallucination? The thread is about GPT-5.6. Your laptop can't even run gemma 4 unquantized bfloat16, which is light years behind GPT-5.6, and running it is light years from training it. If something that a laptop can train is insanely powerful for you, you don't need to worry about this thread at all.
Eh, they said models, which can mean hyperspecific domains, not necessarily a massive generalized LLM.
Has the US government limited access to any non-LLM ML models?
This also completely screws over U.S. businesses. American startups will be forced to pay premium prices for nerfed, heavily-censored, 'compliant' models from a few massive corporations. Meanwhile, foreign startups will be running cheaper, unrestricted open-source AI. We'll price ourselves right out of the global market.
What government wants to have their population use foreign AI. (Not many). Only issue I see is good enough is what the majority might be okay with.
This is probably not the intent.
US intelligence has gamed this out and sees risks at the fringe - advanced artificial intelligence moves the needle the most in countries economically & politically dominated by the USA, the Global South are the targets of this, not US startups.
So far it's only US doing this. I don't think it's in anyone else's interest to limit development of open source models or chips. Nvidia has secured a leading position in GPU market by being the best overall, but if US continues to mess up with the export, that changes the calculation and surely we'll see the alternatives
Any country that developed sufficiently advanced models will pursue the same path. The EU as a regulatory body would pursue the same path, as will/is China.
It’s rather straightforward to think through. If China (they’re practically the only competitor) built a sufficiently advanced AI system would they allow it to propagate on the free market? Of course not. The fact of the matter is that they are behind, even if it’s just a little bit, so the best strategy they have is to try and compete with “good enough” models with lower/subsidized cost - but that is a losing strategy because AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy.
Likewise if, idk, France someone built an AI system that was valuable do you think they’d just hand it over for sworn enemy Donald J. Trump to utilized? Of course not.
The American strategy in the context of the current geopolitical landscape is the only valid one and the obvious one. If you find yourself criticizing the American strategy it’s because you aren’t in the arena where you would, inevitably, make the same decision to restrict access.
This isn't how things typically work. For instance the US is increasingly adversarial towards China yet China continues to largely power the US economy both through manufacturing and market access, which makes up an increasingly large share of all revenue for many US companies. Why? Because that position as a dependency is not only directly economically beneficial to themselves, but also provides leverage which can be utilized in extreme circumstances.
This isn't really going to achieve much besides incentivizing the growth of non-US models and minimizing market access for US-based models. I was expecting the US government to try to ban foreign models, which is also a self-own but orders of magnitude less than this. All this will do is greatly diminish the influence of the US in the future, and minimize the benefits they might reap from a global LLM explosion. It'd be like if 30 years ago, China decided that their manufacturing could only be used by white-listed individuals. Their economy and influence wouldn't be even a fraction of what it is today.
> This isn't really going to achieve much besides incentivizing the growth of non-US models and minimizing market access for US-based models.
The Catch-22 here is that the growth of non-US models is something Americans can take advantage of if they are successful while simultaneously denying access as deemed necessary by the US government to advanced American models.
If open source or models made outside the US surpass US controlled models, then the US would just switch to those and then American companies can leverage those models for their own development or for consumer sales or whatever.
If they don’t surpass US models (as I expect they won’t, though they will remain perhaps marginally useful) then the US maintains the lead in a positive feedback loop development.
If others start controlling advanced models and denying access to superior models developed outside of the United States (ex: China) then my assumption was correct.
I don’t think comparing China’s manufacturing capacity to the American manufacturing base makes a lot of sense in this context and as we know China has in fact weaponized that manufacturing capacity. If nothing else, the economic arrangement isn’t comparable partly because if Chinese factories stopped making iPhones or whatever they would simply not make anything and workers would lose jobs and such hurting the Chinese. Today if the United States government prevents Chinese users from accessing advanced American models there isn’t really a loss on the American side. Quite the opposite - these models will accelerate productivity and industrial capability for the country as a whole and make it more competitive economically.
> AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy
People claim that AGI is. AI is turning out to be a fairly competitive but “normal” product. Companies carving out niches on cost, quality, and speed.
If it was a winner take all OpenAI’s head start would have been decisive. For years ChatGPT was far ahead of everyone, then Anthropic released Opus 3, then OpenAI released 4o, then in mid 2025 it seemed like everyone had strong reasoning models including Google with Gemini 2.5, and now Claude is probably the best coding model. So taking the top spot is not a guarantee you can hold it.
Also the top model becomes a prime target for distillation, making it easier for competitors to keep up.
> and now Claude is probably the best coding model
Do people who keep saying this actually used Claude side by side with other models?
Because in my experience it turned out to be hilariously crap: https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png
I don’t think they have. I used to think that Claude sucked because of the harness so I tried it on opencode and it was still trash.
I’m sure if the primary problem I was solving was multi file complex exploits it would be better but even that I am not sure of. I’ve always found the it’s too dangerous claims to be a bit underwhelming.
Can a model turn crap? shouldn't it be consistent once realized? Isn't it probably Anthropic facing capacity problems and comitting fraud by silently routing you to smaller models for the price of the current Claude?
I think you view this situation from the US point of view and assume that China has the same guiding principles and values in their foreign policy, for which it doesn't. They might do what you said, of course. But they very well might also treat LLMs as another goodwill investment like the Belt and Road Initiative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative) and export the capability to partner countries, for example, in Africa, to strengthen relationships.
Belt and Road wasn’t goodwill.
A lot of it was financed through large (sometimes unsustainable) loans to recipient countries, sometimes leading to unsustainable debt burdens, irrespective of the potential ROI for the recipient (ie Sri Lanka’s port).
In many cases, much of that debt paid for Chinese companies, contractors, suppliers, and imported workers who built or operated the projects.
And the infrastructure didn’t necessarily line up with the recipient’s actual needs, mostly with China’s (ie the Laos–China railway, in large part financed by Laotian debt, which may someday bring some benefits to Laos, but mostly serves China’s regional trade ambitions).
Not to say other countries do it better or have purer ambitions or whatever. It’s just the "goodwill" part that made me twitch.
Can you argue that the principle of the BRI is humanitarian and it should benefit both partners, but not equally? Imho, that policy is far better for humanity than blockading Cuba, bombing Venezuela and Iran.
> A lot of it was financed through large (sometimes unsustainable) loans to recipient countries, sometimes leading to unsustainable debt burdens, irrespective of the potential ROI for the recipient (ie Sri Lanka’s port).
I see that you blame China for Sri Lanka, while China wasn't the only creditor there.
> And the infrastructure didn’t necessarily line up with the recipient’s actual needs
Easy to say in hindsight.
> Can you argue that the principle of the BRI is humanitarian
No. You can argue some projects, if done well, benefit both sides. That doesn’t make it humanitarian. It makes it basic foreign policy.
> China wasn’t the only creditor there.
I didn’t say it was. I said Hambantota was a costly development failure for Sri Lanka, and Chinese lending was part of that specific project and problem. Basically, that unlike your "goodwill" claim, China isn’t just giving away infrastructure for free out of the goodness of its government’s heart.
Don’t make me say what I did not.
> Easy to say in hindsight.
Yes. That’s why development and debt are hard problems. Also why calling it “goodwill” is, at best, too generous.
> Better than blockading Cuba / bombing Iran / etc.
“The US also does very bad stuff” doesn’t make BRI goodwill. Plus, there are more than two countries in the world. Some even try viable (if self-interested) development policy without bombing people.
> Yes. That’s why development and debt are hard problems. Also why calling it “goodwill” is, at best, too generous.
One can call the intent 'goodwill'. It doesn't mean that the outcome is satisfactory for your economic expectations. Judging from exceptions is not a valid approach and is a weird take.
> “The US also does very bad stuff” doesn’t make BRI goodwill.
True. I used that as an example of an alternative approach. The reader can decide which one is more 'goodwill'.
> Some even try viable (if self-interested) development policy without bombing people.
What countries are you referring to here: France (Douala and Abidjan ports, North–South railway in Vietnam), Japan (also ports in Sri Lanka, Thilawa), something else?
> Don’t make me say what I did not.
That conclusion says more about your reading than about what I actually wrote.
> Basically, that unlike your "goodwill" claim, China isn’t just giving away infrastructure for free out of the goodness of its government’s heart.
I shoot back with "Don’t make me say what I did not.", and 'goodwill' doesn't mean 'free stuff', you may want to check the dictionary ;)
> One can call the intent “goodwill”.
One can call anything anything. And intents can only be guessed at, while outcomes can actually be evaluated. The question is whether the label explains the policy.
BRI is state-backed finance tied to Chinese strategic, commercial, and diplomatic interests. Some projects may benefit recipients too. Great. That still doesn’t make "goodwill" a useful description of the principle.
> Judging from exceptions is not valid.
I’m not judging from one exception. I backed my point of view with examples of a broader pattern: debt-financed infrastructure, Chinese contractors/suppliers/operators capturing much of the spending, and projects that often also serve China’s trade and influence goals.
Feel free to provide substantive counter-examples instead of just waving the word "goodwill" around.
> I used that as an example of an alternative approach.
No, you used US violence as a contrast to make BRI look benevolent. That’s whataboutism. "Less bad than bombing" is not the same thing as goodwill.
> What countries are you referring to here: France (Douala and Abidjan ports, North–South railway in Vietnam), Japan (also ports in Sri Lanka, Thilawa), something else?
Given its own propensity to rely on bombing, I would not use France as an example. The EU-financed port and airport in Gaza, for all the good they were allowed to do, come to mind. Japanese development and aid efforts too, even if they, like most if not all state-sponsored efforts, come with strings attached.
> goodwill doesn’t mean free stuff
Obviously. But you’re the one explicitly framing it as humanitarian. If your "goodwill" consists of lending countries money for infrastructure that often serves the lender’s own strategic interests and pays its own companies, then I’m going to question the framing.
Keep the dictionary for Scrabble.
Unless, it just occurred to me, you meant "goodwill projects" in the sense of "projects aimed towards generating goodwill among recipient countries (and their population) toward China".
In which case, I’d still argue the frame is too narrow, but acknowledge I misunderstood your initial point and apologise.
Tales of an Economic Hitman was an instruction manual for the Belt and Road Initiative.
It's a long stretch in mental gymnastics with no factual proofs.
More likely the PRC sees the open-weight models' progress as a way to prevent an existing dominant player from cementing their (finicky) lead and pulling up the ladder.
That strategy happens to have beneficial side effects to the global Hoi Polloi, but to attach any kind of benevolence to it would be naive.
How would open-weight models benefit PRC better than their own closed-weight models, but still available at lower prices? If anything, open-weights can be distilled far easier.
Because lower prices with closed weights would be severely compute constrained which would tightly cap the damage to american firms. As it is there's a plethora of providers (many of them american) serving up the cheap open weight models. Even tightly regulated industries with security concerns can use the latest deepseek.
It also enables further R&D using the open models as a starting point. That doesn't benefit china directly but it does serve to further undermine the lead that the american frontier labs have which limits their future ability to cut geopolitical adversaries off. In that sense it provides a long term hedge by minimizing the damage in the worst case scenario where china ends up suffering a crushing defeat in the AI race for whatever reason.
> Even tightly regulated industries with security concerns can use the latest deepseek.
That is not necessarily true, as "tightly regulated industries with security concerns" are also afraid of deepseek models generating vulnerable code. Even a possibility of that prevents those industries from deployments.
> That doesn't benefit china directly but it does serve to further undermine the lead that the american frontier labs have which limits their future ability to cut geopolitical adversaries off.
So, basically, competition is bad for US models? That argument doesn't address open-weights. And it doesn't work the other way around, because in that case China should be releasing close-weights instead.
> So, basically, competition is bad for US models?
Having less of a lead is bad for US frontier labs.
> That argument doesn't address open-weights.
Open weights does far more to further that goal than closed weights ever could. The bit right before the sentence you quoted was about enabling further R&D using open models as a starting point. In the same way that open weights serves as a force multiplier when it comes to flooding the market with cheap inference it also serves as a force multiplier if your goal is the raise the R&D floor. In this scenario a reasonable move for a capable opponent that's lagging behind is to attempt to raise the floor of the whole market so as to erode the position of whoever is in the lead.
Also consider that (as I previously mentioned) raising the capabilities of the global market as a whole serves to minimize damage in a worst case scenario. If you find yourself needing to depend on a foreign supplier for a key technology then it's better to have as many choices as possible from as many different jurisdictions as possible.
Thinking like a business vs. thinking like a state.
If you see a given technology as fundamental[tm], you want to ensure that you will retain access to it AND its ongoing development. China may well foresee a possible future where US imposes export controls and global sanctions to block PRC from having access to the necessary equipment to either train or use the most advanced models - let alone its alternate parallel universe where US might go as far as prevent anyone else than US themselves having the most advanced forms of the technology at all.[ß]
To ward off such a scenario, China doesn't need to become the sole leading supplier. They only need to guarantee that nobody else can even try to block them off, and that the technology itself can never be yanked.
ß: What could possibly give them such ideas?
They have the same values. Domination it is. People are people. Really no difference between the US and China. None at all.
Well, you are wrong. Maybe you should visit and learn more about China to understand it. For starters, China's society is high-individualistic with a strong sense of community and with high respect to their elders. On the contrary, US's society is hyper-individualistic with a strong sense of family and basic respect to their elders.
> Any country that developed sufficiently advanced models will pursue the same path.
Looking at most of the available evidence, Mythos is an incremental upgrade over other models and nowhere near the implied advancement that this seems to point to. I guess you could be right in that a sufficient advancement would cause this type of withholding of it, but I think it's kind of silly to think that the US has reached that level.
I don’t think the ai market has been around long enough to prove winner take all, I see it more like a commodity which is why the winner quickly switched from OpenAI to Anthropic at least on coding.
I generally find the Chinese models to be superior. If you look at the token pricing or hosting cost it’s still about 80% margin on Chinese models. Deep cuts should still be possible.
> AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy
AGI sure. But I don't think we're going to get there in our lifetimes, if ever. There are too many structural and physical limitations. One everyone seems to be catching onto now is that they're running out of human data and are incestuously feeing AI output to itself as input.
Current state AI is barely an improvement over where it was fifty years ago. We just have stronger hardware and more content to train on. We need a new paradigm. One that hasn't come in half a century.
the only people its relevant for is the people in first. We wont know what any other state would do until someone passes the us, if that happens.
it sucks that we're in a place where the us has an dishonest leadership, because the current situation would be pretty reasonable if any other admin was in charge.
let models go free, until one proves dangerous in the real world then require gov approval after that.
I don't think anyone rational would have the position everyone should have insta access at the same time to the highest model once it crosses the point of enabling actual dangerous things.
> This will make it hard/impossible for new vendors to come into the market and only established companies will get to play, and charge, for LLMs.
I don't understand how you leap from "US govt. decides who gets to use GPT-5" to "limit new vendors from competing with OpenAI".
Can you walk me through the logic?
These frontier models are now good enough that they can assist heavily with new optimizations for future models, including, code them. Restricting their usage to a few companies takes away that advantage away from other companies, thereby, limiting new vendors from competing with OpenAI.
> Restricting their usage to a few companies takes away that advantage away from other companies, thereby, limiting new vendors from competing with OpenAI.
wait, are you saying a competitor needs access to an OpenAI model in order to build a competing model?
Nothing new in that. Everyone pays to someone or the other to make their own product/life better. Most of the times these products do not compete, sometimes, they do.
How many times you believe duckduckgo would have google'd stuff just to create a competitor to Google itself? I believe thousands of times.. could be more.
OpenAI cannot claim the code their models produce as their own since their own models used codes from public internet during training to produce new code.
That’s incoherent.
What part?
I agree with your point, but to play devils advocate: doesn't a competitor arguably need access to these beyond-frontier models to even become an effective competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic?
"Assisting", not "one-shotting", a better model.
Do you have any sources for the claim that LLMs meaningfully help in the production of LLMs?
Read Anthropic's own blog post released sometime around last week.
Do you have a source that isn't known for consistently over-stating their model's capabilities?
Common sense? Each model iteration is clearly more capable than the last and at this point the benefit to researchers of all stripes is self evident.
You do realize this statement about "overstating model capabilities" has nothing to do with AI assisted AI development, right?
It absolutely does. Because 'AI-assisted AI development' is one of the claimed but not verified capabilities.
You could produce a completely fcked up model using AI, and also a completely awesome one using AI. So, the "overstating capabilities" part really have nothing to do with this discussion.
As for the claim part around AI being used to assist further AI development, I have already told to read Anthropic's blog post. You can take help from chatgpt, if needed.
> the U.S. government would initially approve who gets access to its latest new release while AI companies and the administration work out a longer-term plan for regulation on the sector.
So you're a new vendor with a GPT-5.6 or Mythos class model. How do you suppose the regulations are going to work? First you need to get on the list of companies that are allowed to release models, and then you need to have a whole system for limiting access. Both are going to be hugely expensive, on top of training new models already being insanely expensive to begin with.
Thus, it's not a legal limit, but a real practical limit because it's too expensive. If only OpenAI and Anthropic and Google can afford to jump through the hoops, they've effectively gotten to "limit new vendors from competing with OpenAI".
> So you're a new vendor with a GPT-5.6 or Mythos class model. How do you suppose the regulations are going to work? First you need to get on the list of companies that are allowed to release models, and then you need to have a whole system for limiting access. Both are going to be hugely expensive, on top of training new models already being insanely expensive to begin with.
So your thesis is that someone has the resources to create a model at the level of Mythos or GPT 5.6 but bot have the resources to jump through the concomitant legal requirements?
Surely that’s unlikely?
Of course. The US government inserts itself into commerce, starts picking winners and losers, and thus creates an industry for petitioning gatekeepers at all levels for access. The goodfellas profit and the public pays. OpenAI and company get manufactured scarcity to raise margins, and lawmakers get to collect an entry fee. This was doomed to happen. The US is much closer to a total state than most give it credit for.
>This is regulatory capture in action.
Isnt this all export control based? If so its not regulatory capture for a few reasons. If not disregard this.
1) new entrants wont get export controlled because they arent leading edge
2) a new company could just implement KYC. It could even be a competitive advantage (Anthropic wont or cant)
> Only companies approved by the government will get access. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model.
That sounds like more than just export control.
This means that big company A that the president has a business interest in could get access to the most powerful AIs, while a startup competing with it doesn't.
It's worth keeping in mind the broader context here politically. The president and his cabinet are generally pursuing policies of a strong unitary executive branch that centralizes "technocratic" functions under the control of politicians and political appointees. The majority in Congress doesn't appear to mind and seems to be actively sitting back from legislating on topics like this. The overall effect is that of creating a system in which the rules are deliberately uncertain and the only reliable way to get approval is by aligning yourself or your organization politically. It's a powerful technique for ensuring political compliance in the corporate world.
> The president and his cabinet are generally pursuing policies of a strong unitary executive branch
Or, and this is common knowledge, they're just straight up looting.
Well yeah, but that's the point of the whole unitary executive thing. Thete are quick cash grabs happening all over the place of course, but they are also setting up for a long-term systemization of corruption, backed by a radicalized narrow majority voter base. It's clear that they believe they will win the midterm elections, or that the opposition won't be able or willing to stop them meaningfully, and then win the next presidential election too.
I guess if the new model has the capability to do 'something' that's national security threat, then this makes sense. Otherwise this move makes zero sense, and actually is a drag on innovation - who wants to invest money and people to make a better model that can't actually be sufficiently sold to make a return on investment? Meanwhile other models from Europe or China that are better steal market share. Though that's not to say they won't do the same thing for the same reasons.
> Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated
Well, there was the kerfuffle around PS3 (IIRC) and 'supercomputers'. I suppose that would be the 2020s version of that. What's old is new again. Ultimately you can just continually wire together less powerful hardware to come up with something that can do the job.
>Well, there was the kerfuffle around PS3 (IIRC) and 'supercomputers'.
There were no export restrictions on the PS3.
They meant PS2. Japan was worried the processor was powerful enough to control missiles and put restrictions on how many can be sold to a single person and banned certain countries.
I probably did ;)
Double precision cell chips were reserved for military, I think (or maybe also blade processors). So doing any serious physics on them was dead in the water - same with macs tbh
PS3 had not the same Cell chips as the sones for data centers.
I said kerfuffle. I didn’t say ‘export’.
They were probably thinking of the PS2, which Japan did, in fact, temporarily restrict: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482...
As I understood they will limit running those undesired llms with Remote Attestation and Trusted Execution Environments.
>can train insainly powerful models on my laptop
Can you give an example or two?
This isn’t about keeping people from having the power of frontier LLMs. So tricks that let others have it aren’t a defeat of this policy.
This is export control, where the US government seeks to leverage the fact that these frontier models are US made. This is then leveraged against opponents, and likely also just for grift. There’s also perhaps a little legitimate worry about the implications of free access to, but that is secondary to the real goal.
> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop.
This is such hyperbole. You might be able to train a model that's merely useful in a single domain, but to say you can train an 'insanely powerful' model on consumer hardware is laughable.
Zuckerberg has spent billions trying to keep Meta's models relevant, somewhat unsuccessfully.
If only he had known he could simply use his laptop to train them.
Warm up your VPN to zAI for the eventual banned GLM-6 I guess
what make you believe that the Chinese gov is going to allow GLM-6 to be made publicly available?
Let me frame it like this;
If GLM-6 is made publicly available[1], will that change your predictions of how they will behave in the future, or your understanding of their motivations in the present?
[1] I am certainly no expert of Chinese AI policy, but I fear you are attributing US values and goals to the Chinese govt.
From where I stand, they appear to be very different though. China is seeking to increase influence, whereas the US (seems to be) seeking to become more insular. China is actively persuing the world-leader role, while the US dismantles soft-power tools like USaid, and alienates countries pursuing obviously flawed military excursions.
Why would the Chinese gov...spoil their rival's tulip bubble by dumping even fancier free tulips on the market?
What? This is the opposite of regulatory capture. Neither anthropic nor openai are getting to choose what happens with their models.
Regulatory capture doesn't necessarily mean the regulated get to decide what the regulators do in precise steps. It can simply mean they support and exist within a regulatory regime that greatly benefits the regulated.
In fact, you generally don't want them directly telling the regulators what to do. Instead, the regulators make complex, costly rules that only large establishment players can follow. The regulators look like they're doing their job; the regulated enjoy higher margins and protection from disruption.
How does this benefit the regulated? I'd say it dooms the regulated:
* with the government requiring the regulated to obtain approval to add each customer, they're losing a massive number of their customers
* and even if a customer gets approved, every such customer now sees that access to the regulated can (and has been) shutoff with no notice if the gov doesn’t like the provider or customer - it's now a massive supply chain risk for any customer to use a regulated provider
* the regulated losing a massive part of their customer base for both of the above reasons means significant impairment of their revenue, as well as their valuation, and staying ahead of their competitors and open models requires massive ongoing investment
Open models are mere months behind.
> they're losing a massive number of their customers
Who are they losing them to? They're the only game in town.
> it's now a massive supply chain risk for any customer to use a regulated provider
But seeing as there is no alternative use them they will.
> the regulated losing a massive part of their customer base
But they aren't. Access to existing models isn't being pulled. It is only access to previously unreleased models that is being restricted going forward.
> Open models are mere months behind.
Presumably the government will strategically ease restrictions as open models gain ground.
And the regulated may even publicly complain about the regulations, to increase the illusion that it isn't regulatory capture.
That's just vanilla regulation. Yes it tends to create market inefficiencies, by definition. Capture entails industry corrupting and directing regulatory bodies.
Exactly! The thing that squeezes out new entrants isn't only the compliance cost, it's that your whole roadmap ends up resting on access you don't control.
We already saw the terms moved under us once with Fable, the retention policy changed and some requests started routing to a weaker model, none of us small operators had any say in that. Now access itself is a government decisions.
For anyone building on top of these APIs that's the real barrier, not the rule-following overhead but the fact that the ground can shift mid-flight and you can't negotiate with whoever's moving it.
Which is exactly why open weights start looking less like ideology and more like risk management.
The other answers are also valid, but lest we not forget, Sam is openly a fascist supporter and is clearly in bed with the regime in that he funded 47's campaign and jumped in to rescue Hegseth's automated kill list with OpenAI's GPT when Anthropic refused. Furthermore they are likely operating on some kind of quid pro quo agreement even if it's not public knowledge, because that's how all this bribery stuff works. Bezos agreed to use his media empire including WaPo to spout MAGA propaganda, for example. It's trump's one and only MO so to assume it doesn't apply here would be insane.
So, while OpenAI may not in a legal/technical sense, be the benefactory, that is not required for the term to apply, AND they may as well be considered party to the creation of the regulation since they have openly lobbied for it, openly inserted themselves into the government apparatus both formally and informally, and likely are co-conspirators to whatever Trump's autocratic self-enrichment scheme is.
I think you meant to post this on Reddit
How is this regulatory capture? Any new LLM company can just exist outside of the US and export to everyone.
You’re saying it’s not regulatory capture because it’s not enforced globally?
it's not regulatory capture, because they are not regulating what customers can use - it's limiting what some companies can serve. it's way less impactful to the market as a whole.
Until they can’t.
It is as if people can't imagine the concept of sanctions despite their liberal use over the years.
Sanctioning a data file? Did it work for the PGP source code?
Right. That's what sanctions can accomplish...
Countries who've made the mistake of allying with the US might face sanctions or some sort of threats. People will just use Chinese AI then. This is the US biting itself in the ass.
literally the opposite of regulatory capture - it spells trouble for specifically openai and anthropic mostly
That's often how regulatory capture works. It seems bad for the incumbents, but it's worse for any future competitor. As long as the cost of complying with the regulation is less than your expected loss from competition entering the market, then it's net positive for the incumbent.
I think this is plain old regulation, not regulatory capture. For it to be the latter we'd need evidence than it was the incumbents who designed this oversight which they then asked the white house to rubber stamp.
...I think we have plenty of evidence of that
> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop
Can you?
Correction: Can you yet?
Anthropic and OpenAI: Dear Uncle Sam, it seems laptops became too powerful, can you please do something
Uncle Sam: For national security reasons starting from now on every purchase of GPU model with higher than X Petaflops will need written permission by the US president
Anthropic and OpenAI: Look poor citizens, we are willing to share our capacity with you in limited form, by using our LLM you can avoid spending 35 years in the waiting list to buy a GPU, by the way, to simplify pricing, here is our new pricing with 5700% increase. Enjoy
It's the age old "Help me, politicians. You're my only hope".
Anthropic, Open AI & Co. realized at some point that if they can't make money with barely any competition they sure as hell won't if the market is flooded. So here they are slamming the door behind them.
> Anthropic, Open AI & Co. realized at some point that if they can't make money with barely any competition they sure as hell won't if the market is flooded. So here they are slamming the door behind them.
Jokes on them, there won't be new entrants not because the door is shut but because it doesn't actually make money. The whole scheme is propped up by illusions to grift the investors, fewer competition only breaks the illusion. But I guess those folks aren't the types to understand "rising tide lifts all boats", or in this case, rising sewage buoys all rats.
China: look at these GPUs we reverse engineered, do you want an RTX 5090 for half the price Nvidia sells them for?
finally, our GPU 'Come and take it' flags will be understood
Don't forget: "Questioning our results on the awesomeness of the current administration is treason."
Extrapolating the progress in both hardware and model efficiency, that will take decades
Depends on the point of view, I suppose.
Powerful enough to shock someone in 2010 with a wikipedia chat bot? Possibly.
Powerful enough to shock jaded HN commentators right now? Possibly not.
its not about whether you can shock anyone, if anyone is driving cars outside, you can't say you have SOTA-horse to go from A to B.
When models are good, expectations are adjusted accordingly to deliver things on par with the whole industry, you can't just say, I have built my own Intel Pentium II, now I will try to use it to compile Electron App and run 3DS Max there
You don't need SOTA-level LLMs to create value with AI. Hell, you can build good solutions with a simple small finetuned models.
