It's easy to wave this aside as the current administration playing political games. But I don't think there is any reason to assume that the current era of open availability of models is going to continue indefinitely. Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever, even why they get to the level that Mythos is at now, and beyond? And do you think that a competent US government would have no interest in regulating and restricting model access in 2 years time, assuming that model capabilities continue to improve? I think we bias towards thinking the status quo is the norm and will continue, but this news invites us to question that assumption and think about different ways the future could go.
Yes.
I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that.
And simultaneously that the only way they can actually get everyone to use their models is if it's possible for us to run them on our own hardware.
(This isn't exactly a utopian view of the future)
Qwen 3.7 is not open source; previous Qwen versions would have open source releases, but Qwen 3.7 plus does not. The second best Chinese model, Minimax M3, is testing the waters by taking longer and longer between “model release” and open sourcing it. This time, they spent 2 weeks after release before open sourcing it. There’s also a lot of rumors of GLM and Deepseek not open sourcing future models.
It’s pretty obvious that you cannot take Chinese models as open source for granted, they’ll be closed source soon.
There is no evidence here that the cutting edge labs have any durable advantage. Extrapolating current trends it seems likely that even the Europeans will be capable of meeting any given performance measure with enough time. In fact the evidence suggests that the capital required to run the models is where a moat will develop. Knowing the weights won't help much.
China may not care about open source, but they know they will personally fund AI through government investments while US relies on private investments, best way to scare private investments is a free capable alternative for everyone
Add on the fact that they actually invested in energy infrastructure and can offer AI very cheap to their citizens and you can get a population well versed in AI to reduce menial tasks and focus on more productive things (if we're to believe the claims of the technology)
There are lots of AI companies and it doesn’t seem that they all have the same funding fountain or share monetization goals. I wouldn’t read much into what each one of them is doing.
I think the larger problem is that restricting US AI companies gives the Chinese a leg up because they now have a window open where they can become the source of the most powerful models available due to government restrictions rather than on technical merits. All Anthropic customers just got a downgrade last evening, for example. While the Chinese are able to serve the world or whoever, the US corporations will be limited to the US market, or whatever the powers that be will allow. This restrictiveness could turn out to be disadvantageous to American companies since people will migrate to wherever they can get the most powerful models.
How much stock should we put into that graph, though, I'm not sure.
DeepSeek is developed by the largest Chinese hedge fund, their models used to make them $ on the share market are very profitable, they've never ever released anything on those models.
Somehow you are claiming that those same group of people are going to totally change their very consistent long term behaviour and start promoting openness when they are in the global leading position in AI?
I think you made this up.
Right now, I don’t believe any LLM company is profitable at all.
Unless you meant “more profitable” to mean “not-as-badly-negative profit”.
China knows that doing what Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/... are doing is impossible for them. No one outside of China in any sane condition will send their data to compute farms IN CHINA like people currently do with US-based frontier models. Even if they could muster the inference power.
Hence they do the second-best thing possible to attack the dominance of the US-based corporations: reduce their moat by open-sourcing models that are not fully equal, but practically useful and good enough for easily 90% of typical tasks people use agents for in their daily lives. But way cheaper to run.
As long as this arms race in AI continues, China as "number two" will have some incentive to continue open-sourcing models. But of course the US government might force a change if they continue to enforce limited public access to new frontier models - there is no market to minimize if a model is not allowed to be publicly available.
I think your vision of how the rest of the US sees the world is tinted by a massive bias.
But at work the calculus is entirely different. There is already lots of exposure to US companies (guess where our emails and tickets life), so the increase in espionage risk from adding another American company is small. Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited. But adding the first Chinese company to send data to would be a major risk. One nobody would sign off on, given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information
Before the EU cleaned up Europe's act pretty considerably on corruption, US companies used corporate but also state-level espionage actors to level the playing field against a culture of bribes and they were fairly open about it. They absolutely needed to do it, because of the potential penalties back home if they engaged in bribery abroad.
The tables have turned, now. The EU runs much more cleanly than decisionmaking in DC, which is clearly corrupted and lubricated with cash and opportunities for failsons and faildaughters; it has accelerated radically quite recently but it was heading that way from the first Bush era.
But I'd bet the corporate-state merger of industrial espionage is in full flow.
I have zero expectation that a similar culture exists inside Chinese companies. If you think these corporate and national cultures are the same, you need to adjust your priors.