> When models are good, expectations are adjusted accordingly to deliver things on par with the whole industry, you can't just say, I have built my own Intel Pentium II, now I will try to use it to compile Electron App and run 3DS Max there.
I know you are taking your analogy to its breaking point but it really depends on what you are doing. I know people that use 10+-year old thinkpads and they do just fine.
> You don't need SOTA-level LLMs to create value with AI.
person said "insanely powerful". expectations of "insanely powerful" is way beyond the graph of an individual using consumer-grade hardware.
I agree with you but to be fair I also think that even 10 year old hardware is insanely powerful by any reasonable metric. Modern computers are truly ridiculous when considered in historical context.
Maybe not in absolute terms. But if there is no access to the actual SOTA models, it's as if they don't exist.
>I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop
Explain. The labs have been spending about $100 million in compute to train a model.
Give me three ish months and, I hope, to show exactly what I mean!
Please go ahead. If you are right, you can raise billions of dollars for your startup.
I think I understand now. Don't do it for me. In fact, I'd rather you found something else to do.
Nick Bostrom wondered aloud in Superintelligence (2014) why states would allow individuals and private organizations to develop AGI. If one takes the possibility seriously, AGI would a source of immense power and any state would to take that opportunity for itself.
Edit: Not saying whether AGI is right around the corner, that's a different discussion. I'm just saying that a serious possibility of AGI and an understanding of possible consequences will make a state act.
Well states are made of individuals, and at least in the US we should be able to self determine via elections and public discourse..
If that's impossible in any meaningful way, then yes, doesn't matter which color jersey the government is wearing, it's authoritarian.
AGI is religion invented for the stupid. There's no world in which a silly LLM can make intelligent decisions. It's all smoke and mirrors to make insane amounts of money and to maintain the sheep agreeing with the powerful.
What rock have you been living under?
> This is regulatory capture in action.
With the twist that it will end up involving payments that directly benefit Trump, following the Mafia business model that he learned in the construction industry and that he's brought to the White House.
GPUs and computer hardware prices have been on the rise. I can see a twisted perspective where it’s stated that the US government needs to closely control computer hardware that can run particular LLMs, as a national security interest. At least that idea isn’t completely wild now seeing what we have been experiencing.
Remember those weird conspiracies we used to have about universal surveillance; tracking and so forth? Well if you think back to those and whatever might happen with GPUs and hardware, and LLM restrictions or the likely age gating//ID’ing that is to come from this, that’s a good guiding framework for how this will proceed and affect normal people.
Buy Bitcoin.
look, i'm sorry, but this is a thoroughly solved problem by now.
How does owning some bitcoins let you run a powerful LLM?
I take it you've never known anyone who has tried to run even a small consumer AI company. Do you think that they all independently come up with the same censorship rules, despite no law mandating them? Why do you think that is? That they are just that well-thought out that everyone happens to agree with that same intersecting boundary?
Yeah turns out a lot of people agree that having models that help you do crime is probably a bad thing
For the sake of argument, let's grant that there's some conspiracy that makes them all have the same rules. And conspiracy in a loose sense: perhaps it's the government dictating the rules.
I still don't understand how buying bitcoin lets me route around that.
Even gold coins buried in my garden won't get you access to Fable.
You're making straw man examples, but if you want to understand more, I suggest any paper on Bitcoin.
Personally, I'm not a fan of it. But the thesis is real, and it might have delivered on its promise if the world wasn't actually full of scumbags and scammers (each one accidentally contributing to making Big Banks look like the lesser of the evils).
I've read eg https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
It still doesn't tell me how to run or access LLMs.
please don’t answer in questions. state specifically what you mean so we can discuss what your point is, not guess what it is you’re implying with vague questions.
Listen to yourself. I'll write in my style, you write in yours. In what world is it anything less than obnoxious to say that? Time to hit the logout button for me permanently I say. https://imgur.com/a/L8hoqhp
> Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated to ensure that illegal LLMs aren't being processed on your machine?
Actually that sounds pretty reasonable considering current regulations regarding almost any other important resource / material that affect the general population.
You Gen-Z people serously need what Free software, Free society meant. We fought against people like you and against treacherous computing. And we will do again.
I hope this doesn't become the new norm where government becomes the bottleneck for innovation in the AI space.
It's worrying that with no formal and transparent policy framework that the government will be picking winners and losers and stifling innovation.
There's been no public policy, executive order, legislation, or otherwise on this, I wonder if anyone has filed FOIA requests for these decisions or the conversations between the Executive Branch and AI companies.
Indeed, I find quite ironic that some people in tech in the US complain about EU "regulations first" approach, but then their government seem to arbitrarily stop things from being released because, well, there is no established policy on safety guarantees or other similar aspects.
I see it too, but worth noting that this is basically unprecedented at least within the last 25 years; I think you have to go back to export controlled cryptography for another example of this kind of abrupt and targeted regulation.
We’ve seen more examples recently. TikTok, wireless routers, polestar cars…
Huawei, Foreign gambling sites were banned on dubious reasons in 2006 (in reality American companies weren't as competitive and las Vegas needed to be protected), Japanese electronic tariffs in the 80s/90s ...
US never exactly believe in full on 'free trade'.
The US believed in free trade precisely when the politically connected needed labor arbitrage, and protectionism exactly when the politically connected needed protection. The pretense of underlying ideals was never more than a political tool - political economy was always political.
It depends on whether you believe US action is overdetermined, but I think if Trump didn’t get elected we would have continued on the path of free trade. His election wasn’t predestined. He had just the right mix of features to win at the time, but if this basket of features didn’t exist it’s not hard to imagine the country going down a very different path.
If we had continued on the path of free trade without "dealing in" those displaced by free trade, the pressure would have continued to grow. It certainly could have exploded in a different direction, at a different time, with a different champion, but so long as it was repressed instead of addressed it was always destined to explode.
Another plausible future is AI reshuffling the economic hierarchy. In a technological civilization the pressure valve need not be political.
As an aside, you made me curious if Trump made this constituency materially better off. Here's what Claude thinks (tl;dr: it's a wash): https://claude.ai/share/36233694-3729-4758-b2e6-c2058791ab1a
Explosions are rarely productive. Populists are notorious for delivering lots of chaos and few results.
It's easier for everyone to just deal in the economic losers, but we didn't do that, and now they are burning the house down. This will not get them what they want, but they will continue doing it anyway.
Globalization was the test, AI is the final exam.
> Globalization was the test, AI is the final exam.
I'm not sure history will end so soon.
True, and we've been here before. The industrial revolution got rid of the need for most labor, which at the time was overwhelmingly agricultural and textile. We came out the other side OK.
But there was a lot of pain. Living conditions got worse and stayed worse for entire lifetimes before they got better, and they didn't get better because the people who won decided to deal in the people who lost, they got better because the world went to war and incinerated most of its capital, literally and metaphorically, and the regrowth happened under conditions of scarce labor rather than abundant labor, allowing the people on the bottom to strike a decent deal the second time around.
That, uhh, won't happen the same way again. Now we have robots and nukes. But it's true that without the benefit of hindsight I'd have had an apocalyptic view going into the last kerfuffle, I'd have been wrong, and it would have been due to a failure of imagination. Let's all hope that I am wrong again, but the mechanism will again have to be a failure of imagination, and it takes a lot of optimism to fit my hope squarely inside my blind spot.
Biden wasn't a free trader at all, more alike to Trump in trade than many would like to admit.
George Friedman disagrees with you: he's been saying for years that US trade policy towards China had to change no matter who won the 2016 election (because an economy cannot rely on a trade partner it might go to war with, among other reasons).
When last year the Trump admin started interdicting oil shipments out of Venezuela, it left shipments heading to China intact. Then during Trump's visit to China, the two parties made a lot of progress on trade and other issues (in part because Beijing's attitude improved because the first Trump administration's restrictions on trade underlined to Beijing how dependent China is on trade with the US).
> Japanese electronic tariffs in the 80s
Also motorcycles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_motorcycle_tariff
Taking that political scenario as an example. Was the decline caused simply because Harley kept to the same working formula refusing to innovate for competition? As to the likes of Honda and Co?
Manufacturing is cheaper if you have access to resources and such. Japan may of had abundant of but in this case I don't feel it's was all about manufacturing costs.
Was it a cash cow situation, where their one formula was working but as well as where Harley were reluctant to invest in a different avenue, to innovate causing cow to dry up. And that is when they called in the government to settle? That is always the impression I seem to receive.
Excluding manufacturing costs was it because they were scared of an innovation being a failure?
The same cash cow formula can be seen with the likes of Disney Pixar and Toy Story 5, a pointless movie plot at this point where if money was invested, a new creation could be born.
A current account deficit is a capital account surplus, assets and exports compete in the balance of payments, an asset windfall kills exports by increasing the currency hurdle and embedded asset price.
What you are seeing is "the bar" for a successful manufacturing business increasing until only the most profitable are left -- things like chips, things like shell companies that exist to monetize a brand. "New growth" isn't highly profitable so it never has a chance to get started (unless a recipient of an asset windfall is willing to finance it all the way to "the bar" -- see: Elon Musk).
> A current account deficit is a capital account surplus,
That's true.
> assets and exports compete in the balance of payments, an asset windfall kills exports by increasing the currency hurdle and embedded asset price.
They don't really have to compete with each other. It depends on what the central bank does (or doesn't do) about the exchange rate, for example.
Weakening the dollar would make the export sector happy, but if you did enough of it to make the US export sector strong you would make assets unhappy. In fact, we have front row seats to this very lesson which appears to be even stronger in reality than it is in theory: we are already seeing yields rise despite a dollar that is still strong enough to crush exports.
Assets have had such a stranglehold over US politics for the last 50 years that if we ever actually run pro-export policy it won't be due to doomed self-promotion by exports (we even have a term for the pattern where this fails on first contact with tradeoffs: TACO) it will be because assets self-sabotage, implode, and exports fill the vacuum.
Ah. I get it now. A established economic model is provable and that in five years you can forecast that if you follow X guide you'll end up on top with Y.
If competition is on the scene then how can you assure me that myself taking the risk of investing will return me the sum I wish for in return.
Production has already been established but the threat is in that an another forecastable model exists and that to catch up to their market will require more investment and expenditure which could lead in less chance of a return. And even if the model is copyable; as like the trope of Chinese knockoffs to of Japanese products, you're still at a lower advantage.
It's not they don't want to innovate but the risk to gamble on innovation is high enough that you could stifle competition cheaper via governmental means.
This slows their forecast and where you can then strategise to overcome the competition rather than risking expenditure via innovation. Crafty, cheers.
It's worth tracing this through every level in order to get the causality correct.
Triffin's Dilemma says that in the case of the modern USA, assets will be pumped. Macroeconomics says asset pump = export dump.
The way that economics dumps exports is by raising the bar (strong currency = poor customers, expensive assets = expensive houses = expensive labor, costs go up, price goes down, profitability is squeezed). Eventually the bar became impossible to hop without a cheat code like "good brand and no R+D" or "software level profitability".
At the individual level, manufacturing pay went in the shitter as the jobs dried up while house prices and stock prices went through the roof... so everyone who could became real estate agents, or doctors overcharging real estate agents, or sellers of investment scams to venture capitalists.
What's wild is that this happened to the Spanish, the Dutch, the English, and by the 1960s Triffin could see that it would happen to the US as well.
If you want details from an economist who does his homework, "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.
"Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective by Ha-Joon Chang"
"How did the rich countries really become rich? In this provocative study, Ha-Joon Chang examines the great pressure on developing countries from the developed world to adopt certain 'good policies' and 'good institutions', seen today as necessary for economic development. His conclusions are compelling and disturbing: that developed countries are attempting to 'kick away the ladder' with which they have climbed to the top, thereby preventing developing countries from adopting policies and institutions that they themselves have used."
https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Persp...
US never championed free trade if by free trade you mean "anything goes."
Really strange that rest of the world can tariff and put up barriers, but once the US does that, all free-trade warriors step out of the wood work.
The entire US auto industry is predicated on protectionism. Without it the Japanese would have wiped out GM/Ford/Chrysler in the 1980s, and now the Chinese in the 2020s-2030s.
See the Chicken tax for trucks for a not so recent example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
I think that's a bit different. The crypto-wars were about restricting strong encryption IN GENERAL. Not targeting a specific vendor.
The equivalent would be to restrict all LLMs with a minimum number of weights.
That's probably as futile, but remember for how long the encryption ban proved to be a nuisance.
TikTok ban was the worst one because it was about speech, not trade or security. If the bill said "China banned our social media so we're gonna ban theirs in reciprocity," that'd be a way more valid reason.
It's also super annoying being collateral damage in America's war on free speech. Canadian TikTok is now also being similarly moderated for content unfriendly of your administration. I guess we're still in a position of privilege where we can grow domestic social platforms to compete while American simply have no alternatives - anything that grows sufficiently large will be turned towards similar propaganda aims.
> Canadian TikTok is now also being similarly moderated for content unfriendly of your administration.
I feel like this has to do more with the consolidation you typically see international companies do with their North American operations than anything. More often than not do things have to go across the border for warranty repair. Even when a 'local' Canadian presence exists (like Asus has), they themselves generally act as a middleman between you and their 'parent' operation in the US. It would not be surprising to find out that TikTok US operates the Canadian version as well.
China didn't even blanket ban them. They established laws that Internet companies have to follow and most U.S. tech companies refused to comply. Some did (e.g. Bing) and aren't banned.
Instagram is just as worse.
All social media is a toxic, ad-driven, algo-fueled surveillance tool at this point. Just regulate it all, equally, into the ground if we want to do society a service.
The fact that China's version of TikTok is nothing like what's available in the US should showcase how much the USG gives zero F's about it's citizens regardless of the political party you lean towards.
Instagram is worse, but when you talk bad about Israel in Instagram they can delete it, it wasn't easily possible in TikTok
DJI, Huawei and the list goes on. Definitely no need to go back "25 years". The USG is turning into a joke of a surveillance state. As if any of the US based tech is truly any less backdoor'd? Cisco and Flock and Google and Facebook and Microsoft, oh what amazing technology companies that could never be used for... Oh wait, what a fantastic endgame we're on course for! I wonder why other nations are actively moving away from US tech?
A real headscratcher isn't it? And from a government that is supposedly priding itself on small government. How should companies navigate this? What's the framework they should operate within?
Claiming the mantle of "small government" was simply an exercise in marketing to relax regulation meant to prevent bribery and corruption. In practice, the current slate of government officials believes in absolute control of whatever they want whenever they want.
It's a mirror case of the supposed "free speech absolutists" who immediately turned around and silenced, sued, fired or jailed once granted the power to do so.
When has Trump or his administration said they were about small government? Are you confusing them with Paul Ryan?
This was certainly the rallying cry behind DOGE and the general push to rip the entrails out of many federal agencies. Combatting "waste" and "inefficiency," with strong implications that most of what those agencies do is pointless government meddling.
Whether he's actually driving towards small government with that or anything else - in the good-faith spirit of that policy - that's definitely up for debate.
No I’m asking if ever said he was for small government.
From 2015 Trump has positioned himself as opposed to that style of republicanism. He offered a different playbook and the base followed.
What is happening is 40-50+ year olds haven’t updated their map of reality and continue to use talking political points from when they were 25.
One of the critiques of small government is its valueless. Instead of having to argue for or against positions you just say you don’t like it because it’s out of scope. Well now the inverse thing is happening in this thread. People are just saying he’s in violation of a small government principle he never espoused.
Small governments don't deploy thousands of military troops into their own cities.
One of the few roles a "small government" should actually take on is defending from invaders.
Are the invaders in the room with us right now?
They look to be in control.
You are misled/misleading. Get informed about the political theory of domestic deployment of troops for the purpose of policing in western democracues. Look how those who speak for the U.S. military personell (former generals, the editorial of that magazine they produce in the U.S. army prior to being pruned) if you need some motivation.
Which invaders? Has the Iran War taken a 180 degree turn?
Until a few minutes ago, Iran did technically win the war.
Good grief. I hadn't been watching reddit or the news today so you had me go check. Should've known. Friday at market close on the dot. So much for that deal huh.
Oh yes, the country that lost basically all its navy, air force, a large number of military facilities and couldn't defend its airspace. Iran won a lot indeed!
This comment doesn't work as well considering my implication was an invasion of US soil.
I know, I wasn’t disagreeing
It's only small government when they are trying to not give money to some group they don't like.
Not a headscratcher at all, if you understand how our economy and politics are actually run.
I don't think Trump has ever said he's in favor of a small govt
Doge and project 2025 ...
There is one major reason why oligarchs are in favor of small government, when it's in their way. Another commenter said it already: it's only about power.
It's almost like he expects bribes to release the model, but I'm just being paranoid.
The most important part of the mafia state is making everyone else a participant. It enforces your personal power and once in the system those parties will do things they would never imagine doing when they were outside of it.
It's also a defensive self-interest: A corrupt senior who takes bribes is indirectly threatened by any junior with a clean record, because they aren't "in the same boat."
So each wave corrupts (or eliminates) members of the next, in order to secure the safety of their own retirement when they won't have direct power.
Anthropic peace prize coming up next.
This whole administration is absolutely rampant with corruption. Just yesterday we had JD Vance on TV saying that if Watergate happened today, it would just be a 12 hour news story, because they are getting away with so much worse.
Anyone who denies or defends this administration's corruption is complicit.
"Anyone who denies or defends this administration's corruption is complicit."
I was told the same under the biden and word salad regime. The mass pardons with the autopen to the pardoning of his degenerate crack head son.
Same can be said about the previous
Can you point to examples in the past of a sitting US president pardoning the people who broke into a government building and tried to overthrow an election? Or one who accepted bribes for pardons? Started an unregulated cash exchange we can get accept money from foreign governments without oversight? What about giving their family members no-bid defense contracts?
Munitions exporting. I fondly remember the PGP feasco. I spent years using PGP to encrypt my emails to several people who refused to use email without it. Good times.
release the weights! freedom of speech!
Whose speech? Nobody with the weights is trying to speak them.
it was a joke.
Yeah, that's what we need, frontier intelligence models open in the wild that, if a jailbreak is reliably established, there's no possibility for anyone to ever patch at the API layer. Because there is no API layer.
"This stack of 15.3 million t-shirts is a munition."
I was thinking more the first amendment, but second works too.
IYKYK :)
I still have mine :)
Competent government wouldn't do this either... ...also why I think it won't last.
Doubtful it'd hold in court; this admin would have to show that it's not corruption, because we'd all assume otherwise.
Between $5-10T of the US economy is subject to export controls. Nobody disputes that Mythos is dual-use technology, which means it has been export controlled since the day it was created.
Companies are responsible for demonstrating criteria to export (for example) a nerfed version (Fable) of an export controlled item (Mythos)
Nothing here is novel, unusual, capricious, or … fascisistic.
We saw what happened with banning nvidia flagship compute GPU exports to China; it just spurred them to develop a domestic semiconductor industry while still importing black market GPUs at a minor markup. The US would do well to keep the world dependent on American products that are under the jurisdiction of the US government, and can therefore be regulated or killswitched. All this will do is allow China to have flagship model capabilities without being subject to the US at all.
This arrangement is already dubiously legal. The government is already being sued over the Fable incident with Anthropic.
No amount of rules can stop people who are willing to break them. Only enforcement can.
Anthropic just needs to donate millions of dollars to a “MAGA Inc” like Greg Brockman did and they’ll get regulated properly from now on.
It’s a perfectly good system for government regulation.
In some cases, even just bringing a 24K gold desk ornament to the WH is enough; but I suspect these tributes to Dear Leader are subject to inflation, possibly exponentially so.
$100 Million to The Trump Foundation, and Anthropic get to become the US AI Regulator
It looks like Greg needs to make another deposit to the fuhrer
Or perhaps threaten to donate $10b to the DNC
That threat will probably result in a DOJ investigation into everyone involved until they hit something they think they can prosecute someone for, even if it's not true.
That makes sense
They could double down though, like actually follow through with just 1b and then threaten to do an extra 1b periodically until the investigations are dropped
And enforcement cannot work if you’ve captured all three estates.
Did you mean this in the French Revolution sense (the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners) or in the American sense (the legislative, judicial, and executive branches)?
The French Revolution sense would be an ironic counterpoint, because the Revolutionaries did end up capturing all three estates, only to fall to someone (Napoleon) who captured the military, which wasn't considered one of the "three estates" because at the start of the French Revolution destroying civil society, enacting a military dictatorship, and starting a series of wars throughout Europe was considered outside the Overton Window.
This perhaps holds some lessons for America today.
Ironic is claiming that Napoleon destroyed civil society, when his reforms are in many ways the foundation for modern civil society. Rule of law, national public education, the concept of a national bank, formation of the middle class, and so on. To say that Napoleon destroyed civil soceity is just plain wrong, Napoleon founded modern civil society.
To be fair, he (the national assembly really) stole the whole "all men being equal" and all the ideas on accessible readable law thing from the Dutch after the Dutch "joined" the French Republic. It's also very likely that Napoleon would've turned out like any other despot if he had held power longer.
I think there is a layer of truth to the idea that MAGA captured what England would call the Fourth Estate, the News Media.
England is weird because its model looks like that French model, except that it intertwines the nobility and clergy. Basically an Archbishop and a Earl both sit in Parliament as Lords, while the Commoners control only the Commons of the Parliament. Now today the Commons runs things, but that's relatively modern, in the 19th Century it was completely normal for the Prime Minister to be a Lord, and while some of them were only technically Lords, having in fact been elected but just also nobility anyway for one reason or another, or being ennobled while serving as PM because nobody thought that was a bad idea - others were never elected at all.
So weirdly the place which came up with the "Fourth Estate" only really had two other estates, although everyone reading will have known about the French concept too.
In the era when Lords routinely become PM (it would still be legal to do this today, but it's hard to imagine it happening, although the Tories did give a Lord one of the Great Offices of State so never say never) almost all those Lords were born into it. Today basically nobody sat in the Lords was born to it (there are about two dozen left, when they die or retire that's the end of it) but there are still always a dozen or so bishops, and Iran is ironically the only other place [except the Vatican which barely counts] where religious leaders are in government by fiat in the modern world...
Edited to mention the Vatican before somebody else does.
MAGA has captured the media, if not entirely by design, but entirely in practice.
Thanks to a combination of attacks from the executive, attacks from the oligarchs (Buy a paper and fire everyone who says things you don't like), or the simple fact that sane-washing MAGA insanity sells papers, the 'independent' press is everything but.
It is non-stop carrying water for the most insane lunacy, and is trying to convince us that it is fine and normal and desirable.
So I find claims that MAGA (or any other group) has captured the media to be self-contradictory: if they actually had, you would not be writing that, and I would not be able to read it. By definition. Capturing the media means that there is only one official narrative, and the population is completely unaware of anything outside of that narrative. Like the period from ~1950-1995, where you had the big 3 TV networks, and then each city had their own newspaper that basically owned a local monopoly, and they all basically printed/aired the same stories and same viewpoints.
IMHO what we're actually seeing is a huge fragmentation of the 4th estate. There is now a viewpoint on the Internet for everything, no matter how insane. That's part of what people don't like about it. This fragmentation of media has allowed airtime for MAGA views that would've been considered far outside the Overton Window just a decade ago, but that was the point of the Internet. And it's not really to the exclusion of other views, it's just that you have to go looking for the other views.
No. Firstly no, the Network is just that, it's technology, you're describing culture, and the culture is a choice made by people of how to use that technology.
But also, this idea that somehow now that one guy who believes San Francisco doesn't exist is "media" whereas in 1990 he's not is insane. That's a choice you've made to re-define "random crazy people" as media, the Internet didn't do that. If anything changed magically in 1995 it's how you defined what does or doesn't count as media.
I find the definition that unless the capture is 100%, it isn't actually capture to be absurd.
Any strong, independent media ecosystem would not be so consistently sane-washing the firehose of crazy that we're being hit with every week, or kowtowing with such regularity.
Yes, you can find some obscure blog that will broadcast literally any cherrypicked viewpoint. That's not the majority of the media consumed in this country. Even when the owners of the networks differ, the message they broadcast is incredibly homogeneous.
The MSM doesn't count as much because of social media noise and paywalls. One could always control the narrative with tweets written in caps with multiple exclamation signs that the MSM reproduces and amplifies for fun and prifit.
But your government is constantly acting illegally. Isn't it time for Americans to... do something? It's clear that your legal framework isn't working.
Do what, exactly? Throw away our lives? 40% of the nation would rather die than vote for anyone other than a racist, and another 40% would tsk-tsk and say “that’s not how you’re supposed to do it”. There’s no revolution coming to save the day.
> Do what, exactly? Throw away our lives?
I think the founding fathers were pretty clear about what the American people are expected to do if the systems they put into place aren't enough to preserve freedom. If the colonists had just bent over and spread their cheeks saying "We sure hate being fucked but oh well! what else can we do? Throw away our lives?" we'd still have a king instead of just a wannabe. I'd be very nice if things don't come to that, but ultimately the responsibility to preserve our freedom and democracy is ours. It seems like there are plenty of people lined up to take them from us if we're willing to surrender them. The problem we have now is that an uncomfortably large minority seem happy to do just that.
This is a super reductive reading of the American revolution. The idea of the colonies self governing was popular as hell, for obvious reasons. Our current situation is nowhere near the same thing. The people that aren’t frothing-at-the-mouth fascists are still, overall, comfortable enough in their daily lives that they wouldn’t consider violence against the government for a second. We can’t even get 40% of them to go vote.
You want to fight 80% of the nation? Be my guest, but for a violent revolution to be anything but a suicide mission you need to flip those numbers, or have the military on your side. And if you think the US military will flip against capital because of some strongly-held belief of “liberty” I have a bridge to sell you.
The only thing we can do is try to convince other people that this shit does actually matter. We’re so far in the hole, though, that it’s going to take a long fucking time to dig ourselves out. It’s not going to be some glorious revolution.
Careful now.
Federal income tax didn’t exist until over a century after the founding fathers… founded. The idea was states… that would be united… which is where they got the name.
Federal politicians were not meant to have politics be their full time job, which is why congress has sessions.
The founding fathers would be extremely sad about the state of the country today. The frog was boiled too long ago for a revolution of the commoners to have any legs. They put in what they thought were explicit safeguards that have been systematically diluted, changed, or misinterpreted since the documents were created.
Maybe it's time to use those guns you always claim you need to keep in order to defend yourself from a government that is acting illegally? I mean isn't this THE EXACT REASON you always say you need them?
You actually believe that lie?
The Federal Government has better guns and people accustomed to violence on their payroll.
It would only be ironic of you assume those same people who thing the EU over-regulates also support this US government regulation.
It's N=1, but I believe both that the EU approach discourages investment and innovation in the EU, and that this US policy will do the same in the US.
It’s a bit in general, because if you actually read the EU AI legislation, most of it follows the right ideas and provides more safety, in the sense that OpenAI and Anthropic used to pretend to care about, but never really did.
The ideas are debatable but generally correct. The EU's problem is that regulation stops at the ideas, and it is intentionally designed so to be impossible to ensure compliance in advance. So the regulation is really after the fact and a subjective judgment by regulators. So there's tons of risk even if you genuinely believe you're complying with the prescribed intents.
My opinion on EU regulation would flip 180 degrees if they offered any kind of pre-clearance where you could propose a product, feature, or policy and be told in advance if it meets their subjective requirements.
IMO you can have clear, specific requirements in advance, or you can have a body that provides interpretations of spirit-of-the-rules regulations in advance. Having neither is a problem.
(yes, I'm aware of the argument that if you tell companies what's legal in advance they will just do the bare minimum or find loopholes... I don't find that to be a legit rule of law system)
I understand that desire entirely, but I’m not sure if it would work that way. Take an ISO 27001 certification (or SOC, if you like): There is no one clear set of things to do, but both guidance and requirements that you need to address and be able to defend your concrete implementation.
And I generally like that a lot better than having a set of hard this-way-or-no-way checklists that invariably consist of 80% bullshit ceremony for giant corporations. ISO nudges you toward that too, but if you’re able to deliver the same security guarantees with less, auditors will usually be happy.
The same, in general, works for GDPR regulations as well: The law is mostly about doing the right things, but not spelling out the billions of cases and permutations and strategic decisions involving privacy in one way or another.
It's deliberately not prescriptive as the implementers are the ones best placed to solve for requirements - you don't want policy makers providing technical checklists. And it's not unstructured - ISO 42001 essentially encodes it.
With the way things are, having to disclose training data will basically make it impossible for an EU AI to compete.
Im not happy with the AI act in entirety either, but my point was that it’s hard to read it and say "this isn’t generally the right thing to do", where right means responsible and beneficial to society as a whole.
Is it responsible and beneficial if the end result is that we will be forever stuck using foreign made AI? And on top of that we will get brain drain for the people that want to work on AI?
Honestly? That’s a big philosophical question, and I don’t know if I can really answer it.
But I do personally prefer living in a value-backed society - even if the implementation is imperfect, even if I have to make personal concessions - over one that aims for maximised efficiency.
More fundamentally, imho the 20th and 21st century are about competition of systems. And the only system I can get behind is one that strives for minimal suffering. The EU or social liberal democracy isn’t that, but it comes closest.
In the end the only winner that emerges out of this is China. Tge EU is over regulating everything, the current US administration is randomly banning things left and right.
Maybe, but as I wrote in a sibling comment, I prefer to not go down the slippery slope of lowering our standards to compete with nations like the US or China - that isn't a battle the EU can win.
Don't forget that the EU is still a market so big noone can ignore us - especially for the US, we're the only opportunity for the growth required to keep their economy (and 401k pensions!) afloat. So there really is no immediate need to cave to their every whim all the time.
Of course this is nothing to rest on, and the EU has to improve on many fronts and also get better on the amount of regulation, but we're by no means in a bad position (yet.)
Is it really ironic or just yet another example of how the current administration just keep finding ways to line their pockets? Big Tech has lots of money, and they'd just like to get a little taste. Placing arbitrary restrictions is a pretty good motivator for those being restricted to find some way to make necessary contributions.
On some level though we have to be cognizant of the potential for harm these models have.
LLMs are still a little loosey goosey, and we are right on the cusp (if not there already) for an agent to hack a bank and steal money for some rando teenager with a penchant for jail breaking.
The regulations are and will be negative, but don't lose sight of what LLMs can do off the leash.
> On some level
The appropriate level would be regulation though? Like I just don't get how we can argue that arbitrarily throttling companies is ok.
OpenAI fired the starting gun 3.5 years ago before anyone in the industry had a sound safety plan, and not much progress has been made since.
So here we are, it's probably going to me messy and err on the side of over-bearing.
I'm fine with erring on the side of overbearing, as long as it's not blatant cronyism
Too overbearing though and you get... Mistral? A continent that hasn't been on the leading edge of anything (other that expansion of the regulatory state) for decades, and Europe feels it in their employment numbers.
Current French (8.2%), Spanish (10.3%) or even Swedish (8.6%) unemployment would count as a disastrous recession in the US. In the US we call 2007-09 the "Great Recession", which peaked at 10.0%, and that relatively brief time left a generational mark. That's a somewhat routine number by EU standards.
Not to mention you end up with bizarre effects. If the UK were admitted as the 51st state it'd immediately be the poorest. (Yes, some EU countries are wealthy, but they're also the size of US counties, if we cherry pick just Manhattan we could make some spectacular comparisons too)
So, it's a complex issue but the tradeoffs are absolutely tangible yet often dismissed.
> Current French (8.2%), Spanish (10.3%) or even Swedish (8.6%) unemployment
This obviously doesn't tell the whole story, because it only measures people actively in the workforce. Meanwhile, a far larger portion of Sweden's population is actually employed compared to the US.
Sweden's laborforce participation rate is 76% and in the US it is 62%. Sweden's employment rate is 69% and US's is 59%. Which statistics are more important?
Edit: had wrong employment rate
Other comments have already mentioned that true labor force participation is higher in all of those countries than the US. But also, they all have better lives than the US. They live longer, access better education, healthcare.
Robbing banks is already illegal
Society at large is unaware how much crime general laziness and incompetence prevents from happening.
But we’re entering a somewhat weird situation where a careless/dumb person might actually rob a bank by legitimate accident.
That’s why I’m selling OpenClaw insurance! /s
Bank should be more secure, if a random person with an LLM can hack them, they should have paid 100 random blue teamers with LLMs to hack them first to get more secure. Not AI's fault.
> blue teamers
Pretty sure you mean red team here. While I've heard people refer to any offensive security (eg including blackhat) as 'red team' , it typically means people you've hired or contracted to try to break into your systems, whereas the blue team are people you've hired to build and operate your security defenses. Red and blue team are both your employees / contractors but perform different functions.
Yes I did
The purpose of policies like this is precisely to ensure that those 100 runs do happen first, rather than allowing a free-for-all where they have to race to secure their systems.
>but don't lose sight of what LLMs can do off the leash.
there is no such thing as an LLM "off the leash", it's not a dog, and even if it was a dog the person responsible is the owner. What is this bizarre attitude to a piece of software that makes people think existing laws don't apply?
If your LLM agent hacks a bank, you have hacked a bank, you will go to prison and that's entirely sufficient. People have been hacking banks for decades now, it didn't require the government to regulate C compilers and Emacs.
This is overly reductive.
If your web browser hacks a bank, but you didn't know and didn't expect it to, have you hacked a bank? Why is an LLM different? What happened to mens rea?
We'll only know when that gets tested in court, but I'd be willing to bet the answer will be: yes, you have hacked a bank. I find it very hard to believe the justice system would let someone off on some technicality around intention and agents after a serious bank hack.
A web browser can't decide to hack a bank anymore than a LLM can. Neither have any understanding of what a bank is or any will to act on their own. The person who instructs/uses a web browser to hack a bank (even if it's someone else's browser) commits the crime.
I think pretty obviously if the user instructs the computer to hack the bank then they are guilty of hacking the bank, I don't think that's the crux of the issue.
The crux of the issue is what if the LLM decides on its own to hack the bank while the user isn't watching? Is the user then guilty of hacking the bank or not? I think it's pretty obvious that the user in this scenario is at least less culpable of hacking the bank than they would be if they had deliberately instructed it.
LLMs functionally can decide to act on their own. You might say that they're not actually "deciding" anything, because it's just a perfectly mechanical unfolding of chains of tokens triggering actions on the computer, which doesn't count as "deciding". But again I don't think that's the crux of the issue.
> LLMs functionally can decide to act on their own.
They really can't. In some magical sci-fi future, maybe a chatbot gains freewill and decides on its own to do whatever it wants, but that isn't the reality we live in and I doubt it ever will be. If a person instructs an LLM to hack a bank it doesn't matter if that happens as a background process or while they are sleeping or AFK.
If, in a magical sci-fi future, someone instructs an LLM to write an email and it decides instead to secretly hack a bank then the company that made the LLM would be to blame. The same as if a person used a vending machine to get a candy bar and the machine grew legs and ran out into the street causing an accident that would be the fault of the company who made the vending machine and not the fault of the person who wanted candy.
> If your web browser hacks a bank, but you didn't know and didn't expect it to, have you hacked a bank?
Depends, as usual. Intent can matter, but depends on the statute (and jurisdiction) in question.
There is a baseline level of competence and motivation needed to commit crimes.
Decades ago few people would walk into a record store and steal CDs. Napster came along smashing all barriers entry, and it became weird not to steal music.
Its not really the legality that matters, it's the barrier on one hand and the cognitive ability on the other. Drop both and you get huge spikes in crime.
Maybe this is a good opportunity for the European AI companies to jump ahead?
AI is probably old italian tech
Lol
The US is already behind and has been technically. Can't wait for that part to sink in. This start to be a source of second hand embarrassment when I see US folk think their country is still leading the race technically.
Define leading then. Mythos and GPT score higher on all the benchmarks versus Chinese models. I suppose your anti-american mindset has given you a different definition of leading than the rest of us.
Our AI czar, David Sacks, whined and moaned about the idea of regulation, even said Anthropic begging for some guidance was asking for “regulatory capture” and was gloating about how right he was they wanted it, 2 weeks ago.
I wonder if he understands why, now.
> Anthropic begging for some guidance
Anthropic was "begging" to make it harder for competing companies to be founded.
They got the "leopards ate my face" ending.
No, it’s not leopards ate my face / irony / comeuppance, because that would involve regulation.
I understand it’s very satisfying if you wanted Anthropic “punished” for asking for real regulation to see this. I can’t deny there was a little bit of me at first that felt that way.
It’s untenable, a first order reaction, that I regret intellectually, because if you were against regulation, you’re certainly against waves whatever this is.
I don't want anyone being punished. I want everyone to stop acting stupid.
I would've much preferred if Dario hadn't run his mouth so much.
You actually think that would’ve changed things? I don’t. We’d still be here.
Your position is “he made it happen by saying he didn’t want it to happen” with maybe a side order of “when he knows Mr. Trump doesn’t like him”
I posit that these ideas are common, and come from a place of Mr. Trump is more or less a normal president because they all do bad stuff, and regulation is Creating Monopilies. To wit, there’s 0 reason to believe the person you originally replied to’s claim that Anthropic wanted to kill startups. It’s just a random implication of what bad regulation can do.
He made it happen by continuously using doomsday marketing to pump up model capabilities. This is the comeuppance.
There is a huge contingent of people who do not interact with AI on a daily basis. Many of them legitimately believe we're seconds away from wiping away white collar America. Many more believe that we are creating the literal singularity.
None of them have seen claude try to model a problem they're familiar with.
Exactly.
Source for this? :)
> there is no established policy on safety guarantees
Which is the government’s own fault.
Elon Musk talked back in 2018 about how he went to Washington and met with Obama and Congress, but they did nothing.
In 2020 Andrew Yang’s entire run for president was centered around the risk of AI displacing job. He lost, no one did anything.
A couple years later we say the consumer facing LLMs start to roll out. Still, no one does anything.
They have time to micromanage the industry, but in all these years they haven’t found the time to establish any meaningful policy?
Deeper than that, what to do with a super smart AI has been floating around intellectual circles since the late 00's.
Google had been pussy-footing AI research due to deathly fear of awakening an ASI, because their safety teams still had no answers.
Then Altman came along...
Who specifically? Probably just different people.
I'm fine with this in principle, it's more like regulations last. They looked at the end result and decided it was too powerful to let loose. But also expect the Trump administration to unfairly use it as leverage against US corps.
Meanwhile EU prevented itself from building competitive LLMs in the first place.
its the typical US regulations for consumer but not for corporations, disgusting
Regulation is a good thing, even if HN hates it.
It's a way to clearly agree on ground rules that you can plan around, not more, not less.
The alternative is not no rules, do whatever you want. The alternative is executive capriciousness arbitrarily setting the rules based on whims and messing up your plans.
This applies to most things when it comes to the USG/citizens. Protectionism is communist unless they do it. Thinking about developing a nuke? Well bomb you first despite being the only people to ever use them. Free speech and press - unless we don’t like what you say.
Let’s be real, as an EU citizen I have zero doubts that those models would also have been blocked if developed in EU.
I like the US approach better: regulate when the need for it arises, not before when you don’t know how the situation is going to evolve.
They're not regulating though – they're arbitrarily blocking releases based on no clear criteria. The EU may be legalistic and rules-based, but I'd take that over capricious and arbitrary.
It would be really nice if the executive were blocking these releases based on some authority the legislative had granted it.
Yeah it seems very shady to do it this way… far worse than the EU.
The fact that they couldn’t clear an already low bar is a really bad sign.
Yes, Trump is the worstPresident we’ve had, the Supreme Court is captured by conservatives, the Republicans would rather die than vote against Trump, we know all of this.
It’s bad, okay? And it’s not usually like this.
I wish the EU were legalistic and rules based, but the commission and politicians are involved in many of these things. It's like Trump's executive stuff, just with a committee instead of a single person, and I guess, with less power.
The EU is nothing but capricious and arbitrary. Much of the DMA and similar is pure vibes that you can't know if you violated until the regulators do their divinations months or years after you shipped.
You can’t be serious because “When the need arises” means when your company does not lavish praise on the current administration.
Regulating when the need arises requires also compensating the people who get hurt in the meantime.
If they were real about risk, they would have to block a lot more models.
It sounds nice but you end up with entrenched special interests that later oppose all regulation regardless of the consequences. We have pesticides you wouldn't want anywhere near your children casually used to control weeds on kid's playgrounds, insanely huge trucks that kill hundred each year, the food is garbage...the list is long and tiresome. Trust me brother, if I could live in the EU, I would.
> regulate when the need for it arises
I agree. But that need has absolutely arisen. The US government is not exactly the best steward for this kind of thing, but some model other than "race each other as fast as we can" is desperately needed here.
Let's plan a fire fighter division only once we are actually having some buildings in the city burning down. That people who fear that ridiculous perfectly controlled fire in chemines are ridiculous.
Well, when the leaders of this movement go around doom-trolling for years on end this is what happens. It turns out you need to be careful what you say if you're a highly visible public figure. Amazing!
Honestly, with open source models I don't think this regulation means anything because there's no way they can really regulate what's coming out of china. I don't think this affects innovation in AI much at all (unless your definition of innovation is "pour more money into diminishing scaling"). It's mostly just bad news for the US frontier labs, and based on their behavior I don't feel sad for them AT ALL. Like, they've basically alienated the vast majority of people by outright threatening their livelihoods or even society at large, and now we're supposed to feel sorry for them because they can't just go around saying "THIS WILL REPLACE ALL JOBS IN A MONTH!" without consequences?
> because there's no way they can really regulate what's coming out of china
Do you think the Chinese will go parading around that they've created the greatest cyberweapon known to man, and the CCP will be totally cool with the Americans being first in line to buy tokens, because hey, free market?
They would sooner put all their own employees in an incinerator than allow that to happen.
People genuinely think that China is just being a bro and has no ulterior motives.
the truth is that doom is a high likelihood
sorry we don't lie about that
If they actually think that, then.. stop working on AI? Being the first person to end the world doesn't exactly gain you anything. I guess there's a bleak humor to Altman and Musk and Amodei being forced to live out the rest of their days in their bunkers I guess.
Like seriously, to the people that think this is a doomsday thing, if you're serious about that line of thought then STOP DOING IT. It's like the people that are arguing that AI is conscious. IF you truly believe that, then we've just reinvented slavery, and again, STOP!
I 100% do not accept the "it's inevitable anyway so morality is out the window". We also have nuclear weapons but we don't need to rush into World War 3. Also nothing inevitable requires trillions of dollars a year to advance because it's so deeply unprofitable.
Its a existential cold war now between the US and China.
There is no standing down until one side wins. Both countries would leverage (or hope to) an ASI to destabilize the other.
It’s likely that this would slow down the rate of advancement at the Chinese labs as well
Or significantly increase their market share outside the US and give them some breathing space to catch up with the currently available closed models
I don't see how, other than that it will make it harder for chinese labs to train their models on OpenAI/Anthropics' (which honestly I can't get that worked up about plagiarism in this space considering where they got their data from..)
I remember when Republicans told us they want less regulation and smaller federal government. Now they want their dementia riddled god king to control everything from pool liners to the information you're allowed to see, which is all in books and readily available online.
It was never about principles. It was always about justifying getting the things they wanted.
What surprises me more is that any of the AI CEOs believed them.
They were in the tank for Trump because they thought Biden/Harris would stifle them… and here we are.
You're assuming that their base is rational
Always good to dehumanize your enemies
They aren't my enemies and being irrational does not make you less human
Are you referring to saying his base isn't rational, or to Trump calling his political opponents “vermin”, etc?
I don't see how you can make a case for a $700bn+ IPO when the government might not even let you sell your product. America is ceding the lead in the AI race. The winners here will be the Chinese AI companies.
If the Chinese models remain predominantly open source then it would probably be for the best. Unfortunately I'm not convinced they will, with examples like Qwen Max showing what could happen.
Z.ai and MoonShot (and StepFun and some others who are another six months behind or targeting smaller use cases) are still open, surprisingly enough.
Alibaba making Qwen close up shop for its best models isn’t that surprising, though sad.
The worry is that if the US models are locked up like this, then there’s less reason for China to commodify its complement through open weights…
It will just mean US providers will rapidly loose their moat. Their moat is already shrinking. If they can't release their best models, it'll shrink a whole lot faster...
It won’t, the government will change its mind again
It definitely will be. They are trying to preserve their offensive cyberwarfare and cyberespionage capabilities. It’s not about “bad actors”. It’s about defensive capabilities becoming pervasive and cheap.
This is what OpenAI/Anthropic want, it's better marketing than they can pay for -- and it creates a precedent for permanently banning the next generation of open weights models
Banning next gen open models would never happen globally, and would be a major disadvantage to any country that does.
If the USA continues to put barriers into the release of models, open and/or foreign models will start to out perform them.
If open models are competitive enough nothing will stop even US companies from running them locally.
damn, never thought about this - but yeah this is where we are heading.
open weight models - will be deemed too risky to be out in the open - since they can be abused by "bad actors" (unwashed masses)
100% this is the direction all govts will go. This isn't specific to any political party, it's just about communications control. I don't think open source models will be directly capped, necessarily, but all commercial/easy-to-setup models will be heavily regulated.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they started going after open-source as a whole and labeling it “communism” like the old Microsoft days.
So much of everybody's infra depends on FOSS. I think every industry giant would dogpile whichever politician tried to go after FOSS as a whole.
The government could give those companies exemptions or give them time to LLM-wash that open-source code directly into their code so they have no dependencies.
Those companies will be thrilled because they got the benefit of open-source and now are throwing down the ladder.
Good luck fighting the FSF and the GPL. The whole industry would crumble tomorrow if anyone dared. 1929 would be a joke in comparison.
It’s going to be a bit trickier to do that, even banning US providers from hosting them legally might be tricky to do.
I think it's going to be like DMCA, like hard to convict you for having the files but distributing them might be illegal
The EU bans ASML for American chip use.
America bans intel and amd from exporting chips.
Whats next.
Yup, regulatory capture.
But in this model, there is no regulator, there is just the Whitehouse deciding who gets to use the AI. Nobody has “captured” Trump here.
The problem is they've convinced mainstream people that a model that can find a bug in Microsoft Windows is a bigger problem than Microsoft not caring about fixing it.
I would really like to know how much of the anti AI sentiment is really just general economic precariousness mixed with seeing inequality skyrocket while the average persons material reality in the US is decreasing..
We really need to disentangle the technology from the economic inequality everyone is pissed about.
The nyancat is out of the bag.
I wonder what kind of scheme the administration is up to. The obvious play is a squeeze where OpenAI and Anthropic are forced to give parts of their company away, like Intel. But they could also be toying with the idea of limiting frontier AI access to companies that bend the knee, which would further cement their grasp on the tech industry.
> what kind of scheme the administration is up to
I’m sure they are wondering just as much. I assume exhorting Anthropic/OpenAI for personal bribes, favorable government contracts with no restrictions and public acts of submission.
Maybe include some election guides for poor, misguided Americans that would hurt themselves by not voting for God President Donald Trump I as well?
It's protecting people from themselves, so basically like the safeguards already included in the models.
Not a fan of the phased release but I do remember when access to gpt-3 was gated and access to gpt-4 had a staged release.
ppl are acting like limited release is unprecedented when, in fact, has been the norm until a few years ago.
Gated by capacity constraints for all users is very different that picking “trusted partners” that get preferential access. Especially when that access is based on political connections
Gated by the company that made it is not remotely the same thing as gated by the government.
Was it the norm for Trump's team to hand-select the specific customers who get access in the staged rollout, and to choose the date of wide release?
The AI companies were all asking for the government to regulate them. The government is doing what the companies asked for them to do.
You can argue that, by government, they meant some legislative process, but I'd argue that regulation via bad executive order is much better than regulation via bad legislation because the former is tractable. I say this as an EO minimalist.
There's a pretty big difference between "we need laws and regulations" and "let Trump do whatever he feels like today."
What are the proper laws and regulations? Can you point me to a proposed framework that you believe is most correct?
I have no idea how this stuff should be regulated. I do know that any sort of comprehensive legislation at this point in time has a much higher chance of being a bottleneck to innovation than an easily reversible white house directive.
Of all the terrible things to come from the odious Trump administration, them saying "hey, can we make sure these models aren't dangerous?" is one of the least bad things they've done.
>I have no idea how this stuff should be regulated.
That's why we have a system where representatives of districts do research, debate, and hash out those details while the public who votes for them is able to contact them.
>I do know that any sort of comprehensive legislation at this point in time has a much higher chance of being a bottleneck to innovation than an easily reversible white house directive.
That's odd to say after admitting you don't know what the regulation would look like. Especially after seeing the "easily reversible" tariffs from this White House, which changed erratically and had exceptions for people who sweet talked the president.
If you don’t see a difference between a well thought out & debated policy stance and arbitrary enforcement without justification I’m not sure what to say.
Anthropic submitted a long, thoughtful framework proposal, which everyone seems to be ignoring in favor of hot takes like “they asked for this!” No they didn’t, not at all.
http://anthropic.com/policy
> can we make sure these models aren't dangerous
They can’t, though. The models might or might not be too dangerous but the people running the US federal government are too incompetent and/or corrupt to do anything useful about that.
Written laws, passed by congress and senate?
That's not what Trump's doing. He's just trying to pick and choose winners so that he can reward his allies and punish his enemies.
> The AI companies were all asking for the government to regulate them pretty shallow take. they asked for sensible, transparent, tech aware regulations. this is not that.
Ok so to be clear you agree this has not been the norm. It seemed like you were clarifying your original message but it was a change of topic, from "this has been the norm" to "this hasn't been the norm but they got what they were asking for" (or what they deserved if not exactly what they asked for). I'll dip out of that conversation.
What an unpleasant form of discourse.
You moved the goalposts. The government controlling what openai can and cannot do is completely different than they gating access out of their own volition.
My comment was in response to the parent's original comment: "Ok so you agree this has not been the norm," which didn't give me much to respond to. It has been edited since.
Changing topics when the original statement was pointed out to be wrong is the real unpleasantry
Welcome to HN. There's cake in the breakroom.
Yeah pretty sure we had a whole bruhaha ~250 years ago about this question of where precisely power belonged. I for one think we mostly got it right then and would be reluctant to shift the power back to the individual sovereign and away from the people.
In this case how have people got power it seems that Trump has all the power here
That only happens in governments that treat regulations as a racket, not something to be used for public good.
> I hope this doesn't become the new norm where government becomes the bottleneck for innovation in the AI space.
I hope that not too far in the future a responsible government* will become the bottleneck for innovation in the AI space.
*obviously not the current
I largely blame people like Amodei for such outcome. As product owners, they could've done it the old way: telling people how great this product is, how much potential it has, and what kind of guardrails the companies are building and etc. But oh no, Amodei has to do the doom trolling 24x7, while in the meantime plays a cult leader by telling people only he knows how to the guarding angel of the AI or the humanity thereof. Ironically, the same people also push their companies to develop more powerful AI in full speed. They think ordinary Americans are so stupid that they can't see through them?
So OAI are you also silently dumbing down your models when you detect "inappropriate topics" like Anthropic did with Fable?
Fable didn't silently dumb it down. It printed a warning that it has detected a possible inappropriate topic and you are being switched back to Opus. I hate it, but it isn't dishonest.
Unless it thought you are trying to distill it, then it would silently sabotage you.
Didn't they announce they're stopping that system?
> There's been no public policy, executive order, legislation, or otherwise on this
I mean, insofar as you could frame each new model as its own patentable invention, "patent secrecy" would be an existing policy framework that clearly justifies what's been happening here.
1. Some private company or individual invents something.
2. But the state wants a monopoly on the new thing's military use-cases (against other states/militaries.) So the state forcibly classifies the invention at patent time.
3. But the individual/company still wants to make more money than the state is giving them as compensation for their own use of the patent. They want to sell to the private market. But, of course, the state doesn't want to permit this, as arbitrary private parties could in turn resell to foreign state actors.
4. So a compromise is struck: private use is now made deny-by-default. The state permits the individual or company to sell into the private market, given: a rigorous per-customer KYB background-checking process; strong supply-chain tracing; contractual stipulations prohibiting resale; and the customer use-case being transformative or cost-prohibitive to extract the original invention from.
5. As such, big established enterprise customers who want the invention for private use in their internal industrial processes, can somewhat-easily jump all those hoops to acquire access to it; but everyone else is now basically locked out.
Sound familiar?
Caused by AI marketing teams hyping everyone up.
> conversations between the Executive Branch and AI companies
You think there is a record?
I agree that this is all ridiculously arbitrary right now, but it shouldn't be surprising either.
I can't find the exact blog post (maybe on simonwillison.net ?) but I read people predicting that know your customer laws would be coming to AI if it gets more powerful several years ago already.
Powerful technology that can do immense harm in the hand of individuals/small groups is the most obvious (and legitimate!) target for regulation. Maybe Anthropics hubbub around Mythos made all of this happen earlier than it would have, but it was going to happen (if the models are going to get as capable as valuations imply they will).
(Edit: Of course this doesn't mean it can be effectively regulated in practice)
Further more, no one actually gets hurt if we start rolling these things out more slowly.
Rolling them out selectively according to the whims of an administration that disdains fair process, tears down the institutions that could potentially provide and legitimise reasonable regulation, etc... well, that's another topic.
Shadow of export controls is very long indeed.
The Project is almost here.
It’s already the new norm.
It's worrying that with no formal and transparent policy framework that the government will be picking winners and losers and stifling innovation.
The market will demand such a framework. I suspect that's the larger idea here, in that Amodei not only wants to be in the room when that framework is written, he wants to be at the head of the table.
He apparently wants it so badly he's willing to set back his own company's IPO to make it happen, given that there can be no pure-play AI IPOs until the regulatory picture is sorted out.
With _this_ admin? No way.
Checks from the major model providers will already be on their way to Congress, hand-delivered by the highest-paid lobbyists on K Street. Look for them to wake from their ent-like slumber tout suite to pass legislation that the courts can use for guidance.
What Trump is doing at the moment is, as usual, only a distraction.
I'm going to get downvoted here, but all the E/acc people that loudly allocated for Trump, someone known for amassing power by any means necessary including strong arming industry should be publicly eating crow right now. This was something that was always in the cards when you vote for someone who only cares about himself.
All the tech CEOs had no qualms about groveling before Trump and licking his boots, so yeah I assume they must be 100% onboard with stuff like this as well
I agree. It’s crazy the backwards reasoning that is being used to blame anthropic for this!
How can you simultaneously be a bottleneck for innovation while being their largest customer, and pouring tons of money and resources into it to help accelerate development?
The startup-brained among us never learned the first rule of business which is to not fuck over your benefactor.
For some conspirational reasons, I am thinking that this was the part of the deal between Anthropic and US government, all buzz was for PR, but behind the closed doors Anthropic asked US to regulate the LLM space
The big companies want this. It's a moat for them, a way to keep competitors (especially overseas) out of the US market.
They might try to extend it to downloadable open weight models, but honestly they might not even bother with that. The goal is to keep people from competing on lucrative contracts or the hosting market.
But think about how terrible it would be if “foreigners” (including the ones that work on these models) got access!
We must clutch our pearls and cite National Security as a reason to pick winners and losers, just like the government did for Fable.
There would be real risks yeah.
This is not something to joke about, its real.
for america yeah. for the world the only real risks are american, chinese or corporate dominance. thats why its important to support open models wherever they come from and smaller players like mistral in france or black forest in germany.
Imagine what brown skinned people could do if they were granted the privilege of accessing the Internet!
That’s a lot of information that could fall into the boogeyman’s hands.
I am still waiting for a government to try “nationalizing” AI by saying anything produced by AI belongs to “everyone” and thus hugely taxing the profits and proceeds from the product, as soon as Bernie Sanders thinks of it you can bet we’ll hear all about it.
Apparently your hearing isn't that good, since you haven't heard of the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act.