Not necessarily of the companies themselves, though; just embedded people at the right hiring level.
> Given how generally ideological the people working in these companies are
History has many examples of truly surprising spies, over the long term. Including in highly ideological environments such as animal rights and eco-campaigning groups. The embedded police spying scandals in the UK make this clear.
It is naïve to think that there are no CIA or NSA employees in some functional role at these two businesses, just as it is naïve to think that they don't have intelligence industry contacts playing them because they are naïve. You only have to look at how the NSA weakened open cryptography to see that two companies staffed by young, absurdly rich people barely out of college with wobbly moral e/acc compasses might be getting played by homegrown spooks.
> I have zero expectation that a similar culture exists inside Chinese companies. If you think these corporate and national cultures are the same, you need to adjust your priors.
I suggested absolutely nothing of the sort — I flatly was not talking about China at all.
FWIW it cuts both ways: in the dim and distant past of the early dot-com era, I remember encountering someone who wafted inexplicably between US and UK multinational companies who I thought was possibly British intelligence. An odd duck for sure.
Quite funny because if you use that phrase verbatim except swapping China with the US it could actually fit.
Good governments try to do things that are in the interest of their population, and yes it could mean opposite interests to your/someone else governments.
No reason to blame US, Israel, China, Russia, etc. They just defend their piece of cake.
Again I have to echo the previous poster's point: Most people outside of the US really do not see the US as some much better alternative than China. If anything, in the specific area of LLMs, China are the ones doing work benefitting the everyman whereas almost everything the US labs do does not.
That said, I imagine e.g. South Americans thinking very differently on this front
what did you think US-based AI is trained on
I'm pretty sure the US just jumped to the front of the list with their biggest IP heist in humankind history
China indeed has a general reputation for widespread espionage, so any Chinese company wanting to expand into the European market has to prove it isn't spying on its potential customers. US companies have traditionally been seen as friendly, so their platforms are essentially built around "trust me bro" guarantees.
In a world where both China and the US are now seen as hostile-by-default, this might actually leave some Chinese companies with an advantage in their ability to demonstrate trustworthiness.
It’s the same paradox as people claiming: “we are European, our data is safer in Europe” when actually your privacy is higher when your data is stored in China (or Russia) you are safer because it is out of reach from your local government.
The only thing I dislike, and that’s no matter the service, is that my data or information usage is shared with third-party.
For example, Anthropic conveniently forgets to mention Datadog has tons and tons of information about Claude users, or that your data transits through machines they don’t operate.
Like if they could release Ch-ythos 6 tomorrow BUT it had Western ideals, would they take the fame, clout, attention, & profit, or stick to the party line?
(hope the monolithic brush is appropriate, considering, I mean it's an impressive system/country even if I have my own strong preferences - also I've taken as true reporting about their models deflecting etc. on sensitive topics)
I use LLMs for health, design and programming.
If you want to make a political or religious pamphlet it’s not a single LLM that you should base yourself on. No matter where it comes from.
Between RBJ refusing to step down, Biden not reversing immigration policy, and Biden refusing to step down in the primary until too late, he’s going to go down as a poor president in the history books - even if he wasn’t a bad dude or even bad in terms of policy.
"Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you're a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible." - Donald Trump, 2016
Technically his material support to a genocide makes him complicit, it would not have been nearly at the scale without US support tens of thousands of women and children were murdered as a direct result of his decisions[1], if international law meant anything we would hang him for that. So no, he was a "bad dude".
The downfall of the US benefiting bad people is not evidence that the US didn't have a positive impact.
US is a great and respectable country with amazing nature, people tech and military, very very far a collapsed state.
If anything to be worried of, it's the state of Europe. Closer and closer to war, full of insecurity and no innovation.
US is a great country.
OpenAI and Anthropic are both hamstrung by this. Anthropic does have the better chance of surviving.
that doesn't require the model to be SOTA, it can be just a compact model capable of running on some inexpensive hardware. that is vastly different from SOTA models like Mythos which can potentially disrupt lots of things.
> Yes.
holy shit the naivete of HN nowadays.
Is the government going to fund all further development? Hard to imagine investors continuing to throw billions at products they aren't allowed to sell.
And if not, can we simply keep augmenting “stale” models with new knowledge to keep them useful?
I’m on the pessimistic side of things on both questions.
As for the second question, obviously stale models can be augmented to an extent but it’s nowhere near a substitute for new knowledge being fully baked directly into its training.