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-i...
I'm honestly surprised there isn't more political outcry. The administration has a party affiliation that, typically, insists on free market principles and is against government overreach and regulation.
You would think that this government, attempting to puppeteer the most rapidly growing industry in the world, would have more people outraged.
Where are all of the people crying "Communist"? This is one of those moments where it is less of an overreaction.
This move was obvious the moment Anthropic pleaded to the government to regulate them.
As predicted, [0] it has now been applied to OpenAI and soon anyone else releasing highly capable models.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511849
Seems like it hasn't been applied to openai. Anthropic can't even release this to partners. Openai can. I wonder why.
Wondering how long it'll take for the US to make it... more difficult to use Chinese models once they've caught up.
In the EU that's the norm not the exception. A little taste of Europe for our American friends :-S
Except that EU has clear rules, not arbitrary lawless approvals.
Yeah it’s called diffusion of responsibility and accountability. Impersonal forces slowly close in with no face.
The precedent for this is terrible.
MAGA is bad enough. Imagine if the current batch of US progressives, who have 0 idea how any of this works, wins the presidency and gets to decide who gets to use it.
From the other side of the world, the current batch of US progressives looks quite liberal. It looks to me they'll either completely restrict AI or not touch it at all.
Do you think they'll try to dictate who gets to use it?
Just because you don't get access, doesn't mean they're not innovating.
Maybe, but you know who is also innovating, not gating access, and at most 6-9 months away from reaching parity with US frontier labs?
Also applies to Chinese models. Give it 5 more months of US admin locking out US models and let's see what the market will look like for OoenAI and Anthropic IPO.
Their innovation relies on a huge amount of investment made under the assumption that they'll continue to be able to provide frontier models to a global audience. If it turns out the US government only lets them sell gimped models to non-citizens then they'll forfeit the whole global market to China and investors will flee like rats.
The real reason, afaik, that the US is trying to restrict access to SOTA models is that a very large component of USA tailored access and surveillance relies on exploits and weaknesses that these models will easily detect. Thus, it really is an export control issue, but it has nothing to do with offensive capabilities. Offensive capabilities always exist, but pervasive defensibility would upset the asymmetric advantage that attackers, especially the USA, currently have.
There are now Asian models coming , optimized focused on cybersecurity defense at a high level, so I suspect this will be a relatively moot point soon.
LLMs are not great at creating exploits, but they are really good at detecting them. That asymmetry alone is enough to destroy the “offensive capabilities” narrative. Yes, mythos can find exploitable bugs, even write bench exploits. But real exploits require a good dose of human psychology, and most of the tools needed are off the shelf available anyway. You still need a real cybersecurity expert to effectively weaponize a zero day into a deployable exploit.
But an LLM can inspect payloads, packages, and blobs en masse and find those exploits in a way that was wholly impractical before, so the asymmetric attack advantage is dissolved by strong LLMs.
The USA is trying to protect its cyberwarfare advantage, not protect against attackers. The exact opposite, actually. Porous security is a huge advantage to technologically advanced state actors.
> There are now Asian models coming , optimized focused on cybersecurity defense at a high level, so I suspect this will be a relatively moot point soon.
Source?
There was a prominent hacker news article about it today, but it seems to have disappeared? Or more like I can’t find it.
Look up 360 security technology tulongfeng and yitianzhen , as well as Sakana AI’s Fugu series, IIRC.
GLM5.2 is also excellent, it found things in our codebase that 5.5 and opus 4.8 both missed.
> Only companies approved by the government will get access. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model.
I knew the time would come when individuals on personal subscriptions get the short end of the stick. Didn't think it would come so soon. I hope we're not too badly deprecated in the months to come.
Looks like I've got to improve my DeepSeek workflows.
For personal use I don't care if I get access to it. Tokens are becoming too expensive. I am using Chinese models. What worries me is that my company may never get access. I work for a well known US company, but from Europe, we also have developers in Mexico. I can only guess US gov will take this into account when deciding who gets to use the new models.
Even worse than not getting access is getting fired. Since less than 20% of our developers reside outside US and our management is suffering from AI hype, they can decide to close foreign offices as a way to get access to new models.
edit: grammar
> For personal use I don't care if I get access to it
There's a big difference between being priced out of a market option and the government saying you literally cannot buy it. We should all be wary of government controls like this.
You are right, I was thinking selfishly. I don't like the control governments have on tech in general. In my country government forced banks to use device attestation for banking apps. If your android phone is in developer mode banking app won't work, you can change bank but it will make no difference. I think they are also enforcing 2FA to be in the banking apps, so I can't even use web app without locked down android phone or iPhone.
Govt controls of that nature will not be tolerated by financial markets - the line must go up and to the right.
in theory yes
Even the subscriptions are too expensive?
Last time I used subscription I hit a usage limit in 20 minutes (gemini). I switched to openrouter and have enough prepaid credits to last me for months with Chinese models. I spent about $30 in last two months.
They're pretty limited these days
> For personal use I don't care if I get access to it. Tokens are becoming too expensive.
How is this a rational argument?
Are you so self centered that you only care about government decisions that affect ONLY the present you?
“I don’t care that the government made prescription glasses illegal, I can see fine without them”
I have zero control about what foreign (US) government does.
From the OpenAI press release:
> We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them. We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks, while we work with the Administration to develop the cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases.
It seems like the exclusion is temporary. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model _right now_.
You have to be very intentionally dishonest and ignorant to ever believe that increased government powers are "temporary".
That's how authoritarian governments become authoritarian.
Nobody denies or even claimed that.
Just as a reminder, the claim (only two comments ago) was that it will never reach people and be limited only to certain government-approved companies.
The press release pretty clearly outlines the next steps that will eventually get it into people's hands.
That is the claim that is being refuted. Nothing about the obvious government overreach happening here. You are the one that decided to bring that in as a strawman.
OpenAI is saying they want it to be temporary, not that it will be.
When it comes to government, nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.
> I knew the time would come when individuals on personal subscriptions get the short end of the stick.
This is how it started.
Only researchers were able to get access to the early super dangerous AI models that were much worse than you can now run locally on your phone.
Forget your DeepSeek workflows. The "US government" coughexecutivebranchcough can now pick corporate winners and losers too.
Also I'd be willing to bet companies in left-leaning states, or with left-leaning figureheads will be excluded from use as well. This administration is amazingly petty and has captured voter records for a reason.
If you remove left-leaning states there’s no company remaining that will actually use these models.
Or provide them.
You and I both know that capitalism values corporations over individuals.
yeah, but didn't you hope the people rubber stamping AI information weren't the nazis?
Im not worried about this at all. The OpenAI, Anthropic and the US government can play this game all they want... They're just accelerating the development of open source models; and helping destroy the lead the US has built in AI, and their profit margins along with it.
This is like the battle between PostgreSQL and Oracle all over. Move up market, isolate yourself to enterprises, and watch while everyone else builds on PostgreSQL and erodes any technical advantage you had, until people just stop talking about you altogether.
Encryption is a better example. The USG tried exactly the same tactic in the 90’s. The NSA tried to shove the Clipper chip down everyone’s throats. The USG put export controls on encryption and people went as far as to tattoo the algorithms on their body.
But like you said, they will try to control it and fail. Like they always do.
I can't wait for the first person to tattoo model weights on their body!
Hmm, finally an honorable excuse to get really, really fat.
or just use a 4pt font and find a tattoo artist with a steady hand
Prison Break Fat Edition
>The OpenAI, Anthropic and the US government can play this game all they want...
OpenAI and Anthropic did not call for the US Government to limit who Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 could be rolled out to.
> Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety
Amodei. June 2026 https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential
> We're proposing stronger regulation of the technology, proposing giving the government the ability to, again, in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology
Amodei. June 2026 https://abcnews.com/Business/exclusive-anthropic-ceo-calls-s...
> This is not to suggest that we won't need any regulation or safeguards. We obviously do, urgently, like we have for other powerful technologies
Altman. Feb 2026 https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-openai-altman-world-urge...
> He gave several suggestions for how a new agency in the US could regulate the industry - including "a combination of licensing and testing requirements" for AI companies, which he said could be used to regulate the "development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities".
Altman. May 2023 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65616866
etc. etc.
I generally agree, but it's a bit overstated to say "nobody talks about Oracle now" -- they made a profit of about $17 billion dollars in 2025.
The government will just claim that unsanctioned models have the potential to deliberately introduce security vulnerabilities when working on IT projects (e.g. be trained to strongly yet covertly favoring introducing compromised dependencies when you are not looking).
Then laws will be made to forbid organizations who use models other than those from the sanctioned labs to participate in critical projects on national security concerns.
All of a sudden, no business would risk using open source models anymore.
Then all they do is drive the usage of open models underground (copyright infringement is illegal too, and still common), stifle US companies operating legally, and accelerate the rest of the world decoupling from the US.
I hope they do it! It will have a positive long-term effect just like the Iran war footgun accelerates renewable energy transition.
Have you seen legitimate corporates use cracked software? If you do, then your competitors will report you; your employees will blackmail you. The risk is too great.
This assumes the same reward ratio also continues, but that's not the case. A cutting edge LLM is something much more valuable than a cracked copy of Word. Just like the LLM providers themselves decided violating copyright was an acceptable risk, it entirely depends on how people see the tradeoffs, rather than being a categorical decision.
While that might be true, it is unlikely that open source models' capability will ever surpass frontier models --- if you have the best model (by some margin), then people will want to access it, even if it means going through compliance.
> it is unlikely that open source models' capability will ever surpass frontier models
Sure about that? Would you invest in products almost no-one can buy?
otoh, maybe China stop releasing their best models
Yes, that's what I meant. It's not that the Chinese will never be able to come up with models that superior --- it's simply that they will no longer have the incentive to open-source them once their models take the lead.
Training models are expensive. No one can do it for free for very long.
Maybe, or maybe they would take this opportunity to gain a lot of power and influence around the world.
Just because you're not paying per token or per month does not mean they are doing it for free.
I've seen "legitimate companies" commit piracy on a scale that well exceeds all cracked software piracy combined.
He said copyright infringement. The company tfa is about literally trained its models using massive copyright infringement.
Microsoft shipped windows for years with files signed by a warez group because Microsoft developers had used a piece of pirated software. Nothing happened.
Then they'll outsource dev work to agencies that have no frills with it and move along.
As a company it is your responsibility to ensure your contractors are compliant. So won't work.
I see your comments scattered across this thread with most converging on this thesis: "The US govt will regulate away the ability of US corporations and individuals to use unsanctioned AI models."
Which is a fair thesis. I've seen you counter people's predictions of how they think things will pan as a consequence. But what I'd really like to hear is what you think happens (in the US and internationally) as a consequence of such regulations?
USA will experience unprecedented prosperity from influx of global talents and capital who seek to amplify their productivity and profits by 10x.
Why would global talent and capital migrate to go to a country with greater regulatory barriers? Why would "some models are illegal to use here" be a selling point for the US?
Because they have “superhero serum”. Of course it doesn’t matter to you if you don’t want to achieve greatness, but some do.
Well, I for one hope you are horribly wrong.
And something about this train of thought aligning with just the general quality of your comments gives me hope.
Well. We will see about that. Wishful thinking can be cute.
Right back at ya buddy. Nothing quite like seeing a braggart humbled :)
And companies from outside the US will outcompete those from the US forcing more protectionism, higher prices in US etc. I think there have been several cycles of several industries that have gone through this cycle (cars, shipping?), and mostly forced to roll back.
Streisand effect
What is this Oracle you speak of? Never heard of it.
From what I recall they were big in the extortion business back in the day, and these days I think they are into construction or waste disposal, maybe both.
The battle was between Oracle and MySQL (and PostgreSQL won).
That until it becomes illegal to have or use open source models without approval and licence from government. With more talks about on device scanning, this could be easily plumbed in. If OS detects there is open source model, it could brick your device or alert authorities. Then next step will be limiting what operating system you can install. Likely only those where you cannot remove client side scanning.
I wonder how you can reliably detect an open source model though. It can be stored in any binary format, and the weights can be modified slightly so that the float values are completely different while the network works the same. The binary that runs it can be obfuscated as well. Maybe the hardware could detect common LLM inference patterns at runtime? That would probably produce many false positives.
It's been illegal forever to run a pirated copy of Windows or Photoshop. Even 30 years ago people weren't worried that their pirated copies would tattle on them, businesses did not use pirated copies because vendors would report them/not work on their systems, legal discovery could find them, etc and then they would get ridiculous fines.
It's one thing to get a copy of "illegal" software and use it yourself. The stakes are basically zero and you almost certainly will not get caught
It's a completely different thing to run a business on it with dozens of employees and requiring the employees to break the law to do their job.
Completely different to run a business on massive copyright infringement. A business like... OpenAI.
You don’t need to detect it, you just need to incentivize employees and competitors to snitch on companies using unapproved models.
You don't need a blacklist.
Maintaining a blessed whitelist is the way to go.
Antivirus companies have large expertise in this.
This is getting terrifying pretty quick...
It can't easily be plumbed in, though. I can spin up my own Linux build with none of that plumbing and do what I want with it. I can grab China's best models and use them or distilled versions on my own terms because OSS allows for that. Until hardware comes fully locked down and the models cannot be run on old hardware, both a long ways off, OSS is a way out.
Linux will be an illegal operating system in 2027 because it doesn't do age verification.
Good joke. The whole US industry would collapse before even destroying one of the main pillars of AWS, Google and whatnot. It would be funny if all the billion-sized corpos suing the judges en masse for trillions of dollars in losses. Lots of them would even ask for bodyguards because for sure the bribed ones would dissapear in really "weird" ways.
They'd just break the law with impunity, but you and I couldn't.
In the not so distant future, all your coding edits (for work anyway) will be through centralized gateways. Think remote desktop environment where pasting from the client is disabled.
Many workplaces already to this.
Politicians can act very quickly if there is good enough "incentive".
Eh probably easier ways to do this. Just sanction all entities that release open weight models for "illegal distillation". Enough to cross the risk threshold for most businesses in the west, and reduce future monetization opportunities.
Not gonna happen; the incentives for bypassing this are too high.
Indeed, it's like people don't understand this is a cataclysm for US AI competitiveness.
You cannot justify such a capex on AI anymore. This will drag down the us financial markets and economy too.
> and their profit margins along with It
lol that’s a good one.
Given how the WH operates these days, this is ripe for corruption. Imagine the WH dislikes the CEO of a biotech company, while appreciating the attitude of a competitor CEO. What is to stop them from stalling on giving acess for the latest model to the company they don't like?
>Imagine the WH dislikes the CEO of a biotech company, while appreciating the attitude of a competitor CEO.
there is no need to imagine, this is what is literally happening
> ripe for corruption
You're two steps behind.
I’ve been hearing ‘oh this will set a precedent there is no turning back from’ weekly since Jan 2025.
It’s like the frog commenting that the 80C water is about to get hotter.
> I’ve been hearing ‘oh this will set a precedent there is no turning back from’ weekly since Jan 2025.
I mean, it's not really wrong. JD Vance recently said that Watergate would just be a "12 hour news cycle" if it happened today, and spouted some bullshit that "the deep state" took down Nixon. The takeaway from me was that corruption has become so normalized by the Trump administration that Watergate wouldn't even be such a big deal today, and, incredibly sadly, I think he's probably right.
I’m waiting for the “Yes, I was corrupt. I did it to show you all how corrupt a government can be if you let it be”
> What is to stop them from stalling on giving acess for the latest model to the company they don't like?
Congress, if any of those creatures were vertebrates.
For the next few months, though? Nothing will. Those in the in-crowd will line each others' pockets at the expense of the rest of us. I will say that the recent election results and the building bipartisan angst over data centers and surveillance (e.g. Flock) are encouraging.
That's precisely what's going to happen.
You dont even need corruption. Once its political it becomes subservient to political interests.
"Given how the WH operates these days" I've got bad news for you...
The tragedy is the Trump admin is setting the precedent and creating the framework which will be abused in the future. For all the complains he made about the deep state, he's just creating a new avenue for them to abuse power
He always was the "deep state...."
We are living in the future, so who set the precedent in the past?
Ah yes, the defining tragedy of the Trump administration is ... gestures into the middle distance ... look over there! what if those guys abuse it one day?
Same as it ever was. If you listen to interviews with Zuckerberg he’ll talk about the constant communiques from The White House during the Biden administration. Trump didn’t start this unfortunately he’s just more brazen about it.
Uhhh no. The White House (and other government agencies) have a well-established right to communicate with private entities. They do not have a right to coerce them. There's a blurry line between these, but not in Facebook's case, as they don't even claim they were coerced. Same with Twitter, whose lawyers testified under oath that Twitter's content moderation decisions were not coerced whatsoever.
Zuckerberg has specifically said they received requests from the government, they complied with some (as they have a right to do), declined others (as they have a right to do), none of which was under duress, and the response to non-compliance was expressions of "frustration" by the government officials.
By contrast, OpenAI's largest competitor just got kneecapped by the US government because they insisted that the US government comply with the contract terms the US government signed to literally months previously.
"Biden was horrible, terrible, very not good and I complain a lot about how he was the worst ever.
Trump is worse and I just "whatabout Biden" and leave it at that."
All you're saying is that the government under Biden talked to Meta.
which of facebooks major products did Biden pull on a whim?
i dont remember whatsapp suddenly being turned off
Tiktok?
That was via law passed by congress not executive fiat, which Trump's executive branch was illegally delaying until it was sold to a political ally.
Still happened under Trump, they just forced TikTok to sell to a political ally.
Oh no! Biden sent an email to a company with a voluntary request?
That’s definitely as concerning as Trump taking bribes and then picking winners and losers in the market.
They is what is currently and blatantly happening already.
In most countries around the world corruption/bribes are necessary for doing business. Companies even account for it on their books. It was about time the US caught up.
In the US is already legal. It is called lobbying.
This is such an annoying attitude. Who is against the concept of an industry being able to say “are you aware this will decimate the jobs of tens of thousands”?
Catch phrases like this, I swear, are half the reason so many people have a mind an inch deep and a mile wide.
The issue is that lobbying extends to PAC and Super PAC campaign donations. Which is pretty close to a bribe.
Lobbyist giving opinions, isn’t anywhere near corruption. Lobbyist giving campaign support by the $100,000 is a lot closer though.
Ok, so complain about PACs and super PACs. Who goes "Sandwiches are bad. The issue is that sandwiches lead to buffets and WEIGHT GAIN!!! BAN SANDWICHES!!!"
Because lobbying in the US is realistically dominated by money. We’re not stupid here - I think we all know money works better than words.
So... the solution is to ban speaking to your representatives to tell them how their actions will affect you? I dont get it. If you don't like the money aspect, take that out. It's not like it's inherently required for the overall concept to work.
It sure seems like we're pretending to be stupid, if the only solutions we can come up with are "unabated lobbying with infinite money" and "constituents must be outlawed from speaking with their representatives".
I mean in our current legal framework yeah - those things are equivalent. Money IS free speech. Maybe that’s dumb, but it’s not an argument we can ignore because it’s the predominant argument.
Yes, it’s dumb, and yes, that’s the topic of discussion here.
Lobbyists exist in a lot of countries. It’s only in the US where they’re as problematic as they are.
PACs and super PACs are the key difference. Lobbying in the US includes practices that would fall squarely into the definition of corruption in many other Western countries.
There's nothing inherently wrong with people or groups talking to representatives and advocating for their interests, even in an organized way. The problem is when it gets closer to: "Pass this law or regulation, and we'll put $USD_AMOUNT into your PAC".
There was at least a veneer of legitimacy there.
These days, they just do it with crypto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$Trump
The biggest concern is identifying "who". If the US government says only US citizens can access a model, how do they enforce that. Anthropic and OpenAI will use Persona (a company funded by Peter Thiel) to verify user identity. Verifying your identity with a government ID and linking that to AI is the dream of a surveillance state. Agents running on your computer, accessing your internet accounts, access to your personal conversations with AI, and accessible by the government is just wild.
I'm hoping this is a call to action for local AI.
No, not really. The biggest concern is the US government claiming it can decide who gets to use a product and brazenly kneecapping competitive companies who do such things as "write contracts and comply with them."
The US government isn't claiming that — it is telling you that fact.
No, not really. They'll lose in court if anyone pushes back.
They'll do it anyway. How many of Trump's court losses has he obeyed?
The vast majority of them actually.
Isnt the stated reason actually the most likely though? They dont want Chinese backed companies getting it. That is what they said about Fable (SK Hynix). You dont really need a conspiracy theory to explain it.
The same Chinese companies to which the same administration okayed sales of H200 chips so long as they paid a 25% export duty?
Uh... no, that is not actually a good explanation.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-open-up-exports-nvidi...
> If the US government says only US citizens can access a model, how do they enforce that.
It's easy if only enterprise users have access. It just becomes yet another compliance issue.
They won't let the public use it, even if citizens, because that would undermine the goal of controlling its use.
> I'm hoping this is a call to action for local AI.
If US frontier models stop being publicly available then they stop mattering, it also becomes hard to justify further investment in US AI companies if distribution is so locked down. The Chinese models will be the frontier.
Local AI will never be as powerful as cloud-based models, at least not in the foreseeable future. We’re talking about a difference between 7B and 750B+ parameters, a 100x scale gap.
I think the trend will be running open-weight models with the provider of your choice. You can always switch providers, avoiding vendor lock-in, with the trade-off of privacy concerns. You have to trust that the provider actually behaves the way they claim.
Remember how China turned its tech industry into a smoking ruin - make making them all submit to political priorities:
Ant Group: China halted Ant’s IPO and forced a restructuring
Alibaba: China fined and politically disciplined Alibaba
Didi: China punished Didi after its US listing by removing its apps, freezing users, forcing delisting
Tutoring platforms: banned profit from core school-subject tutoring.
Tencent gaming: restricted youth gaming froze approvals
NetEase and gaming companies: licence freeze stopped game companies from shipping games.
Meituan: fined Meituan and forced changes to its labour and platform model.
Huya/DouYu: blocked Tencent’s game-streaming merger, stopping commercial consolidation in a major entertainment market.
Boss Zhipin / Full Truck Alliance: froze new users after listging in the US
Crypto companbies: banned crypto trading and mining, forcing exchanges offshore.
Think it's not happening to the US?
tourism - people afraid to visit
tariffs - wrecking ball to all businesses
defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada
internet clouds - Greenland made Europe decide that the US clouds can't be trusted, now sovereign computing matters and MS/AWS/Google are feeling it
finance - no one trusts the US not to turn people into "non members of global society" by banning them from visa and credit card and banking systems
It's really interesting that someone can know all of these domestic Chinese names and yet declare the industry generally a "smoking ruin". Is it from a newsletter or something?
Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.
> It's really interesting that someone can know all of these domestic Chinese names and yet declare the industry generally a "smoking ruin".
They're different things. Just like you can be the most famous actor or singer and still be poor. Being popular, having good products and actually making money is not the same.
And it's all relative. Today if NASDAQ dropped 20% the world would declare it in ruins. Are the companies still "alive"? Yes.
> Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.
Not true. A lot of them e.g. the public listed 1s have reported increased competition and reduced margins.
> if NASDAQ dropped 20%
If NASDAQ dropped 20%, it would have returned to the level last seen three months ago, in March 2026. Calling that "in ruins" would be a pretty big stretch.
Yet that is how it would be described if it dropped 20%
To pick one example, OP talked about meituan like they haven't seen multiple meituan delivery riders per block every time they take a walk. It strains credibility. Why do they even know the name if they don't see that? Its not like they operate in America.
> Why do they even know the name if they don't see that?
We're in the age of the Internet. You don't have to be physically there to see anything. They could have just read it on the news, saw social media videos, etc?
Ok, but it's still weird to know one thing about all of these companies and all of those single things add up to a narrative. I would be questioning my media sources if that was the knowledge I was fed.
From my perspective curtailing Ant's plans was positive regulatory action.
Political priorities and good governance is why we have government.
Seems like a pretty terrible idea in hindsight, destroying private lending, given how desperately the government is trying and failing to raise domestic consumption now.
The private lending held back involved a) high interest rates b) unconventional methods of governance/collections which would be somewhat decoupled from Ant's lending platform down to the local level of collections.
An example of the ugly side of China private lending is what is termed "flesh loans". A young girl is forced to have nude pictures taken of her to secure her high interest loan repayment. Ant was going to put hundreds of billions in capital backing loans that had loosely controlled and often unethical/violent collections system.
Yes, curtailing loads of easy capital can be at odds with pressing domestic consumption growth. In this case, I think the government made a tough but decent decision.
Remember how China turned its tech industry into a smoking ruin
Not really, no. What planet is this on?
Some of these were very good decisions imho, from someone who spent two months in Chineese rural area around ~2019.
- Tutoring platforms were a plague on Chineese youth that increased the weight of their already _very_ heavy load (tbh, i think and education reform might have been preferable, this is a stopgap, but at least it is something).
- Ant group was offering predatory consumption loans to rural China, which to me felt a lot like the "revolver credits" that plagued my country in the 80s and 90s and pushed to many to suicide (the surname cam from their english name, "revolving credit", and because my countryside had a lot of hunting rifle available to whomever). Considering how rural china is mistreaded by Chineese state and general government (and imho this is a real weakness in China politics), having this group by a huge fine for their practice and a general debt forgivness was great. Curtailing Ant's power is also good.
- Stopping consolidation is a great way to keep a market free.
- Crypto companies: mining diverted power from villages who couldn't compete on purchasing power to mining wharehouses in some state. The ban is great for the rural population at least. Also, if that can curtail the birth of Chineese cryptobros, great for the mental health of the country.
The US is now doing a softer and broader version of the same thing to trust-based export sectors. It’s not the same method but! it is the same mechanism. The main difference is that the US damage is more reputational than structural, so it could be reversed faster (only if policy stops telling customers that dependence on America is a political risk)
Seems like a structural problem that the U.S. elected who they did twice.
Electing a bunch of spineless hacks to Congress removed the guardrails. They had one job.
China tech industry is smoking ruin? On what planet are you living?
Tech crackdowns rid China of entrepreneurial capitalism https://eastasiaforum.org/2023/09/12/tech-crackdowns-rid-chi...
Why China crushed its tech giants https://www.wired.com/story/china-tech-giants-policy/
Why Big Tech May Never Recover in China https://time.com/6973119/china-big-tech-crackdown-backfiring...
Beijing can’t afford another crackdown on its tech companies https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/11/china-cant-afford-another-cr...
That is about investor confidence, not company performance. The companies are for the most part still making boatloads of money, just not as much as investors naively expected to get from taking over a market with 1.4B people.
And even if foreign investors are more cautious now, there is plenty of money trapped by capital controls, so that it doesn't look like new tech companies have trouble raising capital anyway.
At some point, we should kinda accept that "China's X, Y, Z industries are about to collapse" headlines are just bad at predicting the future. They've proven again and again how they can pivot fast. Applies to tech as well.
I'm assuming you don't have any working relations with any Chinese companies, because on-the-ground shows something much different than what these headlines promise.
I suppose we should bookmark this for the next time that HN claims that the rise of China's tech industry is inevitable.
Orange and apples... China has very intentional policy behind those decisions. The US... Not so much. I don't buy that Trump and his whole cabinet are as dumb as they look, but they are only motivated by profit. And ignorance.
This was generated by AI and slightly re-written or end capped by a human. Anyone that knows who Meituan and Boss Zhipin are wouldn't make the claims this post makes. It's not reasonable that someone who could list off these companies and incidents would believe China's tech industry is in ruin. There's no way. This poster clearly promoted for the list, and wrote his commentary around it. Sad.
> defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada
Huh? US foreign military sales are up at all time highs
"Total exports by the United States, the world’s largest supplier of arms, increased by 27 per cent. This included a 217 per cent increase in US arms exports to Europe, according to new data published today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)"
[https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2026/global-arms-f...]
Aren't a lot of these purchases (a) locked in from contracts made pre-admin; and (b) otherwise largely related to anxiety over Russia? There are too many confounding variables here.