Here is why it's unlikely this is anything other than "silly behavior by a government":
- some benchmarks show GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1, and even Claude Opus outperforming Claude Fable, and yet it's Fable which is restricted.
- some benchmarks still show the likes of Kimi 2.5 outperforming any Claude model, and DeepSeek is getting equivalent scores (a few tenths of a percent difference)
> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever (...)
That's immaterial to the discussion. Even if China forced Chinese labs to restrict access to all models, the truth of the matter is that Trump's administration to restrict access to US-based models does not prevent others from having access to models that are as capable or even better.
So what's exactly the point of this?
It was almost like having another human using and shepherding Opus for me, instead of herding Opus directly myself.
I'm unconvinced that this is anything more than proof of work and marginal improvement that other models will catch up with, perhaps as early as to next week. Lots of other current-gen models will find vulns that can be chained together if you're willing to burn enough tokens on the task, and Fable is an absolute token incinerator.
Yet somehow we're always forgetting that lesson and surprised when government is found snooping.
This seems to be an administration that is dead set on antagonizing every single part of the world. Either enemy or ally.
Let's not forget the Trump administration threatened two separate NATO allies with invasion and annexation, and then had the gall to complain they were not helping them attack Iran.
Anthropic would have been able to talk to someone and explain how it wasn't possible to ban just "foreign nationals", and would have pointed out how nonsensical such a request was. The fact that the post does not mention any such discussion, and leaves the nonsensical request as the only stated reason, makes this feel like a power move by Dario, simply complying in the most dramatic and rage-inducing way and announcing it in a way to direct that rage at the USG. (Which is, IMO, a savvy move)
What penalties? Treason is still punishable by death in the U.S. I hate that I just felt compelled to write that as a serious possibility and, pre-Trump 2.0, I would have accused anyone citing that as scaremongering. But times have changed and this administration hates Anthropic vehemently. Anthropic is the only major AI company not "playing ball" with the DoW and donating to Trump's pet projects.
I truly believe if Mythos was an OAI or Google model, there would have been exactly the kind of discussion you imagine and this would have all been worked out. I deeply regret that recent facts make the most likely conclusion that this late-Friday ban was planned for days (if not weeks). And there was no real attempt to work anything out about Mythos, because that's not really what the DoW wants.
The driver behind this is the still unresolved dispute of Anthropic's Acceptable Use Policy regarding autonomous lethal weapons and mass domestic surveillance, which conflicted with the Pentagon's push for unrestricted model deployment ("all lawful uses"). This is the DoW's counter-attack. I fully expect that the DoW is going to hold Anthropic (and Ant's IPO) hostage by blocking any new model until Anthropic gives the DoW full access with no restrictions except "all lawful uses" (and the DoW's position is their in-house lawyers decide what's legal).
It's not nonsensical if the intention is to destroy Anthropic. There is nothing to explain.
Anthropic has been trying to leverage government intervention and dishonest security bluster for competitive advantage and now the Trump admin is using it as a pretext to destroy them ahead of the IPO.
"Silly" is a silly word for corruption.
So it's silly behavior, as typified by the last decade of American governance? Is there "serious" American leadership we should be expecting to see soon, e.g. 2029 AOC elected on a platform of unlimited 10GW datacenters and universal basic Mythos 8 models?
It may seem subjectively silly to you, but e.g. getting executed for refusing to point at a deer and call it a horse is pretty silly stuff as well, at least for those not living in the Qin Dynasty.
US voters deserve better.
Deserve's got nothing to do with it.
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/communities-are-raising-n... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277298502...
(And waste electronics are considered hazardous in the EU.)
Improving the electrical production system would be fine, but it needs to be paid for upfront by the datacentre and ideally completed no later than the datacentre. Otherwise citizens end up paying for this on their electricity bills, as is happening in Ireland [1], and other electrical upgrades (factories etc) can't be done as there isn't the capacity. (I think the limit here is trained engineers to design and build the power plants and distribution networks.)
We have at least 4 new-ish hyperscale datacentres in Denmark, one each from Microsoft, Meta, Google and Apple. I think they're here for the renewable power, and at least the Meta and Microsoft ones are putting their waste heat into the local district heating systems. Some of them have indirectly financed construction of renewable power.
But the energy used is enormous! [3] says data centres were 10% of electricity generation in 2020, before the massive increase in GPUs.
They are built on the promise of high-paid jobs, but that turns out to be 20 technicians and a few security guards [2].
I haven't looked into it, but I assume there are no "profits" from big-tech datacentres leading to additional tax payments, unlike e.g. a factory.
[1] https://www.friendsoftheearth.ie/news/the-cost-of-data-centr...
[2] https://ing.dk/artikel/how-few-people-work-tech-giants-data-... — just 450 full time staff for the big-tech datacentres in Denmark — seems to 1-2 each for MS, Meta, Google and Apple.
Electricity is sold on the market. If you live next to a data center you can choose not to use any services enabled by that center, but you cannot choose to pay non-datacenter prices for the electricity to charge your car or run your household
Sometimes variances in manufacture or maintenance of electronic systems allow the F35 to identify not just type of system but exact unit.
Any F35 bought by Europe is nothing short of lunacy. You don’t buy from people hell-bent on having conflicts with you.
Heck the F35B only exists due to the UK demanding it. They have access to the source code (and so do Israel).
No - it's extremely effective.
Do you realize the difference between a 'few people using VPNs + fake IDs at 2-person companies ... vs companies all companies globally not allowed to use tech?
If 'Bank of Montreal' were caught using export controlled technology it could be devastating - so they're not going to be using it along with any little mom and pop shop.
We don't know what the Administration is doing other than 'This is Extremely Heavy Handed' and will have devastating consequences if it goes on.
I can hear alarm bells going off in less silly governments around the world as we speak. Genie's out of the bottle. The gears have been put in motion. Etc.
But I assure you that many places will be happy to switch up to Fable when it's available and back to Opus when it's not.
It's a programming tool, not something that will send you out of business if it disappears.
10 years from now we’ll look back and laugh at how silly it all was.
Yes, something better than a winner-take-all system.
We have now enough data about modern democracies to conclude that presidential and semi-presidential republics are flawed.
Winner-take-all mechanics are not democratic, period, they give voters very little choice to be represented (generally a handful of parties), just two in the US.
People aren't "conservative" or "liberal". They have a huge and diverse array on topics ranging from education, immigration, healthcare, privacy, civil rights, public spending, foreign policies, etc, etc, etc. Yet we bind people to choose among a handful of parties, which at best overlap with some of those opinions, just to elect a single person that is extremely hard to remove (both from a legal point of view and a from that person's rightful ability to claim popular mandate), that do not rely on confidence votes nor their own party support.
And that individual, in the end, really represents fully a very minority of the country (because of the points before) and can also do the opposite of what the promises were, unchecked.
And from a democracy safety itself, please not that every single country turning authoritarian in the last 60 years has been either presidential or semi presidential. Sri Lanka in the 70s is the only exception, there are no others. All others have been presidential.
With due respect, this take is very deluded. US voters have very little to lose if the tech is not available to the rest of the world. US politicians and elite, regardless of political inclination, understand the enormous strategic potential of this technology and will ITAR the shit out of frontier models and/or use them as leverage for extracting concessions out of other countries.
The main losers are Big AI labs, their investors, foreign employees and rest of the world.
Fwiw, China and other countries would’ve done the exact same thing. It’s perhaps the game theoretic optimal approach when your comparative advantage is so vast (capital, compute, talent, embedded knowledge) and keeps growing especially if RSI is real (making it nearly impossible for anyone else to catch up)
Really? You think the economics of the AI buildout remain viable if US companies cannot export their highest value services?
You think expelling foreign AI researchers doesn't hurt the industry or boost foreign competitors? Half (or whatever) of Google's AI team, including their AI chief are foreign nationals and/or located outside of the US.
You think that other IT exports will not suffer if the US turns out to be an unreliable and even capricious supplier?
This does real damage to the US economy.
But the questions about viability of the labs because of export restrictions is not in my cone of uncertainty. If you believe the labs' implied/stated objectives, the end goal is eating all human-driven GDP, and the US is still the largest single-market economy in the world, last I checked. Keeping the politics of AI-driven unemployment aside, economy-wide automation would make the US wealthy beyond imagination.
US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP. I am not aware of the international revenue share for OpenAI/Anthropic.
The US is about a quarter of the global economy, but let's use Microsoft's international revenue share of ~50% as a proxy for tech services. It's ~40% for the S&P 500.
I don't know what share of that would be impacted by export bans, but it would certainly affect ROI. It would hurt the competitiveness of the wider US tech industry and create incentives for moving highly paid work overseas.