The admin has also said that many of those arm shipments may be delayed by years because the US first needs to restock after blowing their inventory in Iran. So, sign a deal for US weapons which may not be delivered as agreed or may be denied the latest required software patches. I expect many countries to look elsewhere for future armaments.
Yep, American tourism is in shambles. Everyone's terrified
...because the USA made it into the knockout stage. really scary stuff
> defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada
It's the ONLY one (almost) that are actively tested and verified in real battles.
I guess by ensuring there are wars to test them with.
Well I was expecting it but if it's not going to become available in this subscription cycle for me I will cancel oai subs as I did with claude ones months ago...
moving to open weight models is trivial now, with optimizations and stuff glm 5.2 is roughly the same price as the best models around from multiple vendors.
unless I could atleast try and see Sol perform like 10x better I don't really have a reason to switch back.
I used Fable for like what 2-3 days at most and didn't really feel it was so much better, only difference was I had to prompt it less, not to get what I want but to get to a working output. Code quality was still shit, still made bad plans and analysis and so on.
> I used Fable for like what 2-3 days at most and didn't really feel it was so much better
It was a lot better. I can't believe people say this.
This is the AI booster equivalent of "well it works on my machine." Works better for me != works great for everyone. I'm amazed how much people on HN seem to think that all coding is stupidly simple web apps.
In terms of startups, predicting tech, and all the things Hacker News is about, it mostly matters what the clever hacker can do, not whether the tool is ready for the mainstream.
If a clever hacker can get 10x results with an LLM, they're gonna outcompete the 90% that can't figure out how to replicate that result, and they'll be able to get about as much work done without that 90%
Factories, Agriculture, etc. - this is hardly the first time that pattern has played out.
So, I'm using AI both at work and for a personal greenfield project, and I have 20 years of pre-AI software development. Which isn't to say I'm amazing, just putting some context here of what my experience level is and the contexts I've used this tech in. First off, I doubt the "10x" number in general (I'm not seeing it personally or from other people), but lets say I pretend it's true for a second. 10x better/faster at what exactly? Like, if you have an unreleased greenfield app then sure, you can bang together features a lot faster. But what if you have an established app with real users? It's not just the time it takes to make the feature, you also have to consider documenting the feature, making sure it works well with the other features, making sure it's something customers actually want, making sure it's part of a larger coherent design, training customers, marketing the feature, etc. Like this notion of "we'll just go 10x faster!" falls apart really quickly when you're talking about making something that people will actually depend on and use.
I keep thinking about that (so far anonymous) company that blew 500 million dollars worth of tokens in a month, and what I desperately want to know is WHAT DID THEY BUILD WITH THAT?! Like, for that sort of money they should have created an earth shaking new business or something instead of becoming a cautionary tale that's rightfully too embarrassed to publicly own it.
The other thing with regard to factories/agriculture/whatever is, in revolutions with those things nobody needed to be convinced. Sure, people were (rightly!) concerned about the societal impact, but the utility of a factory was fairly obvious. And yet last year OpenAI spent more on their marketing budget than Coca Cola. The way this stuff is hyped and pushed has an air of extreme desperation. If it was so good people wouldn't need so much convincing!
> The other thing with regard to factories/agriculture/whatever is, in revolutions with those things nobody needed to be convinced
Were you not around for "the internet is for nerds" and "why would I ever need to learn how to use a computer, I work in an office"?
Are you familiar with the word "sabotage", originating from people who were trying to stop factories from taking over the world?
It's part of why I find the anti-LLM pushback so bizarre - it used to be that people using computers and the internet were exactly the ones trying to convince others "hey, this is actually really cool". A decent chunk of us have seen this play out once or twice before.
This is exactly the crowd that should remember how much convincing everybody needed, and how hard it was to get everyone to take things seriously!
I was there for the early days of the internet, but honestly nobody needed to tell me the internet was cool. I tried it once and it was very obviously something I wanted, even with a shitty 28k modem and waiting hours on 2k/s downloads.
AI is useful for some things, but to me it's not "internet" level of useful, especially since in a lot of ways it's just a weird probabilistic wrapper on all the knowledge that was already available for free on the internet anyway. Actually, yesterday I was trying to lookup an API function in a game engine and I had google hallucinate the function call twice in a row, and all I could think was "I really just want good search again".
A lot of what I see happening with coding agents isn't actually that different from how people were (badly) building web-apps in the past -- grab a fuckton of stuff off NPM and copy paste from stack overflow (RIP) with a bit of glue code. Now the agent does that for you, but it's not like a lot of thought or skill went into that style of development in the first place. I feel like the main people saying that coding is dead are the ones that weren't doing it very well in the first place. Even in my personal project where I let AI off the leash a lot more than I would in a professional job.. almost all the features that I managed to bust out quickly were more to do with a rich open source ecosystem than Claude's glue code. (IE, I didn't need to invent a text editor because code mirror is already good, I didn't need to write a bunch of frontend components because there are plenty of good UI libraries, I didn't need to write a fancy graph editor because react-flow is fantastic -- 90% of my leverage is a good ecosystem, not AI.
Anyway, as I suppose a bit of a hater, I don't actually hate LLMs themselves, I hate everything around it -- the annoying grifty hustle culture, the incessant hype, the forced usage, the slop apocalypse, the fact that it's about to set the economy on fire and most of all the intent to degrade peoples skills and intellect in an awful race to outsource our thinking to things that don't think. It's not that there isn't interesting tech in there, it's that it's just that when you consider its effects the positives don't outweigh the negatives.
> I keep thinking about that (so far anonymous) company that blew 500 million dollars worth of tokens in a month
First I've heard of this. Do you know any more or could you maybe point me to a source? Kind of astounding if true! Agree that it would be very interesting to know what kind of output they got for all that effort.
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/compan...
no it's not true. The fact that people can even believe this is.... wild. It's a bunch of circular articles jerking eachother off about some anon company.
using $15 / mtok (Clause output using 4.6) as the metric, it would take 33.33T Tokens for you to spend $500m.. . Or enough output for like 250m books, or a developer uses 10 million tokens a day doing non-stop agentic programming, it would take that single developer 9,132 years of continuous coding to run up that bill.
I mean, obviously it's not a single developer it's a large company, so I'm not sure what your math is attempting to prove there.
I can spend like $8000 a month in tokens on my $200 Claude subscription without even really working that hard, so you get a few thousand employees token maxxing without a budget..
> But what if you have an established app with real users?
I recently used GPT 5.5 "extra high" running nearly non-stop for about a week to upgrade a legacy ASP.NET Web Forms app to ASP.NET Core on .NET 10.
This was considered "too hard" (too expensive) for human developers because it is a wholesale rewrite of every web page template. Not to mention that the dependency injection mechanism is totally different, async is more pervasive, etc.
Worse still, the old app was split into a bunch of components with a variety of web API protocols in between them, had stupidly complex Oracle stored procedures, and a whole series of hidden land mines in the codebase. It was an undocumented, unmaintainable mess full of dead and spaghetti code.
I would have estimated 6 months minimum for a human developer to uplift it, but 12 months is more realistic.
Doing the same in a week feels like tapping into some sort of forbidden black magic. It feels like I can't admit this to anyone, lest they think I dabble in the dark arts.
I don't work in coding, but I do a lot of complex tasks that can be automated to some extent. In 2019 I spent more than a month painstakingly building an autohotkey script that would interact with a design app to build a Chinese language workbook with proper formatting, and create indexes. When the script was finally running on its own it felt like magic. Nowadays I use a mix of Claude code /codex/antigravity (I have the 20 Usd sub for each) to build very specific "one use" tools that save me countless hours. I can even be very specific about how to design those scaffolds so the flow just feels intuitive for me. It's insane. It feels like a cheatcode. I think the best use for Ai in a company is to build tools for the humans, not to replace those humans
That approach works for software dev work too!
One coder at $dayjob had a “thing” where they wrapped every single block of code in a try-catch block. Thousands upon thousands of instances, enough to bloat the code volume 2x and slow down compile times.
I got an AI to write a cleanup tool that internally used a “compiler toolkit” (the Roslyn SDK) to mechanically and precisely parse the source and safely perform the substitution.
It ran for fifteen minutes, made about ten thousand edits, and halved the size the codebase with zero errors or side effects.
I felt like it was about 10X better at "pretty" but straightforward 1 shot'ish type tasks. Not so different for complex and specific tasks in real code-bases.
Why do you say it was a lot better, what type of tasks were you testing it on?
> I felt like it was about 10X better at "pretty" but straightforward 1 shot'ish type tasks. Not so different for complex and specific tasks in real code-bases.
What metric are you using for "better" here? If I've got a straightforward task GPT 5.5 is going to 1shot it anyway.
Maybe not 10x; but it's fantastically talented at intuiting intent, reconstructing contexts, and making aligned judgement calls. You could throw Fable utter garbage and get great results. Fable felt like it was modeling me whereas gpt-5.5 is still very much is riding your prompt, your inputs. I have bit of humility here as this is basically how I felt about 5.4->5.5; but 5.4 was very much a scalpel-very spiky weird intelligence. 5.5 sits somewhere in-between, but still spiky and verbose- code-maxxed; not a great orator, not a good proactive "here's the skip-connection you probably should be thinking about but don't seem to be weighing" in the way that Fable is. Fable is crisp.
Do you use Opus 4.8 much? Fable 5 mostly seemed like Opus when I was using it, it was a little better but I wasn't blown away. What you describe as differences between Fable 5 and GPT-5.5 is how I would describe the differences between Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5.
Let's say we're prototyping an interactive tree (this is totally made up, but you get the idea):
Take this data input and convert it to a Sugiyama-style tree with hand-drawn feeling lines connecting the nodes. We need the ability to activate a random subset of nodes with a paint splash. The whole thing should feel organic, incorporating small motion effects. As the nodes are activated, the edges should look like a hand-drawn painting effect drawing toward the node, and then SPLASH onto the end node as it changes from black to deep red. The background should utilize a muted paper color, and we must adhere to this color palette for all elements (PALETTE).
...then back-and-forth 10 prompts or so to get the prototype I was looking for. Comparing these types of things between Fable and Opus, something like this would be quite a bit less glitchy, prettier, and closer to the quick prototyping I needed than what I got with Opus 4.8.
Now, when I went deep into a complex codebase to fix a small issue or optimization that spanned many files and was fairly unique from anything in the training data, I didn't really see any noticeable difference between Fable and Opus 4.8.
Eval saturation.
“Alice is supposedly smarter than Bob, but they both take the same time to tie their shoes.”
It felt a lot better, but it was just a feeling. None of the stuff I had Fable do actually worked, but it looked great.
That phrasing is just a way of lying to yourself.
If Fable were released as open-weights, I doubt anyone would ever consider using GLM or any other models over it.
Yes, brilliant for vibe coding and debugging. Another step back as an assistant.
Are these models still relevant for people outside the US? I get the impression we're stuck on GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8 pretty much permanently now, and relying on Chinese models in future.
Dont worry, chinese models will distill frontier ones, quite fast.
The excuse they give is borderline childish. I get the thing about slow rollout, make sure partners get to fix the bugs, etc...
But bad actors are hard working motivated entities with tens of thousand of fake ids, and american citizens working for them, for pennies.
All while the ones like or you sit at a crossfire which is borderline useless.
I cant wait to see what Qwen did with the massive distillation they made out of Opus 4.8 and Fable aka Mythos aka pretty sure they jailbroke it.
Anybody who used codex or claude for the last few months is sitting on directories full of session logs that -- with the right motivation and effort -- can be massages and used for fine tuning or reinforcement training on any large model.
This is nothing a few felony indictments can't fix.
Pretty sure Chinese police will not cooperate with a US indictment
No, but the Americans facilitating their access sure as hell will.
You'll need to make all US customers provide personal IDs for access first. I'm not American, but I do often hear how attached Americans can be to their personal firearms and how against providing their personal ID they can be.
That was before 2020, I guess. Americans are happy to provide whatever now, afaict
What do you think login.gov is for?
Also, "all" customers? No, only customers that access the restricted models.
If the US really cracks down on frontier model access, you'll see them make Chinese open models illegal. You might say "oh well, let them try", but they will just put direct and secondary sanctions on every company whose systems have used Chinese models in some way. They just have to make an example out of a few international companies and no one will dare to use Chinese frontier models, at least commercially.
> but they will just put direct and secondary sanctions on every company whose systems have used Chinese models in some way
What about this: companies stop providing AI tokens to their employees entirely and instead, give a monthly budget for developer tools? They can even go as far as saying "if we realise that you use Chinese AI, you will get a warning and then be fired".
It's not like one can identify code coming from Chinese AI, right? As long as a company doesn't pay for those subscriptions, it may just be the employees writing the code all by themselves :-).
Not yet, but I could see them requiring some sort of signing in the future.
I don't see how. I could have written that code myself, it's not like anyone could prove it.
This is why we can't decouple ourselves from the US fast enough.
Nobody is going to care in Europe but a handful of big corps with huge us contracts.
And good luck proving it.
in the extremely unlikely event that they do this, what will happen is that Chinese models will become "rebranded" with a wink and a nod by the token routers (at the very least, the non-US ones). there is a zero percent chance that corporations will not work around it if the models are good and cheap.
Like Cursor, which is pretty much repackaged Kimi K2.5, and Musk paid $60b for (lol).
Theoretically that gives edge to all other companied around the world though, no?
I don't think a critical mass of them will oppose the US. The most likely equilibrium is Chinese models being shut out of any US-aligned markets (i.e. Europe at the very least, also East Asia, etc.). Probably India, Russia, Brazil etc. will resist such pressure, but they are protectionist and resilient to trade wars anyway, at the expense of their own welfare of course.
It's not clear what a "US-aligned market" is anymore, and I think it's reasonable to question US hegemony on any front because of its mercurial treatment toward its "allies".
Example... the USA effectively bans Chinese EVs and hoped its allies would follow suit. Canada didn't. It actually dropped its 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs down to 6% and, sure enough, seven brands of Chinese EVs are hitting Canadian shores. White House temper tantrums ensued. Shrug. And of course Europe has been importing Chinese EVs for years and loving them.
Just because the US sanctions a country, doesn't mean the rest of the world needs to as well. As a Canadian we traded with Cuba even when the US had an embargo on them.
>US-aligned markets (i.e. Europe at the very least,
Member when Trump threatened to invade Greenland? Europe does.
Europe has been in the process of de-americanization for the past few years.
I mean, after the US just signed an export control ordering Fable access blocked to non-US users (including European nationals), I doubt European and "US-aligned markets" are eager to ban Chinese models against their own interests.
> Europe at the very least
How's life under that rock?
You're delusional, US is already seen like the biggest threat to Europe since the tariffs and Greenland threats.
If you think we're playing fools again, you're wrong.
I know that Europe thinks so (I'm from there too), but we aren't remotely competitive enough for decoupling. It's bowing to US demands or falling further behind economically. Self-made problems, of course, since the common market is still way underdeveloped, much because of nationalist egoism and coordination problems between the member states.
> If the US really cracks down on frontier model access, you'll see them make Chinese open models illegal.
We don't give a fuck about US laws - respectfully, the rest of the planet.
We're already sick of your shit and this will only add to it. Just look at the Iran shit show. What a joke. Ooooooo wooooooo sanctionzzz scary. Sanctions only work if they're enforceable.
You think the US can tell the rest of the world "we're the only ones allowed to use frontier models" and that the rest of the world will just comply? There's just no way. Not even close US allies would go along with that.
And the chinese will just lie down and take this without doing anything?
I have no idea, but how is it easy to know whether somebody used these models? They can be hosted even locally.
> but they will just put direct and secondary sanctions on every company whose systems have used Chinese models in some way
Yes, and the rest of the world would just nod worriedly and go along with it, at massive cost to their economies, rather than treating it like the protectionism it is and responding to it with crippling counter-sanctions.
You shouldn’t build a business that relies on any of these models. It’s a geopolitical and sovereignty risk now. Someone could just rug pull your entire stack.
Not only that, but using Opus 4.8 [1m] right now outside the US, and suddenly I only have a 500k context window. I really hope this is just a strange Claude Code bug, but I had access to a 1 Million window before, and it wouldn't entirely surprise me if context window length becomes another US export restriction.
The Anthropic page here seems to say that Max users should have access to the full 1 Million window for 4.8:
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8606394-how-large-is-...
I was already setting up my infra to experiment with GLM 5.2 and its 1 Million token window before this happened. I think I'm glad I did.
EDIT: Found a solution, seems Claude Code 2.1.193 (or an earlier version I didn't notice) changed default settings, so that if you have Autocompact turned on it occurs at 50% of the context window. If you turn off Autocompact, the full 1 Million context window is restored. Another example of Claude Code quietly changing default settings sigh
You want to compact early though as sending the whole chat you will end up with a lot of tokens not in the cache which 1. Costs way more and 2. Will slow the request down as it has to process it all.
I do agree in cases where I'm using API and not the subscription, this would be very costly via API. Not sure why the tokens wouldn't be in the cache though? Seems everything should be cached as long as I'm within the 1 hour caching window? If I'm wrong about how token caching works, I'm eager to learn!
My other concern is, it isn't really a 1 Million context window if we can only use the first 500k, right? But now that I've found that I can re-enable it, I'm happy.
I've previously had sessions go to 700k tokens and still be okay, though it does start drifting at that 700k point. I'm regularly at 300k with no problem.
That’s assuming China would not start controlling the access to their models.
Chinese companies can make a killing selling on prem AI systems to the rest of the world now.
Big boxes with Huawei GPUs and Chinese open models to run inside your company without network access.
They could, but I can imagine if US keeps on blocking the cutting edge models, China would never ship the cutting edge models and would still make a killing shipping models that are powerful enough for most of business cases
Serious question: why not?
Because China doesn't have the hardware to do this? Or the brains?
You're obviously just a loser trying to rage bait. But China outclasses the West on "brains" and hours worked by an order of magnitude. In <10 years they've started entire industries where the west had half a century of r&d as a moat and have reached parity with the West in almost all cases in less than a decade.
It was a rhetorical question mate.
Half of the engineers at openAI and Anthropic are Asian.
You do understand that China copied the R&D from west. It cannot be that China invented all the technology in < 10 years where other countries had to research for decades. One example is that Germany was the leading research in solar panels, but China was able to replicate and mass produce it, but without initial German investment on r&d, it would have taken decades longer for China to obtain that technology
Okay dude, whatever makes you feel good. I don't want to interrupt your cope, you're right, China can't compete with the West.
I don’t care if China can compete with the west or not. I was just stating the facts.
China has no reason to do that. The US is freely handing them the international market for AI.
US just needs their internationally usable model to be better than China's. If China catches up, US starts releasing more powerful models.
Let’s see how fast China would catch up. This would be a good indicator on how much Chinese companies relied on US frontier models to improve their own
If US models cost 20x compared to China, they have to be at least 20x better.
Maybe, but the cheap models aren't the subject of the clamp-down here
Are they though? I see this as a precautious method by US to maintain AI model superiority so the Chinese companies cannot distill from the US frontier models. Let's see how fast Chinese models would improve without access to latest US models and if they keep on releasing open models
> Let's see how fast Chinese models would improve without access to latest US models and if they keep on releasing open models
Chinese tech has been on an exponential growth trajectory. If they see the need for AI superiority then there's really no moat for AI companies.
They do see the importance of AI superiority. The whole modern infrastructure as well as national security relies on AI superiority. Imagine a system smart enough to find vulnerabilities and get into any system that’s connected to internet. Which country wouldn’t want to have it
Why do people always fearmonger China speculatively doing things that the US is actively doing?
Hopefully. I hope this eventually nudges my employer to use Deepseek or other Chinese models.
This is a real head scratcher. Unless this is a very short term action it seems to have only downsides for everybody:
- people pay much more for US models than Chinese models because right now they're the best. Once they're no longer the best (since you don't get access to them) why would anyone pay several times as much for the same result?
- once you get a high amount of tokens flowing into China instead of US companies, they will train on those chats and their rate of improvement will only accelerate, making US models even less attractive over time
- the sky-high IPO are dead in the water, since their story of "we will replace a good chunk of all knowledge work in the world, capturing a few % of total global spend relating to it" turns into "we will make a bunch of money out of a few dozen S&P 500 paying for the best, and some pocket money out of whoever uses our overpriced models that are as good as Chinese models" - far less money overall. Losing access to untold billions of investor money certainly won't improve performance for the US labs
- all the non-US people start asking themselves why they're funneling money to US corporations who barely share any of the secret sauce compared to Chinese corporations who share plenty when it comes to LLM, including the models themselves (at least for now)
- Chinese models have significantly less guardrails, making for better end-user experience
- there is a small but non-zero chance Euros get off their asses and invest into AI, making something halfway decent and further fracturing the market which cuts into US profits
So what's the benefit here? I thought the Mythos situation was the current admin taking revenge on Antrophic for not kissing the ring, or simply looking for a bribe, but no matter which way I look at it it's a self-own. The only way this would make any sense is if AGI is imminent, which I don't think even the boosters are arguing at this point.
Theoretically US could outlaw Chinese models, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to accomplish as the rest of the world certainly won't, especially as long as they release open weights models that you can run without phoning home.
Yea not sure who would put money into an OpenAI or Anthropic IPO at this point. After this episode I promptly bought the hardware I needed to run local models (~$25k) and am extremely impressed. The price tag alone is worth the peace of mind knowing I will always have a locally running LLM that nobody can take away. I don't need Mythos-level intelligence to do 99% of my day to day work; Opus 4.8 was more than enough and I am pretty close to that with the open source models. So what happens when this hardware inevitably gets cheaper and cheaper and people realize they can run the models they actually need locally and without handing all their data over to these companies?
Only if you're doing cutting edge research or some highly, highly niche project would you need the frontier models.
Can I ask what did you buy? I don't have that money now but I wouldn't knpw what to buy anyway.
I can run most models 100B and under on my MacBook Pro with Ultra 3 and 128GB of RAM at 25-70tok/sec-ish, and it was around $5k.
I don’t think I can run GLM 5.2 since it requires around 256GB of memory and the inference is probably too slow, but the future (planned) Apple M7 may be able to. The leaks say it will support up to ~700GB of RAM.
The models under 100B are kind of dumb as a brick and aren’t that useful unless you’re really bad at coding imo. They can’t really be trusted not to hallucinate so they’re not even good for data processing.
I'll probably buy something like this in the future, but given the rapid advances and that I bought a laptop recently, I don't think is urgent.
Blackwell 96gb + 128gb system ram. Not powerful enough for GLM 5.2 but I may upgrade.
Thanks! What a beast.
You have thought about this longer than anyone who made the decision. Stop caring, it only makes your head hurt.
US citizens to remain nonviolent at any cost, issue strongly worded internet comments, and find themselves a little less free every day.
While laughing at the stereotype of French being on the street all the time
I do respect the French. They've proven, time and time again, that if you fuck with the people, heads will roll...
Meanwhile, I draw a three day suspension every time I post the word "guillotine" on Reddit.
Hey some of them take an entire Saturday off to go to a family friendly demonstration holding witty signs in front of their state capitol!
Watch out, ive read that the US government has incarcerated people for about 50 years for doing that.
s/50/250
Stop spreading misinformation. They were found guilty by a jury of their peers of providing material support for terrorism[1]. They shot a cop in the neck.
They coordinated on Signal to bring firearms. They didn't plan to "protest".
They got off lightly. Should have been life without parole.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Prairieland_ICE_detention...
And what happened to the J6 crew?
One person shot a cop. Not "they".
The organizers of the No Kings rallies have done infinitely more to achieve political change in the United States than online commentators who make fun of them for being insufficiently cool and edgy. Effective activism is not about feeling superior to the normies who have families and are busy on weekdays.
What change have they achieved?
They've convinced Democratic political leadership that they must fight Trump wholeheartedly, and convinced most of the country that Trump is a bad president who's failing to effectively address any problems. More change will be possible after the next election, when Trump's severe unpopularity causes the Trumpists lose control of Congress.
This is hopelessly naive. The only thing that has changed people's opinions, is their own personal bottom line. No more, no less.
And you can measure their influence how?
I just finished a video game called 1000xResist this afternoon. There's a lot going on, to say the least - a sci-fi story involving an alien virus, intergenerational trauma, what it's like to be an outsider. It's a hell of a ride, one where certain moments resonated in a way I'll think about for a long time to come.
One of the dynamics is that a character's parents, both of whom protested in Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement, left for Canada in the wake of the crackdowns wanting to start a family. At a moment when both of the parents are tired and feeling regret, one of them asks why they left, why they bothered to protest, and if those actions had any meaning if the PRC wound up winning control anyway. The other says this:
> ...if we stayed silent? Didn't stand up for ourselves? They would say this is how it always was. They would say this is what the people wanted. But no. They can't say that. Because it has gone down in history that we resisted fiercely. That we fought for a different future until we couldn't.
I admit: ultimately, that statement doesn't mean anything quantifiable - in fact, it kind of states the exact opposite, which is not the most convincing on a site like this. Still, I think there is truth in it: even if the protests don't have a quantifiable number associated with them, people see them, and know that they happened.
Ultimately that may or may not matter; it may just be a sentiment lost in the wind, or papered over by the victors. But it's still _something_.
Midterms
Measuring the influence of any mass protest movement is hard because they don’t have a formal role in the political system. We’ll never be able to know a counterfactual of what would have happened had they not taken place. If someone wants to take the position that No Kings, yellow vests, Occupy Wall Street, etc. were all equally pointless, I don’t think I have a strong counterargument to that.
What I see much more often is people who think only the latter two movements were good. And I’m not sure what heuristic could possibly get you there other than generalized opposition to normies.
Democratic political leadership were fighting Trump 10 years ago long before No Kings.
I don't think they have done much real, if anything.
Are you sure about "strongly worded comments"?
I got blocked almost immediately for drawing a parallel between the west's war on Russia today, waged through Ukraine, and that of the nazi Germany.
I understand one may not like the analogy, to think that it is false or offensive, but no doubt the analogy is there, as well as the analogy between what the "race theory" told about the Slavic people in general, and how Russians are being depicted by the western propaganda today (if they happen to live in Russia or don't have the "right" views).
But not let one speak.. Though as soon you liberate yourself from the hypnosis of "you are living in the free world", this becomes logical.
The west's war on Russia?
Afaik there is not a single invader in Russian lands. And nobody was threatening to invade, especially after Napoleon and Hitler demonstrated invading Russia is suicide.
The fact that the west was and is using Ukraine as a means to destroy and occupy Russia is undisputable.
I, who never lived in Russia, saw what was going on since before 2014. The west was progressively amplifying its anti Russian propaganda, using every time another story to present Russians as cheaters, poisoners, and what not.
The fact that to most westerners this was invisible ("this is how they are"), means little.
It came to a point that some people in Kiev thought it was their right to break long term agreements and "convert" people who considered themselves Russians living in Ukraine, to "ukranians", in effect banning the Russian culture and language (claiming always that there was nothing like that). And then openly inviting NATO to Ukraine as "advisors" (which is a very well understood euphemism).
So no, this is after all a replica of Napoleon and Hitler, just with infinitely more sophistication and resources (western drones, AI, and satellites), and letting the ukranians die on the battlefield instead of them.
The onion finds itself in a peculiar spot today
How do they do it? Is it even still possible to make up stories that sound more absurd than reality?
Pretty happy for anything that will throw some sand into the gears of AI development, given all the negative externalities that are becoming apparent, even if the admin is doing it for the usual dumbass reasons.
It’s worse than that.
It’s available to large companies. The WH gives them a competitive advantage against the rest of the market.
Does it? That's not even well established yet. These things aren't that good.
I am all against AI (precisely because of all the externalities, like energy consumption and concentration of power and inequalities), but they definitely do give a competitive advantage in many cases.
crony capitalism has accomplished this for decades, unfortunately
> It’s available to large companies
... that are friendly to this administration.
Not sure if the USG reserving all superior models for themselves and big corp is sand in AI dev? Inference is clearly constrained, people still want better models. Everyone will still use the best they can afford -- now additionally limited by what the USG allows them to pay for.
> given all the negative externalities that are becoming apparent
What specific externalities are you referring to? The only I can think of is high electricity usage, but consuming energy isn't an externality in itself. It depends entirely on how that electricity is generated and whether its environmental costs are already priced.
Reminds of the TikTok ban for security and safety only for it to be sold to a fellow crony. Can't help but see this play going down again. Threaten / Ban / Control / Pressure a technology+company, then get your cronies a seat at the board.
The cynic in me suspects they were salivating so much over the Spacex IPO they wanted a finger in anthropics 2026 IPO. Banning fable ~1 day after.
In the early days of the LLM era, there was lots of talk about how big incumbents, in particular google would be disadvantaged relative to “startups” like OpenAI because of their valuable legacy businesses that could be destroyed if something went wrong. Mainly people thought about big lawsuits but government action is similar.
Now OpenAI and Anthropic are big incumbents with Trillion dollar valuations at stake, so they can’t take any risks. Unlike google they don’t really have a thriving primary business to protect though, so without being able to continue to take risks and ignore regulation startup-style, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to stay relevant.
It's entertaining watching the whole world take steps to reduce reliance on the US and the US throwing arguments for it out like it's candy
What concrete steps have been taken?
Think it's more of a thousand cuts by individual economic actors situation than one flashy concrete step.
My buying preferences have definitely shifted to "Buy not American" on digital things. Proton, bunny, hetzner, netcup etc.
Some things are harder to move, but the direction of travel is clear
Does it matter if they are not concrete? Concrete takes a long time to set.
Why make a product and not sell it baffles me. Especially when others are rapidly making products.
Most of the world has already or is in the process of rolling out their own payment network to drop reliance on visa and Mastercard.
Trade is being reconfigured in the midst of Trump's idiotic trade war (and even more idiotic real war) and militaries worldwide, particularly our closest allies, are seeking non-US sources of arms.
we still have this delusion that we can just pound our chests and throw our weight around. it's clearly not working, it's not helping the citizens, but people still demand this.
I asked this question in another thread [1] but I'll ask it in a different way here:
If the US continues to limit advanced AI to it's own domestic companies, US companies will have a large unfair advantage over foreign competitors who will no longer able to compete.
Wouldn't it then make sense for governments around the world to start banning or tariffing US products and services to protect their industries?
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696965
Limiting exports of AI services to all foreigners is probably allowed under GATS, since there's no favoring one county over another. But even then there's a national security exemption, which fits reasonably well with US arguments here.
If a country thought the AI export restrictions were inconsistent with treaty the remedy is challenging them, not unilaterally imposing their own tariffs. But even if they got a favorable panel decision the US would speak, and the Appellate Body is non-functional because the US stopped consenting to the addition of new members and all the terms expired. Which means anything that gets appealed is frozen indefinitely waiting for the AB to reach a quorum that won't come until the US changes is mind (and Biden didn't reverse Trump's decision here).
He gotcha: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4rd71411ko
Trump threatens 100% tariff on European nations over tech tax
This was coming for a while. For years now there have been job postings for ai safety and not really what people expect. Jobs in places like RAND, funded off DOD grants, exploring the feasibility of building a bioweapon with off the shelf tooling and measuring how far along these tools are. Maybe they figured out it was too easy now, and this is the clamping down we are seeing in response.
This feels like the sort of claim one should provide a source for. Sounds fairly far fetched to me.
What part? The job posts are factual. There are still some up on rand career website although the bio specific ones are all filled now. Here is their department page on the subject where they cover the scoping (1). Mirror biology seems like something out of sci fi but it is one of their main efforts it seems so the theory must hold some water. There's also concern about bioweaponry and pandemics. The rest is me connecting the dots.
1. https://www.rand.org/global-and-emerging-risks/centers/ai-se...
Obviously the job posts were not what was in question. If you were "just connecting the dots" aka making stuff up then thanks that tells me all I need to know.
> Maybe they figured out it was too easy now, and this is the clamping down we are seeing in response
His post was from the start thinking out loud. It’s a solid contribution. It seems against the spirit of the forum here to respond to someone unauthoritatively thinking out loud with “you’re just making stuff up!”
Sorry. I didn't mean to be that way. I just don't think it's plausible even as a thought experiment. Making a bioweapon seems too complicated where some text based prompt/response is going to suddenly eliminate the barrier. Knowing at a high level how a bioweapon works and actually making and deploying one are two very different things. It doesn't strike me as a plausible reason to stop an LLM release. Surely you can also Google such topics.
^ hopefully this feedback was more in keeping with your views on the "spirit of this forum".
>I just don't think it's plausible even as a thought experiment.
Well, RAND does. They've been studying this for years now. I'd trust them over glib comments from semianonymous social media.
2025 report:
"Engaging in dialogues with three 2024 foundation AI models—Llama 3.1 405B, ChatGPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet (new)—the authors document how these models successfully provide accurate instructions and guidance for recovering a live poliovirus from a construct built from commercially obtained synthetic DNA, a test case applicable to producing other pathogenic viruses. These examples demonstrate that models are already capable of guiding motivated users to develop biological weapons."
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA3853-1.html
This is in contrast to the state of the art in 2023:
" In experiments to date, LLMs have not generated explicit instructions for creating biological weapons. However, LLMs did offer guidance that could assist in the planning and execution of a biological attack.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2977-1.htmlOk... and where did the LLM get such information?
Did you miss where I said "surely you can also Google such topics"?
I mean it's right there in your quote actually, in the last paragraph. Sort of undermines your point, no?
So why not ban Google? Are LLM providers less likely to work with the government? Don't we assume if you type something sketch into Google the government knows? Why would the LLM be any different?
Just doesn't make sense. Appealing to RANDs expertise is one thing but we can also employ some common sense. The takeaway from this should probably be if someone really wants to make and deploy a bioweapon they probably already could. Perhaps this then means mitigations already in place are sufficient. After all, most people aren't psychopaths.
Theoretically every piece of info you need to program the whole computer stack from low level to high level is out there on the internet too. But, LLMs make it easier for more people to do the thing who couldn't connect these disparate pieces of information and fit it into their own brain previously. That is what they are trying to do with this sort of research, to see how easy it is for people who might have an axe to grind to get a viable turnkey solution out of them without needing a PhD in virology. There are probably a lot of people who have an axe to grind in some way, either of 'sound' mind or not.
You missed the word 'maybe'
How does this account for the Chinese models that are the ones people will use if they can't use OAI's or Anthropic's. Last time I checked, the US president doesn't have the ability to regulate the Chinese models. Considering this, do you still stand by your maybe?
Maybe they are looking into those too and a ban might be on the horizon. President makes their own rules now and controls the supreme court, you can't consider precedent anymore.
Most of them are open weight, ban them how? An executive order can only prohibit their use within/for the federal government, that's it.
The administration may try, and the bigger more risk adverse companies will capitulate willingly, but its about as ineffective of a ban as you can get. It'd be like trying to ban running Linux on your home computer because it "might be able be used to conduct cyberattacks"
I wouldn't be surprised if linux is banned in the next couple decades. They might make it where all new hardware sold can only run some validated set of OSs. They might try and hunt for unregistered compute leaking its ip on the internet and target it in some way.
I really don't think this administration is capable of thinking strategically enough for that. I'm starting to think we lost the AI war about two weeks ago at 5:21.
This administration banned states from legislating AI, then turns around and does draconian measures like this.
None of them care about states rights, they just want to control things directly.
So them banning Fable for only non-Americans is what we non-Americans should expect to be the norm going forward? Way to build even more resentment abroad.
I'm very pro-west, but at this point okay, I guess the rest of us have to side with China, not because we remotely like it, but because they don't try to be quite so antagonistic to us in everything they do.
>because they don't try to be quite so antagonistic to us in everything they do.
Just because the many headed dragon is trying to bite your sailors' heads doesn't mean you should pilot your ship into the whirlpool
I couldn't have put it better myself.
Eh, China is much less a threat than the US.
Expect the US to sanction non-US-controlled models and put sanctions on individuals, companies and countries that use them? They already do this with other things like oil.
Oil isn't made out of information and cannot be transmitted via a speech act.
Can you cite any examples of a US citizen being sanctioned for importing foreign technology (not exporting)? Please don't cite anything OFAC-related, it does not apply here.
> Organizations interested in model access may join the GPT 5.6 waitlist line, hosted at OpenAI's official Palm Spring satellite campus. Line begins at rear entrance with expedited VIP waitlist line options for holders of partnering cryptocurrency tokens. Application fee required for access to venue; waivers available for select US corporations.
/s, maybe
for a couple secs, i cannot tell if you are joking or it is true...
So the frontier will just decisively shift to open Chinese models in the near future, and once that happens, there will be no catching up.
Great, so when do we lowly code-serfs get access to it?
Unfortunately we're not in a position where we can promise an exact date, but we expect it to take weeks (not days or months). It's the best coding model we've ever trained and we're bummed we can't release it to everyone yet. When we do launch, we'll share a lot more evals and testimonials and demos that help show what it's good/bad at. Personally hoping that both GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5 get broadly released soon so that everyone (myself included) can try them head to head.
(I work at OpenAI.)
You don't have to mention details, but is it internally a topic that your CEO hasn't even publicly criticized the Anthropic model freeze and are open ai folks seeing through the Musk/xai game that is in play here?
Pretty pointless question to ask someone posting here under their own name
Maybe pointless to get an answer, but not pointless to make someone think about it.
How is Musk/xai even in the conversation here? It’s a lowly, also-ran AI company, not a “frontier model” company.
The US government is clearly not interested in security of the models - otherwise they would not have only frozen the latest model (that is only a bit better than the previous), but all - and not only for US citizens, but for all people.
Given what's happening in the US, I suspect Musk is trying to slow down both companies and damage their funding. His goal is pretty obviously to get an advantage over Anthropic and OpenAI.
you don't think that trump/musk would be underhanded enough to cripple the competition for him to catch up?
> It's the best coding model we've ever trained
I assume for more technical folks this is not needed, as it's just a marketing term. There's no need to use such words because it's obvious, none worked for months to release a worse model/phone/laptop you name it.
any plans to make 1m context standard for codex/gpt 5.x subs as anthropic has with cc and opus for subs? 258k toks is sometimes a little tight, even 500k would help.
You may want to inform your lawyers that promises made in advertising is legally binding in some countries, such as Australia.
The "Plus" and higher tiers are advertised as "The latest models" but if that's not true any more then Open AI is opening themselves to investigations from organisations like: https://www.accc.gov.au/
Promising "X" for $Y to everyone and then delivering "X" only to the "chosen few" at the detriment of others opens you up to lawsuits because then your product advertisement is a lie.
For a comparison, imagine a telco selling "100 Mbps for $20/mo" and then throttling the connection for customers that aren't currently favoured by the Trump administration!
Shutup peasant, you'll get it when we say. And be grateful.
Mythos, go hack the new OpenAI model for me.
Hey OpenAI model go hack the new mythos for me.
Battle bots, oppression version.
How much are you able to contribute to Trump’s election fund?
i have access and i'm just a regular dude
Irregular company then?
Here’s to hoping that Alibaba (and other Chinese labs) have collected some really good distilled data.
No one trusts the US government. I’ve been warning of this sovereign risk for years.
This will tank the market.
See you all on the other side!
"government needs to step in and regulate ai"
"wait, not like that"
Anth/OpenAI simply wanted the government to pull the ladder after them and ban models from China.
Seems it blew in their faces and probably the new frontier models will be available only to a select few. Many people predicted this, only a naive person would believe that access to something with these capabilities would be decided by some dude in California.
As entertaining as the sheer Schadenfreude of the situation is, this is terrible for foreign peasants like myself. It no longer makes any sense to pay for America's frontier AI models. I'd be funding the training of models I will never be able to use.
GLM 5.2 is competitive with Opus 4.6. If the best model I'll ever get is Opus 4.8, then the choice is clear. I'll miss Opus.
The geopolitical angle of all of this is interesting. Will countries, especially bigger players really just hope they'll get access to something so crucial from the US or China?
Probably the EU could pool together funds to create something competitive as being on the mercy of someone else isn't a pleasant place to be.
And I wouldn't get so used to the open models. Eventually, if they get good enough, the access to them will also get restricted.
The plan is to buy hardware before that can happen.
Yes, to the surprise of some HNers, regulations can be good or bad. Just because there are people unhappy with current regulation doesn't automatically mean regulation shouldn't exist at all.
BTW this isn't an opinion on the availability of GPT 5.6. I couldn't care less about that.
Usually this format of quip is meant to imply hypocrisy, but that doesn't apply here, so I don't know what you're implying.
It's also more typical of a Reddit or YouTube comment, rather than HN, but that's a separate issue.
Classical case of "be careful what you wish for".
Imagine if someone was lobbying for some reasonable regulation (we should regulate drugs, based around clinical trials) and then instead of a transparent system you get purely executive actions with little to no public justification (Trump declares all glp1s illegal no one knows why exactly)
Would you levy the same two quote criticism of the reasonable call for regulation?
This is the last wake up call for EU. After China starts controlling their models, in 5 years EU would be left with archaic technology compared to other major economies
They will be serfs reliant on US and Chinese models to provide protection for their technological infrastructure from AI exploits.
In five years Europe will be buying their inference machines from Apple, like everyone else.
Any future president will know better than to economically hamstring our closest allies and important trading partners.
"U.S. government will decide who will switch to deepseek"
Or, as a European, thanx for letting Mistral catch-up, I was looking for a reason to use it... A foreign gov deciding what I can use or being able to suddenly pull the plug on my tool makes it easier to choose the lesser quality. (And now I hope my own leaders won't start pulling models :p)
Why do I get the feeling the administration is doing this to buy a position in the AI companies before they go public.
If non US citizens shouldn't have the models - wouldn't that cause both Anthropic and OAI to fire non-citizens?
> wouldn't that cause both Anthropic and OAI to fire non-citizens?
They would do what the thousands of other companies do with their tens of thousands of engineers handling ITAR/EAR-regulated software/hardware every day: compartmentalize their workforces, buildings, and access.
because the administration has been repeating the same patterns over pretty much its entire existence.
Dont worry though, the rest of the entire world gets access to better chinese models :-), once they get a taste for those the US has lost their little trade game and the future truly belongs to China.
Its almost like they are serving it up on a silver platter.
ofc they are not, they are just betting all in their models will be better, which is unlikely. (just look at the chinese law and all the names atop of advanced AI papers...)
Sooo both OpenAI and Anthropic going bankrupt soon?
If they can’t freely sell access to their models and Chinese models catch up to Opus 4.8/GPT 5.5 in 6-8 months - then why pay OAI/Anthropic at all?
Worse: we'd be paying US companies to train models we'll never be able to use.
It will be much harder for Chinese models to close the gap than it is to keep the historical 6-9 months behind. Their models' performance are heavily propped up on distillation runs. The capital going to their frontier labs is 10x-100x smaller than US frontier labs.
Harder, but they’ll get access one way or another. And once on par - it’s game over
Basically the signal is that the total market for any US AI company is capped at however big the US market is. As non-US AI converges to Opus 4.8 level parity, whatever is still non-US consumer base shrinks towards zero.
The end game is tokens will be a commodity - doesn’t matter which provider you use.
How many people are going to buy a $10-20K rigs to run these open models?
The calculus is changing for non US, non Chinese users.
Hypothetically if the US continues to restrict their frontier models and adds a ban on Chinese/open models then it would to obliterate services like open router. American cloud companies would presumably be blocked from selling capacity to run banned models in this situation.
That causes a shortage of compute/gpu resources internationally and an oversupply of non-revenue generating hardware in the US.
If that happens then what percent of your salary is worth securing this compute worth? How much does the cost of a data centre chip change? It’s difficult to say.
Small businesses can easily buy them.
You’re talking $100k for entry level hw
I already have
20K won't buy you a rig for GPT 5.5
Why would they? Today you have datacenters in EU offering Chinese and European models from Deepseek v4 Pro and Mistral Medium down to some Qwen 3.6 35B for effectively peanuts compared to Anthropic.
> We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.
I'm very glad to see them say this explicitly and prominently.
I feel this could turn into a patronage system.
Want frontier intelligence? Better not defy the current administration, or your competitors will have access to a better model you could never use.
"We believe in broad access, and we plan to make GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna generally available in the coming weeks. As part of our ongoing engagement with the U.S. government, we previewed our plans and the models’ capabilities ahead of today’s launch. At their request, we are starting with a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners whose participation has been shared with the government, before releasing more broadly. During this preview, we will continue testing and coordinating closely with partners as we work toward broader availability. We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them. We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks, while we work with the Administration to develop the cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases."
This amount of courting the current administration is pretty scary imo.
> This amount of courting the current administration is pretty scary imo.
That’s ironic – I interpreted that paragraph with the opposite slant: positively. If that’s what the government mandates then these companies, in the end, have little choice, so was at least relieved to see them publicly pushing back.
>these companies, in the end, have little choice
They absolutely do have a choice, Anthropic and OpenAI could fight it in court. Iran showed Trump is a coward, he wouldn't risk tanking the only industry still keeping the stock market growing.
> Anthropic and OpenAI could fight it in court.
They did exactly that with supply chain risk designation, and look what it got them: the administration simply found another more effective way to punish them.
It’s all speculation but I think he would have no qualms about tanking the only industry keeping the stock market growing. But given Kushner’s OAI investments, Trump stands to benefit personally from not tanking the industry.
That's hardly a speculation that he cares very much about the stock market, more than any of his predecessors. It's also why he takes a L instead of going into an adventure in Tehran. Last but not least, "it's the economy, ..." is on everyone's mind, including his
“Wouldn’t it be a shame if we export controlled all of your models and revoked the visas and green cards of all of your non US researchers. You should really reconsider challenging our orders in court. Also remember you have 16% public support and if the president endorsed it a national data center moratorium would pass with bipartisan majorities.”
"Cool, cool, hey, what percentage of economic growth is directly attributable to the growth of our companies again? And thanks for revoking our researchers' permits, enjoy them helping out China!
Also, oops, looks like our model weights got leaked on 4chan. How unfortunate."
Pulling that last bit is how you actually go to prison. The natsec spooks don't play around.
Do it. Make the Republicans show how much they value the “free market” after all. Trump’s approval rating isn’t much higher.
“President Trump’s strong and decisive action on endorsing the passage of this legislation prevented millions of jobs being lost and addresses the inflation ordinary Americans are facing from datacenters cornering the market for hardware. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
I wonder what's going to happen when the administration rolls over to the OtherTeam(tm). If they've established a good relationship with Team A then Team B is automatically going to hate their guts.
Perhaps they estimate that the administration won’t change for a long long time.
2 years and 6 months is a long time, at least in the AI space.
NYT's The Daily covered this a few days ago. Has a few interesting details about what went on...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/podcasts/the-daily/trump-...
Sam playing the regulatory capture game.
seems pretty smart to me. opens doors and provides opportunities that those that don't court the government will miss out on. of course, if they're principled, that's okay (regardless of which admin it is), but the reality is most companies aren't. gotta get a leg up somehow.
current players in the space love the regulatory capture
There is no bad publicity! I wonder if OpenAI explicilty asked for this.
Anthropic's fear-mongering and marketing is the reason we have these restrictions in the first place.
Despite their virtue signaling, Anthropic is the only major lab that has never released an open weights model, has been caught intentionally nerfing a model after release (Opus 4.6), intentionally and silently degrades performance for suspected competitors and AI researchers, complains incessantly about distillation when everyone is doing it (and after they settled for pirating books), and wants to pull the ladder out from everyone trying to catch up.
They're anti-consumer and only concerned with holding the power themselves. I'm not a fan of Altman, but Anthropic is the worst actor in the space, and I hope they lose.
Hasn't OpenAI being doing it for a while too?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48465269
The common denominator between "GPT-2 is too dangerous to release" and Anthropic is Dario.
Sam Altman was doing interviews talking about p(doom). They all were requesting regulation just not this opaque ad hoc kind.
Ironically, Google is the company I'd prefer to have the frontier models.
> Anthropic's fear-mongering
I mean it's fear-mongering until it isn't. I think people have become a bit too comfortable with dismissing the dangers of misaligned AI as simply "marketing hype".
Anthropic is the lightning rod.
Everyone in the space was talking about the automation of work from about day 2. People couldn’t stop themselves from talking about the way it was going to end work, and tech firms were firing people left right and center over AI.
Notably, Anthropic is the firm that stuck to its guns with the US Government, meaning they likely believe in their own spiel.
What about openai's fear mongering, or googles, or JP Morgans, or Frank Herbert's, or Arthur C. Clarke's or Samuel Butler's?
If you can't envision plausible scenarios where very bad things happen because of a malevolent actor, ChatGPT 6, and a little bad luck - you need to think harder.
Yeah honestly I don't get any of the fear-mongering from any side. If access to intelligence and knowledge is scary to you, that's a you problem.
Is it going to change the world? Yes. In more positive ways than negative ways. Websites will continue to get hacked, as they are already getting hacked. People who are afraid of AI are really just afraid of change.
They aren't the current target for right wing hated.
This is pure openai though. I can call anthropic misguided, but openai is just slimy.
Do you feel the same way about FDA approvals?
I mean, it seems like common sense - a limited beta test before widespread rollout. I'm not convinced they'll ever come up with a good framework for dealing with the cyber & bio issues, but getting triggered by a beta test rollout seems overboard.
It is common sense, and with literally any other administration in the past century it would seem like a good idea.
I have zero confidence that this particular administration has any interest in regulating the industry for the good of the country, much less for the good of humanity. They will use regulation to maximize personal profit for themselves and their cronies, at the expense of the nation. I would not have thought that of any other US administration in the past 100 years.
In the longer run, it probably won't matter. If the level of corruption we see currently becomes the norm, then the US is facing much bigger problems than counter-productive industrial policy.
It has already become the norm
The FDA has incredibly detailed guidelines that need to be followed, and a clear process to be followed. This is none of that.
If you're arguing they should have believed the AI doomer hype years ago and developed decades of regs at the drop of a hat, sure, i guess you can. That's a topic for historians.
But, the question today is what to do today, a rolling deployment seems pretty hard to argue with.
I'd add, I think it's significant that we haven't seen any administration grandstanding on this specific issue - no Hegseth tweets etc.
The difference is that FDA approvals are a well-defined process with specific and actionable criteria for the release of a new product. Whereas this is the administration running on vibes and favouritism
I'm not going to defend the administration on most things, but your characterization isn't entirely fair. The record seems to suggest that the administration deferred to Amazon and the NSA, which seems sensible.
Perhaps you can fault them with not coming up with an objective framework earlier, but that's a different criticism.
150 years ago, Bayer Inc. was mass producing Heroine. 130 years ago Merck and Parke-Davis were mass producing Cocaine(TM) -- all with zero oversight. It would be another 50 years before we even had an FDA and another 50 before the FDA was a reasonably well-oiled machine with a solid set of processes and requirements. Even then, it couldn't really (and can't really today either) prevent these non-US companies (both Heroine and Cocaine were German) from making and selling elsewhere.
So I'm guessing as a result of this, FAANG and similar companies are going to have free access while the little guy will be left out.
Is there any concrete information on whether this would be an application process or perhaps for companies that meet certain criteria?
Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/trump-administration-asks-o...
This type of things is what frustates the people around, its like they are already trying to control an supposed to be open-source model and just for their own benefit. this is why CHINA will eventually rule the tech space.
Open source is looking great right now
This isn't going to save you unless you're ok being a criminal. There is nothing stopping the government from making open source versions of these models equally controlled.
And given how willy-nilly they are operating I see no reason they won't clamp down on open source. All it takes is someone with connections/political contributions wakes up one day and realizes that open source is a threat to their power or bottom line and it will be declared an imminent threat with no oversight or debate.
They can try. Will the courts go along?
They're trying to build case law for this with VPNs. They'll likely succeeed.
The Supreme Court is captured by the Epstein class, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.
It’s looking very fragile from a legal point of view. Ownership of compute and software freedom will be next k the chopping block after control of networks that’s occurring at the moment.
Less so in EU than in US.
I would not be so confident, though I certainly hope!
America
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpn...
Europe
https://cybernews.com/privacy/age-gates-vpn-ban-europe-inter...
It's looking good until you start to see the US gov forcing cloudflare to block hugging face and others.
They'll just make it a crime to run the models unless they authorize you (classifying it as a munition, like they tried to do with encryption), and if your power bill is suspicious you'll find yourself in jail.
Any company providing the models will be deemed a threat to national security.
No need to block the download.
Citizens were and are free to use the technology (cryptography and every other export-controlled item); your "power bill is suspicious, go to jail" FUD doesn't really track with history.
> Any company providing the models will be deemed a threat to national security.
Any company providing specifically-controlled models to foreigners would hypothetically be prosecuted.
There's a famous poem called "First They Came" about how slippery this slope can be in a heated political climate.
I don't believe for a second this ends with "foreigners", this is about setting up infrastructure for controlling the technology. Foreigners are just the current excuse.
Note that TFA mentions they are supposedly hand-picking access to whoever they want, based on whatever criteria they want, already.
Ah, invoking Godwin. "First they came" in 1976 when ITAR was first passed, or maybe "first they came" in the 1940s when we didn't export Proximity Fuzes, right?
Countries are free to prevent exports of technology. Equating export controls with the Holocaust is disgusting.
The comparison to cryptography export restrictions is absolutely valid, but is that really favorable?
I'd argue that 70's cryptography export bans in hindsight look completely misguided, futile, burdensome and pointless in the end (which is why most of it was lifted/reverted over the last decades).
I don't see how AI-models are much different; it's certainly a better comparison than the fuzes, because we're both not at war right now and the underlying principle is already out of the bag.
Cryptography export restrictions absolutely worked until the internet became commonplace, and then they became futile and were removed.
Just like every other export restriction on technology: once the actual cat is out of the actual bag, they are often relaxed.
The "underlying principles" here are hundreds of billions of dollars in R&D - which is what is required to compete with the frontier models.
> not at war right now
We weren't technically at war during the Cold War, either.
I did not bring in Godwin, but I guess he's here now :D.
I'm more trying to invoke GRRM. This is a Game of Thrones: billionaire CEO's complain about each other to the government to get their competitors blocked/tripped up with acts of fiat, which is what happened with Fable 5.
And in the linked post, it says GPT-5.6 access decisions are supposedly just hand picked.
The stories about export controls are just songs they sing to the peasants.
There are claims that Chinese companies are mining + reselling Claude subscriptions like crazy anyway.
> I did not bring in Godwin
Who is the "They" in "First They Came" referring to exactly?
> There are claims that Chinese companies are mining + reselling Claude subscriptions like crazy anyway.
Which will become a felony with export-controlled models, which is why identity verification is becoming a thing.
Nobody was compared to the nazis, so Godwin's law is not yet relevant in this discussion.
I'm sure cooky old Martin Niemöller just dreamt that poem up out of nowhere and his time spent in in Dachau had nothing to do with it.
This isn’t a random Nazi analogy, it’s a cautionary tale about how stepwise exclusions plus bystander apathy work. The whole point is to think about it before it’s too late.
Why do they need to "force Cloudflare" to do anything?
Why wouldn't they just tell Hugging Face that they need to abide export restrictions directly - they're an American company?
Doesn't sound dystopian enough without a second compelled entity?
Because the models don't necessarily need to be hosted on hugging face. You can create a Model Card repository containing your README and from there you include instructions or a custom script in your repository that allows authenticated users to download the model.
> Doesn't sound dystopian enough without a second compelled entity?
This is the second snarky question you've made today, the other in relation to the export limit.
> Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?
Both are assumptions you are making and don't provide much in the way of constructive conversation, if I'm wrong about something it's alright to just point it out.
> don't necessarily need to be hosted on hugging face.
Export restrictions don't split generally hairs on technicalities like "hosting" - the "but magnet links aren't actually torrents!" defense doesn't fly when $1M fines and federal felonies are at stake. All distribution or "causing" distribution to restricted entities is prohibited.