>US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP.
It's 12% to 13% but this is distorted by the way in which tech services are counted in export statistics and also by tax avoidance. Just look at Ireland's ridiculous GDP numbers.
If the technology is as powerful as these somehwat fantastical "goals" suggest, the incentive to use it everywhere in the world would be enormous. An export ban wouldn't mean that only the US has the capability. The theory behind current models is well known. It's just a matter of optimising them for specific use cases and using them on an industrial scale.
Most AI researchers are not US citizens either. It's completely obvious that this is the US shooting itself in the foot (if it were to last, which I don't believe).
> US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP and has a deep trade deficit ... maybe there is a connection?
I agree that it's really hard to tell from the outside, but if I had to guess I think we still have more to worry about on the side of "Wall Street races to superintelligence" than on the side of "KYC for AI". I could be wrong though.
Why is that? Well, not to search very far, I just got a breach notice from a company I never heard of the other day. They are sorry.
Can you imagine the disaster???
Also, foreign nationals legally residing in the US can have access to US-based payments. There's no way when accepting a credit card payment from a US card issuer to ask whether the card holder is a natural born citizen versus Green Card holder, etc.
Can we stop with this bothsides-ing. The level of co-opting by this administration is unprecedented. There’s the strong-arming to get Intel equity stake, Nvidia/AMD revenue share, U.S. Steel golden share, Lithium Americas equity stake, Big Law pro bono pledges, TikTok forcible acquisition, Paramount-CBS-Skydance favor, it’s just unbelievable the stark use of power.
Both sides are not at all the same in how executive power is being wielded.
Be as upset as you want about Congress passing the law but that’s a 100x higher bar than what the Trump administration does regularly.
We are here in many ways as a direct result of the last admin, particularly the way they threatened tech companies. This moved tech companies to feel emboldened to go all-in on Trump. Don't think I'm justifying that - it's just what happened, in basically the tech bros own words.
The Dems then proceeded to lose to Trump, despite being extremely well funded themselves. They accomplished this through a spectacular series of "own goals": arming genocide, vetoing ceasefires, forcing deeply unpopular candidates, allowing a certain attempted insurrectionist rapist run out the clock on justice [0], awful elitist messaging on the economy, keeping the Epstein files under wraps, etc.
The red side is worse than the blue side, so the blue side demand immunity from criticism. The red side sets everything on fire, on purpose. The blue side prevents progressives from real change. The cycle rachets and repeats. This has been going on for decades, at the cost of millions of lives and trillions of dollars - but people who point it out get accused of saying both sides are the same.
0 - "That Biden was a placeholder president – a stop gap to streamline an aspiring American autocracy into an entrenched one – was obvious by mid-2021. The first, rather large clue was the lack of urgency toward sedition." - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/behold-a-pale-horse-rac...
Your second sentence is a great example of the type of both-sidesing that needs to stop.
Your third sentence is a great example of the type of both-sidesing that should not stop.
Your fourth is disappointing conclusion, a strawman to start ("demand immunity from criticism"...) and a false equivalence / faux symmetry as a bonus ("sets everything on fire" & "doesn't support progressive policies" are two sides of _which_ coin, exactly...?)
> We are here in many ways as a direct result of the last admin, particularly the way they threatened tech companies. This moved tech companies to feel emboldened to go all-in on Trump.
I agree - he clearly should have done much more than just threaten.
Have _both sides_ actively collaborated in genocide?
... Yes.
Therefore, _both sides_ have breached any recognizable red line of decency. _Both sides_ have breached hard-won national and international law.
Time for something better than both sides unapologetically arming live-streamed genocide.
"Oh, you're one of those single issue guys" - if the issue is genocide, then yes. Why aren't you? Why aren't 98.15% of 2024 voters?
As pointed out below: it's our culture. And that's not okay.
> Your second sentence is a great example of the type of both-sidesing that needs to stop.
I don't see how you can disagree with the simple truth of it tbh. In what way is that not what happened?
With statements like that, if it’s been going on that long then it’s either our culture and normal way of life or you’re on some QAnon cuckoo rabbit hole.
That's the one - from an outside PoV the two US parties are two sides of the same coin, barely a perineum twixt them, both ceding the votes of many people to the cash of a very few.
It's baked into the US zeitgeist that it's better to sit back and watch "the government" go tits up and then wade in with guns hoping for a better outcome than it is to properly manage communal resources and common ground.