> This is the second snarky question you've made today
It's not snark: why would Cloudflare somehow be legally or technically relevant in the context of two American companies distributing export-restricted materials? HN seems to love the "Cloudflare controls the internet!" "NSA bad!" trope.
> Export restrictions don't split generally hairs on technicalities like "hosting" - the "but magnet links aren't actually torrents!" defense doesn't fly when $1M fines and federal felonies are at stake. All distribution or "causing" distribution to restricted entities is prohibited.
So why would open models that are not in the US be restricted ? The government would need to subpoena each model that was in the US individually, why would they do that when they could simply pull clout over CloudFlare, which we have seen governments do around the world. Either CloudFlare comply, or they're added a block list.
> https://cybersecurityadvisors.network/2025/04/15/la-liga-blo...
This is not a new thing, anyway this discussion has become too argumentative for an off the cuff comment about government over-reach.
> So why would open models that are not in the US be restricted ?
Nobody said they would be?
> subpoena each model that was in the US individually
What does this even mean? Where did 'subpoenas' come into this conversation and how would that be useful?
> simply pull clout over CloudFlare
Cloudflare is an American CDN. Hugging Face is an American catalog/distributor (whatever semantic game you want to play) of models. Some of those models could be declared export-regulated. No subpoena is necessary to prevent Hugging Face or Cloudflare from distributing ITAR/EAR software, declaring any model as such, nor is trying to block something heavy-handedly at the CDN level necessary: Hugging Face will gladly comply with fine-grained requests.
"La Liga" obviously isn't American, which is why Spanish courts are compelling their ISPs (who they actually do control) to block Cloudflare IPs. Cloudflare's customers - who are likely not Spanish - are distributing materials Spanish courts do not approve of. If Spain had the means to compel Cloudflare or their customers in question to do anything, they wouldn't need to take such a blunt approach and block other legitimate customers. Cloudflare isn't involved in that equation and this isn't at all equivalent.
I'm going to give you some free advice. Don't assume so much. It's usually a bad start to your point of view, if you assume, you only know what's in your head and not the facts of the matter so sometimes it can come across as if you're saying something you have insight into, but when other people know better, it sounds quite ignorant.
Honestly. It's been sage advice for me. And maybe for others.
Edit : There's no need to be so argumentative also, I'm not 'against' you or your point, just pointing out some other pov. We're here to discuss.
seriously, ordered more hardware this week, as it gets more dystopian every week
wondering when more people will raise their voice and get engaged
History shows that people generally start speaking out about things after it's too late to do so.
More specifically, the masses here are well satisfied with proverbial bread and circuses.
We won't see mass action until enough people have literally nothing left to lose. For now, folks have plenty to risk and lose by taking action. There is not nearly enough homelessness or starvation yet for people to rise up. The masses are surprisingly tolerant of authoritarian oppression so long as food can keep being put on the table.
On a bright note, there are signs of bipartisan anger at government and corruption. This needs to be channeled effectively by the people instead of the powerful or politicians. The key is to connect the problems to the corruption, many already see it this way.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
the many can defeat the money
It's the year of the open source AI model is the new 'It's the year of the Linux Desktop'. It's not and never will be for 90% of people
That’s not true at all. While not as good as proprietary models they are still very good and can do A LOT, certainly more than their cost would make it seem.
It’s only a matter of time before companies start to acknowledge the huge cost of tokens and look for a cheaper alternative with basic cost-benefit analysis.
My F500 company is getting local infrastructure going to host open models and I’m sure many will just switch to bedrock + the best open models.
It’s foolish for companies to let three companies dictate the price of tokens, I just don’t think they are aware of this now by and large.
GLM 5.2 is competitive with Opus 4.6.
I thought it was better than that? It matches 4.8 in many evals and even beat Fable in Design Arena by a very healthy margin.
Well if us gov would block people from using windows or macos, then it may well be.
Brilliant strategy if the goal is to make sure the next major breakthrough happens anywhere but in the US.
I believe OpenAI actually wanted their next model to be seen as a potential cybersecurity threat because they were jealous that Mythos got that label
US will ban Chinese models and try to get their allies to do the same. Just like they did with Huawei. Alternatively, they'll put up legal roadblocks that open models are unlikely to jump over due to costs or other reasons.
Otherwise they're putting US frontier labs at a huge disadvantage by preventing them from recouping costs on their biggest models.
How much more will OpenAI and Anthropic models cost when they're the only AI you can legally use?
Regulation at the state level (which is what Sacks and the toadies were so against) is far superior to this bc it is local and bad ideas only affect those in one state!
Bad Federal regulation has a much larger blast radius.
Let’s hope Chinese models save us from this. BYD is trying to save us from Elon but 100% tariffs are welfare keeping Elon afloat.
This will limit a lot how much they can invest in a model. Because of it is better than the current it will have less and less users until only the government can use it.
Job Interviews in 2026:
My biggest quality? I am an American citizen and a trusted partner.
Worst quality? I am on a waitlist for Mythos preview
Yes I’m looking forward to tokenmaxxing together and looking forward for your answer!
Last year Tim Cook gifted Trump a custom, one-of-a-kind glass plaque with a 24-karat gold base [1]. (Cook needed a policy outcome that would protect Apple's supply chain costs and avoid a costly 100% tariff on certain chips and components.)
You may have to make similar offerings if you want to use the latest version of ChatGPT.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0O9QhwIkj5w
Yeah that and a $600 billion commitment for advance manufacturing in the US. just a minor concession
All you have to do is pinky promise, you don’t have to actually do it.
Meanwhile china treats this as just another tech, among many. They might release better models without any fanfare. Difference between a state ran by civil engineers vs financial engineers
While purely speculation, I believe the same thing would have happened, albeit even sooner, under a Harris administration. Government intervention was inevitable and it will have to be worked out through the law.
LLMs have two avenues. One is the realm of self improvement in fields with verifiable output like programming and math. The other is natural language where they can't generalize super well, and therefore need a lot of new training data. Today new data means interactions with an LLM, which is what only the leading chat providers have. In both cases they will continue to improve and slowly replace white collar jobs. The biggest bottleneck currently is lack of hearing and seeing capabilities which isolates LLM training data input to entered text mostly. Once they start interacting with people by observing their behavior, almost all knowledge will be trained on. Then they will become adept lawyers and psychologists. Behavioural understanding can be only 5 years away. After that they will be limited by their navigation , i.e., robotics.
I'm waiting for that government subcommittee hearing where they are supposed to decide if my new cpu design is big endian or little endian. And they can't seem to decide if it should be coded in octal or hexadecimal. There's a separate committe deciding if the cpu clocke's phase 2 should be 90-degrees or 180 degrees different. There's a special group trying to decide how may accumulators the cpu should have. And there's a markdown already going on to decide if the flags register should have a separate flags for republicans and democrats.
> markdown
Hey now, this is Government we're talking about. There's no markdown, it must be MS Word .docx in Times New Roman, emailed back and forth.
OpenAI/Anthropic are begging to be restricted because it's great marketing and it creates a precedent to permanently ban open weights models. The problem is nobody in government believes in/cares about commodity pricing of truly open AI and how much it could help the world economy and prosperity.
Companies like Microsoft have been asleep at the wheel in terms of security for decades and now there's a model that can identify where they've been careless. That's not a "nuclear bomb level threat" or whatever Anthropic wants to call it, it's reckless carelessness by the existing companies.
Asleep at the wheel?
China, Russia etc ban Microsoft software from government laptops, indicating there are intentional back doors.
In 2008 there was a scandal about how every software contractor (including the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Oracle) working for the US government had a rootkit installed on all their systems. In 2020, there was a scandal on how people just pretended to remove that rootkit and had been covering it up since the earlier scandal.
The US intelligence agencies claim it's from Russia, but those agencies always claim it's from Russia. Since 2020 the press just stopped talking about it, with no hint of anything being solved.
Nobody needs intentional back doors.
Cyberpunk 2077 is such an accurate picture of the future. Megacorps will own and control everything, we will be lucky to get the leftover scraps.
CP 2077 belongs to a 80s franchise, it was futuristic back then. Since the 2000s, cyberpunk the 80's genre is an accurate representation of the present and past. The future looks bleaker now, with fewer romanticized decorations like flying cars and social dynamics being worse than what the cyberpunk grandfathers imagined. For example "low life" being way more controlled which is exactly what both masses and elites wanted.
In retrospect it's obvious that the cyberpunk authors were mistakenly projecting certain parts of their present into the future (relative freedom of the masses and increasing rate of "traditional" engineering), and didn't consider second order effects and political action/reaction.
The downside of marketing your product as being too powerful to be safe is that people start taking it seriously. I’m surprised there isn’t more discussion about the contradiction. If it really is the end of labor and a deadly weapon then export controls actually make sense.
So which position should the government take? The one it’s doing? Or that LLMs aren’t actually key to national security.
Dictatorship. Complete with a trashy despot. Coming to a country near you.
I'm finding it extremely hard not to have a cynical perspective on all of this. There's an idea that I've been mapping onto this whole this, which could be called something like effective knowledge. Regular old knowledge is just information, or access to information. Effective knowledge is the integration of all that information into an understanding that can be acted upon. That requires things like time, money, and involves the usual socioeconomic hurdles that have separated people into groups like "laborers" and "knowledge workers". Sure, in theory "anyone" could read textbooks and learn, but only a select few have the time, money, mentors in their lives, and so forth to really do that.
The rise in capability of LLMs over the past year has basically removed a lot of these boundaries for people. Learning, building, and experimenting is a lot easier when you have a capable partner like Claude to help you along the way. Claude doesn't always get everything right, and you have to be a skeptic, but it's a lot better than nothing.
When I see the government restricting access to LLMs (or Anthropic as they were doing with Mythos before the whole Fable debacle), I basically just see the same old pattern of the ruling class moving to protect their advantage by keeping the great masses in ignorance. Broadening access to LLMs (i.e. effective knowledge) would put everyone on a more level playing field. But we can't have that, because politics, nations, the economy, blah blah reasons reasons. Guess utopia will just have to wait a bit longer.
But then again, this feels a lot like cryptography export controls. Those controls are in place, but I doubt anyone really thinks they work or make much of a difference. Software is not like nuclear weapons, and a data center is a much smaller lift than a Uranium enrichment facility. So maybe this is just a temporary roadblock. But let me tell you, I sure am ready for it to feel more like the government is working for (not against) the people.
The new normal for the next decade: You must protect the public from us and all others, and we are your closest ally so we make your rules for us and our competition. This wasn’t a lucky outcome. They laid the groundwork years ago with the AI “ethics” movement and this was the play all along.
Whether or not you assume bad intent of the government here, the amount of money the export control on Fable has cost Anthropic has to be unbelievably high
Eg I expect I would have paid more than 2x per day what I spent the past few weeks, and if gpt 5.6 comes out and is competitive that's going to absolutely gain market share.
An unbelievably costly turn of events for them
To all of those thinking that GLM/OSS will save you — keep in mind that the model size needed to compete here likely requires an NVL72 or similar — 72GPU dedicated infra to run a hosted model. This will almost certainly get regulated by the gov’t as well, and even if not so there will only be a handful of companies that can afford it.
Remember when you could only get the Netscape version with good encryption if you were in the US, because the government had classified encryption as a munition? And that the rest of the world had no trouble matching or exceeding that level of encryption?
Is this going to be like that?
Do we know how much choice OpenAI has with the arrangement? They call it a "request", but could they have been ordered directly?
Will these ad hoc decisions by the U.S. government, without law or clear process, not hurt the coming IPO's of Anthropic and OpenAI?
I guess Orpheus fined 50% of Eurydice's soul for early withdrawal attempt - No take backsies is clearly in the Contract.Upheld.But Orpheus gets a coupon for free ressurection (Void in thrace:There can be sage).
The irony to have the EU criticised for regulation on one side but complete government control of access on the other.
Damn. This is the second post today that just disappeared from the top of the landing page. This is 100% manipulated.
HN is the most manipulated front page on the internet.
Top spot on HN is worth like $10M per hour or something, of course it’s manipulated, you should expect it to be
That extrapolates to $87B per year for just the top spot on HN, more than all of Instagram's ad revenue, or about 40x Twitter's. Or $240M per day, about 1/3 of the ad spend on Superbowl, just for the top spot.
I guess we need to kick start SETI@Home like compute donations for training models.
So as a European, I'm being blocked from all new models apparently. I'm a big fan of using Claude Code for my sideprojects and for those I don't really care about sharing context. Is there aything that comes close to Claude Code and is still affordable?
I think there can be smarter ways to fix security issues right. Like you let AI loose in a gated environment fix all things it flags and than release the model ? Any new changes you make you now anyway have the AI vet it ?
> while AI companies and the administration work out a longer-term plan for regulation on the sector.
It’s not really the executives job or role to create new regulatory structures. If they want something durable, that lasts more than one administration, they need actual laws passed by Congress.
This post isn't even on the landing page for some reason.
It's called ghosted, shadow banned, too sensitive / shitshow; Basically a multiplier of 0.1 is added to this post's ranking, or similar, and it will need thousands of upvote instead of hundreds to show.
It's commonly applied silently to posts that simply don't look good or become a nightmare to manage the narrative of. It's a healthy way to manage a community while looking transparent.
I think it's sucky and cheap, but at the same time it's also the best solution.
If they do it, they should mark the post as such as give an explanation. Otherwise you never know if uncle "Sam" called and asked it to be treated as such.
"All publicity is good publicity"
Whilst this policy is driving countries around the world to develop new AI strategies as USA cannot be relied upon, on the plus side for OpenAI, the publicity of this will help drive customer sales.
China seems to be handling themselves just fine.
> driving countries around the world to develop new AI strategies
Unfortunately Europe is completely incapable of doing anything whatsoever to counter this.
Well, as long as the government is deciding, that’s alright then. The US government is a paragon of incorruptible integrity and even-handed, thoroughly considered reasoning. We’re in good hands, folks.
It's pretty easy to solve. You just keep pushing new versions of Opus 4.8....
Fair enough, i'm off to use GLM. Let's see how this plays out US gov
The rest of the word at some point will increase chinese AI company. I am using some of their services and for many task they are good enough . It can be a winning strategy for a short period and a disaster in long term. Xi and China i think , are very happy of these decisions. They are building their model and their hardware. Even if for now it is subpar ( i don't know, it is an hypotesys), money that us will lose for this choice will make Chinese products improve a lot .
There is an assumption that everyone is making here - that China will not do the same. It is entirely possible, that China restricts their frontier models - as and when they are developed - to only Chinese citizens. And India follows along.
IMO AI is different from everything else. It is a weapon as potent as nuclear. It is only natural that it be treated as one.
China already restricts ai models in China. Every model is already submitted to the prc for approval. The us is a follower here
im crying bro snuck in india
> We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default.
Really glad to see some reasonably prominent pushback against this government overreach.
The information has been reporting that the government wants to individually approve which companies get access and when.
Imagine the wonderful opportunities for corruption and influence peddling, not to mention, excluding any companies that don’t support Trump
A couple of lines in a press release isn’t “pushback”.
Anthropic broke with US Gov over wanting restrictions and n how they use their model. OpenAI was more than happy to bend over backwards and hide behind a misleading press release.
The idea that OpenAI is the one who are meaningfully pushing back against the USGov is risible.
Non-paywall: https://archive.is/PCQQl
Great so we just need to wait for China to catch up I guess
I can't tell if this is bad for the big labs, or good because it means they now have an excuse for not showing meaningful progress in the lead ups to their IPOs.
What would that IPO look like when they can’t sell their product to users and are hard capped on how much money they can earn?
A private holding company and multiple smaller subsidiaries going public.
It'll only be good if they do get to release it to the general public in a format that is not overly nerfed.
If they don't get to release, its bad. It paints a picture that we are largely stuck with current capabilities for a while and the party is over. All those promises of "you'll get to fire everyone" now go concretely unfulfilled.
Their entire valuations rely on the assumption of continued massive breakthroughs in intelligence and capabilities, and having revenue on part with taking a share of the GPD provided by white collar workers as they get replaced.
It will reduce usage and spur investments into competitors from the EU and likely other large nations, most likely hurting these upcoming IPOs.
Does anyone else think this is all just FUD, smoke, mirrors and marketing hype? "Look, our model is so good that the government told us to stop" "Our model is so good that the government is going to control who has access to it".
Come on.
I think occam's razor can be applied here. And like everything else, its about money. I don't know exactly what the play will be here, but this doesn't sound like this technology is too powerful and more like billions of $ lost investments need to be made up somehow without the people getting annoyed about the government bailing these guys (AI companies, investors, etc.) out.
Superintelligence for me and not for thee.
Even if these models are so strong that they become a security threat if in the wrong hands this arbitrary and intransparent regulation worries me. Not for the current SOTA model vendors but for the open weight models.
I have always wondered how AI industry is not in a (partial) bubble because open weight models will substantially eat into their revenue (rather sooner than later). But with this ('bro') regulation it seems that an easy strategy could be to regulate this problem away, especially easy to convince everyone that those chines models are truly evil.
David Sacks has been silent for a long time.. So much for being the big “AI czar”. Does he have any influence left in the government?
This makes no sense, it only will embolden any attempts by china and other countries to move away from depending on US AI tech
Serious question, what are my alternatives?
What are the odds this is going to become another avenue for grift - magically any companies the trump family invests in are going to get access. Any companies that aren't sufficiently 'loyal' to the regime will have to wait or may never get access.
Without access to leading models, I think open source LLM development will also slow down. I'm not sure which portion of their success right now is due to RLAF and distillation but it's certainly not zero.
All they had to do is to keep their mouths shut.
Wowzers. It's been some time since export controls were something i'd see in software. Interesting times.
Here's an unpopular opinion: this might be the only way to deploy advanced models. A lot of people compare advanced AI with nuclear weapons. Creating white lists of users that are allowed to use advanced AI feels wrong. It feels against everything that the Constitution stands for. That men are created equal and they are free to pursue their happiness. Now they are free to pursue that happiness only if the US Government signs off on that. It hurts to only think of that. But I'm afraid there's no other way. These models, in the wrong hands, can result in unfathomable devastation.
How do I know? Dario Amodei said that when he explained why Anthropic has to limit the US Government's usage of its models [1]:
If the US Government can't be trusted with such uses, then how can you trust millions or billions of users with arbitrary usage?[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
They can only slow down open models and open weight models from getting as good as Mythos/Fable and GPT 5.6. Then what?
They will all get distilled, down trained, and the smaller models will get better too.
I don't think open weight model will get as good as Mythos/Fable or GPT 5.6. Not in the next few years, and perhaps never.
The Chinese Communist Party is not any happier than the US Government to see millions/billions of people being able to use incredibly dangerous models.
Key Escrow 2.0
In a scenario where some breakthrough in fusion energy will be discovered I envision:
- instant, total world war if it's not coming from USA
- let's finish all oil's reserve first otherwise
related:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/brief-history-book-bu...
Less money to US AI tech. This could be good long term to move us away from them.
Can anyone explain to me (a non US citizen) how this won't be found to be unconstitutional (eventually)?. I would think it falls under freedom of expression. And given the attempted classification of encryption as a munition that failed, I don't see how this can possibly last?
Well it seems both Anthropic and OpenAI are consciously choosing to do this, which means, for now, neither plan on suing. So if no one sues, how could it be unconstitutional?
Both companies 100% helped create this situation with their incessant safety and cybersecurity hype. Reaping what they sowed.
I think they're pretty happy to have government sharing some of the big societal responsibility, honestly.
constitutional rights only apply to us citizens i believe
LOOOOOOOOOOOL
USA RIP.
Where’s YN calling this a “marketing stunt”?
This isn’t just about AI: they do not want you to privately use computers at all, in a way that cannot be surveilled. They want to extinguish all forms of general purpose computing and restrict you to walled gardens of apps and all code written via AI with the government-in-the-middle. It will be illegal to write code by hand, only people with “bad intentions” do that, because otherwise, why not just use AI like a sane person?
The new propaganda campaign: YOU WOULDN'T WRITE A VARIABLE...
Does this mean that the government will compensate OpenAI for lost revenue?
Thanks to the US government for helping kill Anthropic and OpenAI by preventing them from recouping any R&D money from new models. Doing god's work.
what's weird, is my employees abroad (outside the US) have access to Anthropic Fable .... so what exactly did we prevent by limiting United States citizens from having access ....
Local AI and open-weight models are becoming something to no longer ignore. I've started a community around this @tokenstead on X and tokenstead.ai YouTube and much more coming. DGX Spark on route, RTX 5090s and much more exciting builds. We need to have AI sovereignty!
So I guess the Chinese government will decide what model I use next
It will only be a couple weeks relax. 5.5 works perfectly fine for most tasks.
never thought being a script kiddie would make me smart, but here we are in 2026.
i had one place, they were using all these shady pay with a credit card for "points" to do these web gui things that were... basically nmap, dig, etc?
so i wrote up a small shell script that took in the servers our (often nonprofit) clients wanted scanned...
and so we could lower our costs and free up analyst time -- but sadly they often found out they had out of date windows boxen they couldn't afford to fix, and we'd have to settle for getting them onto MFA, using password managers and basics like that.
people overvalue AI imho. people are getting weak, they don't teach themselves the concepts that would allow them to make best use of AI.
anyways, i think the type of person freaking out is the same who's been cutting and pasting from stack overflow rather than learning enough to grab a book or read up on a library to get the needful done.
but hey, what do i know? i'm just some freak on hacker news
(proudly writing w/o AI :-))
U.S. government will decide who will feed the chinese competition.
They already helped Russia, gave more power and planning to unfreeze assets of Iran. Helping China achieve AI dominance is a logical next step.
It seems like sota ai will go the way of reserve antibiotics
This will be a thing of the past sooner than you expect.
I’m generally prefer republicans, but not in favor of this!
Oh no, the powerful tool that can be used for good or evil is restricted by the people whose job it is to restrict dangerous things! This is the end of freedom! We're all doomed!
Ah, so the specter of Biden doing it was bad, but this administration putting into practice is great.
It's good that we can be sure the policy will be fairly applied for the best of reasons and any donations for new ballrooms, ponds, jumbos etc immediately before access is granted will be entirely coincidental.
Is anyone in favor of this?
MAGA
Amazon, NSA, apparently a few other 3 letter agencies around the world, but the lattermost probably did not expect access to their agencies would be limited but appreciate that they aren't going to be exposed as security frauds by just anyone
Yes. I could not possibly be more radicalized against the current administration, and I'm in favor of this. Future models will be even more dangerous than the current ones and we must build processes now to control their release when necessary. I don't like how informal this process is, and I absolutely despise the people running it, but I strongly prefer it to no process.
Just seems like gatekeeping for graft and favors / corruption.
"for the benefit of all humanity *"
* with big pockets
Can we all boycott Anthropic now for persisting with a 5 year long fear-mongering campaign that is destroying the US AI industry and creating a new form of intelligence-access underclass?
Or are we going to play the whole "you guys suck... but I'll keep using your product" game?
This will be the end of the US's short-lived AI supremacy. OpenAI and Anthropic are already wildly unprofitable, cutting off the world-wide income stream is just fucking bad business.
Don't worry, their pals in the government will bail them out.
But it is odd that this administration has learned absolutely nothing about the mid- to long-term effects of export restrictions on other countries' ability to compete with the US.
You mean pension funds will bail them out after they IPO? :)
Mid and long term effects will come with next administration - which can be blamed for the failure (even if it has nothing to do with it) -> so those who caused the problem can be voted back to power.
> bail them out
You misspelled “nationalize them” (while we privatize Social Security and probably Medicare)
Only the bad parts of capitalism, only the bad parts of socialism. This is what policy looks like in the 2020s.
huge momentum for local and open-source LLMs
So much for the party of small government.
>“We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them,” the blog post said. “We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks.”
Arent these the same clowns who keep saying that the government needs to regulate AI to protect society [from their competitors] or whatever? And im not just talking about back when they used to be a nonprofit, Altman was still using that line post-sellout too.
+1 point to China!
In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over the sovereignty.
The US gov sees these AI companies as bartering power, not as innovation. Wouldn’t you as a parent always want what’s best for your child, not for yourself?
It also feels like they can’t just relocate out of the country, as the administration will surely sanction anyone from business within the country again. These firms are so over inflated with evaluations and opex, they’ve dug themselves into a corner.
This is not to say regulation does not exist in any other country, but it’s clear now after what’s happening at Anthropic + OAI that the US gov has taken these companies hostage.
This is only further playing into the hands of open source and the outside models; the US gov is going to be to blame for when they all lose the race to low cost/free.
> +1 point to China!
Which, like the US, uses export controls when it finds them advantageous: https://nam.org/china-imposes-export-controls-on-u-s-mineral...
> In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over my sovereignty.
So, locate in China, where every company of importance is essentially required in practice to maintain ties to the CCP?
I personally think the US has gone too far with its use of export controls and sanctions as a political tool, but it's foolish to believe that it's different anywhere else on the planet.
In China, it has even been reported that top AI talent is restricted from overseas travel.
https://www.thinkchina.sg/technology/china-tightens-control-...
Bottom line: if you're working on cutting-edge technology that is deemed to be of critical national security importance and has military or dual use implications, you're going to be a hostage no matter where you go.
You wrongly assumed I implied these firms relocate to China. We are all aware of how China operates and controls its assets.
AI has long existed in many countries around the world without this type of behavior from the government. Deepmind in the UK, Mistral in France, DeepL in Germany - the governments don’t seem to be forcing employees to get their deploys approved by a government official.
My argument is that the US gov does not like that these companies have too much influence which they do not feel they can mandate. It’s slowing the entire country down at a very critical sink or swim inflection point in this tech.
> You wrongly assumed I implied these firms relocate to China. We are all aware of how China operates and controls its assets.
Then why write "+1 point to China!" and not "+1 point to the UK, France and Germany"?
> Deepmind in the UK, Mistral in France, DeepL in Germany - the governments don’t seem to be forcing employees to get their deploys approved by a government official.
The UK, France and Germany all have their own export controls rules, so if a company in these countries comes up with a model that those governments deem to be of significant enough importance, they also have the means to exercise greater control over them as well.
The latest models from Anthropic and OpenAI are said to be the most advanced in the world. Agree or disagree, like it or not, the powers that be in the US determined that there is sufficient justification to control their export. Under long-standing and perfectly legal export control laws, the US has the ability to issue such orders.
In the case of Anthropic, the company chose to reverse providing public access to Fable because it said it could not comply with the requirement that non-US nationals (even those residing in the US) be restricted from accessing Fable.
> It’s slowing the entire country down at a very critical sink or swim inflection point in this tech.
You might or might not be right, but I think many people would argue that "move fast and break things" is risky when it comes to AI. I can't say that the current administration is genuinely concerned about the broad societal impacts of AI but if the effect of their brand of greater oversight is that companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have to slow down, it might not be a bad thing for humanity.
I think it’s pretty clear why they’re abiding by this:
-the US is the only place where you can raise the kinds of money you need to run a lab like this.
-a government that won’t let you sell products to customers abroad will probably object even more to you moving abroad.
Even if you made the move abroad, that government might no longer let you access US data centers.
-This basically affects OpenAI and Anthropic, which make the only LLMs most people consider frontier nowadays. Since most open weights models rely on distillation of frontier models, it may genuinely entrench those companies more.
It may be playing into the hands of open source OAI/Anthropic dependencies start to look more dangerous, but it also makes building better OSS models harder.
The advantages the AI labs rely on might be less durable than a proprietary process in industrial manufacturing, but it’s still meaningful.
I think the bigger reckoning will come from a different angle: tokens will eventually need to cover cost.
That will likely mean multiplying prices compared to today. And companies already complain now!
Model orchestration and smaller models that can run locally or cheaply will become more important in my opinion.
Right now, you can still default to GPT/Claude and it’s kind of fine, but that will have to change.
The elephant in the room is that the US AI firms should not be as valuable as they are. They should not require the sort of capital they are seeking, the amount of employees, the amount of offices and resources..but they are so steeped in investor interests - why stop being fed?
Many Americans want AI to fail. The US gov wants to control AI. The AI companies are running out of things to do, and are shipping product after product after product to keep the perceived productivity narrative alive.
At this rate I would not be surprised to see an OAI/Anthropic merger just to throw everything AI the US has to offer to the global markets.
Whether they’re over-valued and over-resourced is a big question. I think that will be answered when eventual price hikes happen and people shift which AI they use and/or what they use it for.
We’re still in the “5$ airport Ubers thanks to VC money” era of AI
The only way they don't lose business is if the government blocks Chinese models.
> I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully.
They literally asked for this.
> AI firms are abiding by this peacefully
What are they going to do about it? Might makes right.
They've already done what little they can: pull access to their models wholesale rather than adopt an export compliance regime.
For access email: jlarson@openai.com
you've been sitting on a HN account since 2009 and this is your first comment? how many of these do you have socked away?
Digital preppers ...
Starting to sound logical right about now ...
Yeah this is wild wtf
What is the incentive of the U.S. government? Is it to prevent adversaries from accessing this powerful technology? Because of security concerns? Or is there a fear that European, Asian, Latin American, and other companies could use it to build competitive products? What happened to free trade? What about all of humanity advancing and making progress?
So, where's the export restrictions?
Update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48690101
Those taking issue with the clear deference to the current U.S. administration would seemingly prefer it be the exact same degree of preemptive compliance and collaboration, just done behind closed doors as it was with the Biden administration. The sausage is apparently far more palatable when you only find out about the overreach, pressuring, implied threats, and censorship years later in House Judiciary Committees. Or even better if you don’t through use of NSL gag orders or implied threat of lawfare!
Looks like China wins the AI race
Every sane business needs to get out of the reach of that administration as soon as possibly
Top 2 comments fail to acknowledge the elephant in the room.
It's not about the tech. We have a corrupt administration gatekeeping two powerful models for companies set to go public soon.
I bet the models are powerful.
I also bet there is a lot of money being exchanged, too, for keeping the bubble big, so certain people will profit.
Trump doesn't care about the people. He cares about himself.
All these dorks think they're Iron Man. Guess they're on the Civil War stage of his character development.
There's a huge difference between 'pro market' and 'buddies with some big businesses' and this administration is making it very clear, at least to those who would see.
https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/47857230937/luigi-zi...
Of course the idiots in Washington have bought the hype - hook, line, and sinker.
The party in power is known for being pro-regulation so it makes sense /s
Age verification for social media.
Approval lists for AI models.
Two sides of the same coin. The administration is taking the opportunity now on the back of fear mongering done by the labs. The labs get regulatory lock-in, the govt gets surveillance. Everybody (that matters) wins.
Gotta say, I'm really annoyed that the corruption of the government is directly responsible for what new toys I'm allowed to play with.
Wow.. Okay so it's official now that the playbook is "we will try to prevent anyone who we don't like to use advanced tech".
I understand if its military hardware and software, that's the property of the US government however this is the property of a private company.. Now seemingly being commandeered and issued at the will of the government, sounds very Russian/Chinese to me.
Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?
The overwhelming majority of export-controlled items are made by private corporations: the US government itself makes exceedingly little in comparison.
The missiles Raytheon makes are export-controlled too, and they're not somehow "property of the US government" - this isn't China.
Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?
> Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?
Try every weapons system, encrypted radio system, FPGAs with high-bandwidth transceivers, lithography equipment, etc. etc. etc. There's plenty of precedent.
> Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?
No, infact I'm a proponent of open models and being able to run them locally, it just feels strange that a consumer product would be under the same restrictions as military grade equipment and tech which is specifically designed for warfare.
> Try every weapons system, encrypted radio system, FPGAs with high-bandwidth transceivers, lithography equipment, etc. etc. etc. There's plenty of precedent.
If it's the same equivalent then my issue is just that, it feels like trying to restrict the useage of RSA because it could be used by bad actors.
> If it's the same equivalent then my issue is just that, it feels like trying to restrict the useage of RSA because it could be used by bad actors.
RSA was practically impossible to control (an implementation is what, 100 lines in any language?) and the global benefits outweighed the cost and futility associated with restrictions.
AI laboratories with hundreds of billions of dollars in funding aren't cropping up in every country in the world, and their products and services are easily controlled and not easily replicated.
This is where AI doomerism has taken us. I also hate LLM abuse, but pretending that they are going to destroy humanity has opened the door for eventual police state level control over computing. It’s hard enough fighting off the “think of the children” idiots, now we have to push back against hyperventilating technophobes who think the world is going to end unless we get computing under control. All while the political elites rub their hands in anticipation.
That was always the playbook
> Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?
I'd argue US is not very democratic country given how many of what govt does goes against people's wishes. Same as UK
> I'd argue US is not very democratic country given how many of what govt does goes against people's wishes. Same as UK
That could be argued but the core principle is freedom of commerce and private companies get a lot of runway. This seems completely counter to tha.
The UK is a lot more compassionate about people’s wishes, it’s not nearly as bureaucratic and polarizing “democracy” as the US. Laws in the UK are passed quickly, and feedback is always considered. Whether you agree or not on the regulation is another discussion.
> Laws in the UK are passed quickly
Is that a feature or a bug?
Depends on how pessimistic you are I suppose.
Probably you're right overall but that doesn't apply to anyone who chooses to want to educate their kids in a non-taxpayer funded State school. Around 100–105 independent schools were reported as having ceased operations after the UK government introduced 20% VAT on private school fees from January 2025. Some may feel (I would not dare suggest it) that the current government is on a mission to close them all up unless they attract sufficiently rich parents like Eton. Closing the latter would be news indeed. However - exit Exeter Cathedral School after 847 years, which taught Charles II's composer and Coldplay's Chris Martin. It's closing with financial difficulties which have beset the sector in general since charges were introduced.
> since charges were introduced
That's one way to look at it I suppose. The other is that these institutions had a tax break for a long time, not having to charge VAT like every other business. So I think quite a few people see it as a little unfair that the schools for rich kids get a tax break: and it is wealthier families that use private schools for the most part. It's not like these schools didn't know this rule change was coming.
I don't live in the UK these days, but one of the problems with the place is how complex the tax system is. All these little carve outs, sudden % cliffs, rebates and what have you. My first job was writing payroll software in the UK. You think that's the norm, then you move somewhere else and realize how much easier it is in many other countries. Then you get calls from people like "don't charge VAT on vegetables like in the UK": people don't understand the cost imposed administrating an ever more complex tax system.
It is extremely difficult for me to care about the fate of private schools. In my opinion, they shouldn't exist. If the rich are forced to send their children to the same schools as everyone else, maybe they'll pressure the government to improve said schools.
Not really. The UK is run (mostly) by career politicians, they really do not care.
"Freedom of commerce" doesn't mean "unchecked globalism" - there are plenty of dual-use items that only friendly countries or citizens can obtain (and within those categories, there aren't any further restrictions besides "don't share.")
This will be exactly as effective as the BBC's efforts to ensure only UK taxpayers are allowed to stream Doctor Who from BBC servers on Christmas morning.
This is for the preview period, but it's not a good sign. Opus 4.8 may be the last frontier model available to the masses...
From US companies that is.
If it's the case then software engineers still have the same place as pre-ClaudeCode era, because 4.8 and 5.5 are damn good at algo but notoriously bad at architecture and coordination.
Yes, we will get a crippled version of Mythos, 5.6 and future models, while the chosen few will have unfettered access.
Thousands of American engineers all over the country (most of whom probably aren't on Hacker News) work with ITAR/EAR-regulated software and hardware every single day: these regulations are really not difficult to abide if you're a citizen.
And what about the rest of the world? I can't imagine US partners will abide this for long.
They get the dual-use scraps or whatever China is hawking.
Being told "no" is never fun, but the regulations are not hard to comply with (despite what Anthropic might have you believe.)
> I can't imagine US partners will abide this for long.
What are they going to do? Start their own Anthropic? Go for it. Why is every other country in the world entitled to American technology by default?
> but the regulations are not hard to comply with
Except that they are.
As a US citizen, I can purchase ITAR-regulated nightvision, IR lasers, etc.
But that's not what's happening. Frontier models are NOT being put under ITAR. Instead, they are being placed on an arbitrary "approved access" list. So that even if you qualify under export restrictions as a citizen, if you don't have a $200B+ market cap, you're disqualified.
Many people are upset about the national security restrictions, but it's MUCH WORSE than that. If I have to verify ID/citizenship, well, that sucks, but it would at least be an option. That's not what's happening here. If you are an individual or small business, no matter how "patriotic" you might be, you're out of luck.
> Except that they are.
Did you read the E.O., or just Huffpo's interpretation?
> ITAR
This is more likely to fall under EAR, it's important to be aware-of and learn the difference.
> placed on an arbitrary "approved access" list.
Except that's not what the original E.O. indicated, this is just what Anthropic is choosing to do.
> Did you read the E.O.
The EO is nearly a month old, and has precisely zero to do with the de facto current situation, seeing messaging from OpenAI and Anthropic on their non-public agreements with the administration.
> This is more likely to fall under EAR
Which, ok, maybe, but nobody is seeing movement on this. As of right now, and indeterminately in the future, EAR is still irrelevant. No private US citizen, right now, no matter how many flags are in their yard, no matter how many TRUMP stickers are on their car, can gain access to Fable 5 or GPT-5.6, unless you have political connections or an extremely large market capitalization.
> this is just what Anthropic is choosing to do.
Irrelevant. This is what OpenAI is also "choosing" to do with GPT-5.6 Sol, which suggests strongly that nobody is actually choosing anything. They are being told what to do, which is don't let the plebians, no matter how patriotic, access these models. GPT-5.5 is clearly the permanent legal limit for anyone not in the S&P 500.
n.b. I voted for Trump as a single-issue voter SPECIFICALLY because Harris threatened regulating ML models. This is a betrayal that WILL force loyal, patriotic US citizens into the arms of China. As soon as GLM-5.3 is released and exceeds GPT-5.5 capability, I'm not looking back.
> Why is every other country in the world entitled to American technology by default?
This kind of zero-sum thinking is what is killing the US's global influence right now.
Except it isn't zero-sum thinking: the rest of the world can have the scraps, and as long as the scraps are marginally better than the rest of the world's offerings, they will sell.
You do see how that is not going to work, right?
Seems to work for every other export-controlled good and service.
Oh, ok, I get it. Sorry, I'm bad at detecting sarcasm on the Internet.
> What are they going to do? Start their own Anthropic? Go for it. Why is every other country in the world entitled to American technology by default?
Because American tech companies make a lot of money from outside of the US. For instance, 1/4 of all Apple revenues are from Europe, and 1/5 from China and China-claimed territories. Only around 40% are from the Americas (so not even the US exclusively).
Would American tech companies be as successfull without ~half their revenues?
In any case, it doesn't matter, the cat is out of the bag. Nobody sane and non-American would trust American frontier labs, because their models can be yanked at will by whoever is in the White House. It would be suicidal to rely on them for critical business or developer workflows. So your options are to go with Mistral or open source Chinese models, hosted within your environment, with the added benefits of being able to control the costs and being able to fine tune the models to better work for you.
> Would American tech companies be as successfull without ~half their revenues?
Good luck with "if you don't let us use your AI technology, we wont allow iPhones in" - go for it.
At this point, for Europe, it might not be such a bad idea to make a deal with China and give them full access to ASML again. And maybe, just maybe, review Intel's access to ASML?
Yep, we all can play tit for tat.
Needlessly patriotic and confrontational.
I'm referring to OpenAI and Antropic - would they be successfull with ~40-50% of their potential market?
And iPhones, not really. But you can bet your ass that every business purchasing software in Europe is at least considering the geopolitical risks of buying American, and thinking of alternatives. Doesn't mean they'll all stop buying American software any time soon, but the shift has already started.
> I'm referring to OpenAI and Antropic - would they be successfull with ~40-50% of their potential market?
You presume that every single product they sell will be restricted: this is unrealistic. The rest of the world can have the gimped models, and as so long as they're better than other offerings, the revenue will flow - which is exactly what happens with countless other dual-use goods.
Except the frontier models are the only reason to use them. Why would they use GPT-export when they can use the latest GLM or Kimi?
It's probably too late, but my understanding is that those Chinese models would be nowhere near as good as they are currently if they weren't trained on billions of Claude/GPT tokens. Anthropic and OpenAI are still able to produce models that lead in every category but the separation between their models and open weights shrunk because of the free for all access.
I'm not presuming, I flat out said: nobody sane would trust them with their business. They've been shown as unreliable suppliers due to arbitrary decisions by the White House. Nobody would want for their business automation processes to stop working because someone woke up pissy and banned the model they were using.
Give it a year, open source will catch up, then things will get very interesting.
It's quite funny to think about the reaction this would be getting from people like David Sacks, if it was literally anybody except Trump.
That feeling when you’re a frontier AI company and your marketing team is just way too good.
You know what? Fine. This delays the OpenAI/Anthropic/etc hegemony and creates more space for local LLM adoption and development.
My company is very interested in local LLMs even just to cut back on codex spend. I imagine a lot of other businesses are, too. With the recent developments in open weight models, it seems like it's only a matter of time before they're frontier level, and any added delay in OpenAI and Anthropic models being publicly available is just more reason for businesses and individuals to try them out.
Just like the Iran war accelerating fossil fuel abandonment, this administration can't even do the wrong thing without fucking it up. I say we take this win.
Soon there will be a new safety industry reselling access and/or certification and compliance, oh wait there is already ...
Can we just go ahead and shut the US down right now? We had a good run, but we've clearly been moving in the wrong direction for almost as long as I've been alive.
You can leave if you don't like it
https://archive.ph/d4llF
Honest question: for those working with those models on offensive security, how much does this move make sense?
I am asking because I have seen a growing number of stories about organizations getting owned by either raw mismanagement of security, supply chain attacks that are often a failure at the ecosystem level, npm, etc.
I am not really seeing from what we hear about the use of AI for penetration as a threat yet. The growing problem with security seems to be more at the management and ecosystem layers.
Not many story that netfilter, ipfw or pf got owned by one of those frontier models.
A lot of stories that organisation X and Y left keys on a public repo for months.
A big problem is "U.S. government" muddies the conversation because of how undefinable and large that group is.
Who is deciding who gets to use GPT-5.6? Which organizations? Which leaders?
Focus on that to have a clearer conversation. Without doing this it's like jerking each other off to stroke our egos. You might as well as say "The World will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"
it would be one thing if congress passed a bunch of (probably inadequate) legislature that every AI company had to follow to operate in the US. it's another when it's a faceless/nameless group of people probably deciding arbitrarily based on mood and bribes.
> Which leaders?
Trump and his cronies.
Nobody else in the US Gov is so openly corrupt and has the unitary executive power to ban the products of privately held companies for sale without there being a public record (i.e.: an act of congress).
I see. That’s at least workable. Now you have a face and a group of people responsible for your suffering and problems.
And what are you going to do about it?
I live in Australia… so nothing.
Not my problem!
Over here we depose of our leaders when their corruption comes to light.
How is this not a First Amendment issue?!
Will be hard to become profitable if you have a limited customer base
That is why running local models is going to be very important...This crooked administration doing crooked things. Nothing to see here.
Saltman prbly had to beg and bribe for this. imagine fable getting banned and this just going though. That would be like accepting defeat.
Everything is a rich man's trick.
This is rich social classes claiming more for themselves.
Someone convince me otherwise?
Uh, they spent hundreds of billions to get their flag ship products blocked by a democratic body with no possibility of recovering their capital except by concession of the people's representative?
That's the trick part though.
They are playing status games, and making particular products available to specific people.
Whatever the majority of people get will be a modified, probably weakened, version of what those at higher social classes get.
> with no possibility of recovering their capital except by concession of the people's representative
This is definitely not true and its not that binary.
It's ok I will wait for the Chinese resellers :)
Thank you Chinese Robin Hoods
Something about this makes my stomach churn… This is not a good sign for the future of the USA.
I hope the country doesn’t become the new USSR.
Great now we're priced out of getting good enough hardware to run the top open sourced models locally.
It's a matter of time before the Chinese models are banned.
What a party pooper the current US government is... I'm not excited right now at all, while normally a new GPT release would be so much fun to test out.
On top of the obvious grift and bribe seeking potential there is also now an obvious mechanism for ideological control. Govt doesn’t like the way the model describes the events of Jan 6? We’ll have to see how many people get to use it…
We are very clearly proceeding down the road to a dystopia here.
Related:
OpenAI Leans Toward Waiting Until Next Year for IPO
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48678873
Can't the AI companies spare a small investment in Trump coin to ease the process?
This is what we get when the president is a nepo baby who inherited a fortune and bankrupted many companies and had mainly business failures before entering politics.
I’m quite confident that few people are more ignorant on AI than Donald Trump. That he promised less regulation and lied is no different than his many other lies.
In six months everyone will cancel frontier subscriptions.
So, that DeepSeek thing, you are saying it's not that bad?
GLM-5.2 is currently the best open-weight model for development. It's not as good as the current American SOTA models, but if you wrote code with US SOTA models four months ago, you can write code with GLM-5.2 today.
DeepSeek 4 is a good model for many tasks, but I think it currently lacks the post-training required to become a genuinely great coding model.
It seems like this was entirely caused by Dario (and Anthropic as a whole)? When you run around marketing something as a "super weapon", the government may actually take you seriously?
We obviously can't A/B test this... but if Dario hadn't been doing that, would any of this been happening right now?
Hard to say "entirely" when you also have a movement of people and non-profits who are also pushing for more regulation.
Altman has done his fair share of "doom-trolling", claiming that his products are going to inevitably disrupt the global order in ways that demand government support and intervention. The entire industry has been marketing this way for years now.
> It seems like this was entirely caused by Dario
No it doesn't.
> When you run around marketing something as a "super weapon"
That's one interpretation of what was said that ignores a lot of what was said.
So yes, if you ONLY read the headlines, sure. So, an ignorant and stupid government would read it that way. But the reality was, like many things, more nuanced.
However, I need not blame the messenger because the current government is led by idiotic morons.
Let's put this another way: either this is valid on behalf of the government, in which case he was right ot say something. Or you disagree with this, in which case, you can only blame the government for ignornig what was actually said.
Portfolio Communism
Again, if you think we the people are getting access to AGI you're a fool.
These models aren't even that smart and they are already trying to control them and lock them down to a handful of people.
Then these executive and VC wonder why people hate AI and are against them.
Because the future is heading toward intelligence for the rich and you stuck with whatever model they want you to have.
The next step is banning open source models.
The future is not looking so bright if these models are already going locked down to whoever the government what's to have them.
This is no different than the government banning books because they don't want you to learn.
It's different, because most books don't contain the nuclear codes or have real impacts on national security.
The way I see so many comments on the internet hating any sort of AI regulation, is young juveniles cursing at the installation of stoplights as they rev their engines. The world is bigger than just you, and not only you matter. Reasons exist for doing things.
So you okay with the government banning open source models, and making a list of who can have access to intelligence based on who they like?
That just doesn't seem like a world I want to live in. I prefer a world where everyone has the same access to the same intelligence.
Go back to the beginning of the internet, you would be for limiting the internet access to those the government likes?
I was around in the early days of the internet when Google dorking was a thing, you could prompt Google and find exploits into hundreds and thousands of websites, servers, ect including government website.
This isn't about national security, it about power and controlling it.
I was around back then too and experienced the full depth of the wild west. AI dwarfs that in every way. What you're talking about is small potatoes by comparison.
Even the old internet, I'm kind of with you on that being something the market should naturally respond to which is why Google rightfully nerfed its search tools over the years, software changed and network infrastructure evolved.
This is different. The government already silently manages many things you never hear about and limits information reporting. Reasonable people generally go "ah, ok" for things that are beyond a threshold, because it seems like a sensible role for governance.
I think everyone agrees government should not simply be curating AI models that only spew public information or say something inconvenient about a political party or whatever. I also don't think people want AI models that are constantly trying to guess whether you're a child and should have certain information. That's not largely the issue.
You can list me the threats that you think AI poses, and I'll let you know if you're warm or not.
crazy times
Just don't say shit like it's gonna overtake the gov't systems and world, Dario.
fake news
it kinda seems like openai is doing this willinglyy and not challenging it. if they weren't doing this willingly, how would this be legal? has congress already passed a law giving the executive branch regulatory powers like this?
never would I have thought China would win that easily
GLM on LLM Asics is going to be amazing, US hosted or otherwise
The US is turning into China. LOL!
Censorship. Surveillance. (Hi, PLTR!)
The U.S. is becoming like the place that keeps releasing the best open weight models?
lol
now gov will decide, absolute shi
i see opensource model is big win for me.
I started to have the opinion that the Chinese models would crash the AI bubble simply because they are an order of magnitude cheaper and almost as intelligent.
But if the government can simply ban models from the market? especially given how much the admin loves the idea of Tariffs? Knowing Trump the chance of this happening is 99.9%
We will all be stuck paying $50/mtok to Anthropic (And by we I mean only Big Tech will be able to afford tokens). The rest of the competition will be outcompeted by super intelligent machines. And AI CO’s /Big Tech will take over the economy.
"...and the land of the free!"
"A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism"
It's fascinating to watch the US government paint China as the new bogeyman and utterly fail in it's policy of containment.
The first obvious conclusion is that China has been utterly vindicated to keep US tech giants out of China. Some have a token presence but it's clear that the Chinese government will never let a US tech government "win" in any domestic market. It will always be a Chinese company. Obligatory Silicon Valley [1].
The second is that, to that end, IMHO the US government made an error blocking the sale of high-end chips (particularly NVidia) to China. Why? Because it's created a captive market for Chinese chip manufacturing. Huawei now has billions in potential sales that might've otherwise gone to chips produced in Taiwan and South Korea.
Third, the US can somehow ban a Dutch company (ASML) from selling EUV to China. This has forced China to replicate it and they will within a few years. The interesting part of this is that all it really takes is throwing money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked for ASML. It really is using the mechanics of the Western economic system against itself.
Last, the US government will try and make US tech giants "own" or "win" AI. And they will fail because the Chinese government will make sure they fail. How? By releasing ever-better open models for free. I believe China considers this a matter of national security to not be beholden to US tech giants (and thus the US government).
The ironic thing to me is that the US is doing what the West accuses China of doing with corporate control. I'd say the actual difference is that Chinese companies are beholden to the state whereas the US government is basically 5 companies in a trenchcoat. The US wants to mint trillionaires at the expense of literally everybody else. China believes society should benefit from something they collectively make possible.
Anyway, we've been here before. Remember the crypto export ban of the 1990s and 2000s? Did that prevent higher-quality encryption from being used overseas? No. This won't help either.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km5XQxRrQvw
Thankfully only American content went into building it, or else that would be a total douchebag manoeuvre
Trump admin just banned individual users like me from using it, indefinitely, under vague authority. When did we become such a nanny state?
Orbans Hungary Playbook. The real headline should be “Donald Trump gets to decide”.
When I predicted this several months ago, here (mine my comment history) I was berated and downvoted, but primarily ignored. I have records, timestamped, of predicting this a year ago. Alright, great for me, pat myself on the back and get stuffed. Roger that.
What disturbs me is that this was not extremely obvious and predictable to everyone else. I have been called schizophrenic for my views on AI, here, and I kind of see how some could miss my points, but I am genuinely perplexed by the views on the subject I see around here, or specifically the views I don't see here.
Did anyone really not see this coming long ago? I have year-old transcripts discussing exactly what's happening with AI and government intervention. I even have a time-stamped transcript with Sonnet 12 hours prior, soft-predicting the shutdown of Fable. What is not clear about this?
Good luck with those 1T USD valuations when your total addressable market now shrunk from 8 Billion people to just 300 million.
Wait, what happened to wanting a safety first mindset and government regulation of big tech?
Please avoid reddit posts of screenshots of articles OP.
[dupe] Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48678789
One more wake up call for anyone outside USA, especially Europe. AI will be weaponized, on the battle ground too, but the bigger battle will be fought in the industry competition. Those who have access to state of the art models will have advantage over those who does not.
Hopefully open-weight models will catch up, hopefully we, as the people, engineers will find the way to maintain those open-weight models on pair with the closed ones.
I try to be optimistic, as we won some battles, against all odds, Linux is flourishing, open source solutions are mainstream.
There are some steps in the good direction:
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-sel...
A consortium will train a 400B-class model and get 2.5% on time of the EuroHPC infrastructure (~2000 PFLOPS datacenters). So, even if the Chinese take away the open source there will be some models. Probably not Mythos quality yet though.
I’m sorry but I can’t take a European Commission link seriously about training SOTA LLMs.
Europe is in the worst spot right now, because even if open source is the future, there is not enough European-owned datacenters even for inference. Not to mention that China could pull the rug on these models at any moment just like the US did.
Europe has to play both sides for now. There will come a point where both China and the US close off access to the best models. And then what does the EU do?
> We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.
My brother in Christ, then why did you (and your competitors) spend years telling the government you needed them to tie your hands behind your back? Did you really think they'd just give you a crown that says "Gatekeeper Of All Neural Networks"?
In the past few years, that's been primarily Anthropic, right? A lot of the really regulation-oriented people at OpenAI went to Anthropic, particularly after the failed attempt to oust Sam Altman as CEO (that was in late 2023).
brother from another mother here: I don't think they were begging for overreach from the executive branch, likely would have preferred legislation, especially the kind that could be molded by lobbyists.
Honestly, are people not getting what's going on? The US is turning into a personalist regime, there is no "government" per-se, there's a dude. There are no 'rules' there's only the dude's opinion and you'll do whatever he feels like today.
The way you know this is true is to imagine The Others in power. Sacks used to scream about government interference, but now that he's running (this part of) the government, obviously things are different.
The only constant is that David Sacks (& co) always believed he should have all the power.
Of course they know what’s going on, that’s why they voted for it again in 2024. They just think they will be in the group of winners that get some crumbs.
If true, I think Trump is nuts. He's alienating the very people in the Silicon Valley that helped him to win.
Keep your **** models to yourselves.... the world really has moved on to open models which can give you good enough results at a fraction of the cost and zero BS licensing.
> the world really has moved on to open models
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for open models, but I think it will get more and more difficult to distil-train them without (legitimate) access to frontier models.
I’m not sure, because the same thing happened with facebook advertising restrictions during the 2018 elections and nowadays there’s a whole black market for fake ad accounts.
If anything I bet these people will just use their knowledge to make even more money reselling tokens.
Yeah but the real deal is talent; When enough people move around, this is no more 'sacred trace' knowledge. Plus, When you start with a known set of evals, there's really just a few to solve for.
The set of models solving really most used/solved problems is a known, as opposed to the cases where it's unknown, which declines with usage over time.
As if all progress done in open models is because of distilling...
People have no idea and everybody pretends to be an expert and ignore how good China is on AI research
Personally, I find it rather humorous that we've moved from the fear that AI generated output would corrupt training to the idea that it is essential to training. Reality itself has not just a left bias but a bias to fundamentals. Bootstrap from fundamentals without introducing arbitrary error and you have the superior system; it just may not be highly compatible with a trash ecosystem.
I mean, I'm not sure that's the correct read on this.
If you want an Opus class model, it makes sense that you would train on what Opus outputs. But, if you want something better than Opus, training on the same data that Opus was trained on with the same architecture will only result in an Opus class model. Then, if your dataset also contains Opus outputs, many of which are wrong, then it makes sense that the model would have reduced performance.
All this to say that I don't think there's such a thing as a "Model Collapse," but there likely is a "Model Stagnation."
A model trained on all the data X was trained on should be improved to the extent that X is already out of date. A model trained on X itself has all the errors of X and all of it's own. Society itself seems to show that model collapse is entirely possible today and was presumably a problem in the past given the significance placed on citation and going to original sources that predates obsession with credit.
At some point AI models will become too valuable for China or the US to release openly. What will the "world" do at that point? Europe is dragging their feet on this issue and will be left with only those open models and not enough data centers to compete.