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Where would they go?

1) It’s safe to assume the US would do its best to prevent it, and even if Anthropic was successful in exfiltrating their data, code, models, and people, I’d imagine the US would immediately block all US companies from working with them. So they’d be blocked from their own US-based compute, plus Google, Amazon, Microsoft, xAI, Meta, etc.

2) Where would they go? China maybe, but as far as we can tell it doesn’t have sufficient compute for Anthropic’s level of need. The EU likely as or more restrictive in different ways to the US - the EU is hardly buzzing with AI innovation. Some Middle Eastern countries might have the money, energy, and interest in carving out such a position, but no compute. Plus I’d imagine the US would act directly against any country or region receiving them, economic or otherwise.

3) Then, as said elsewhere, the US would block GPU sales to wherever they found a safe haven, preventing the buildup of the compute they’d need to continue.

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> the EU is hardly buzzing with AI innovation

Depends what you mean. The academic work seems largely... fine? Plenty of good work came out of Europe or European researchers. It seems the problem is more "trying to build a trillion-dollar company of any kind".

It's an interesting question: does the EU seek only to regulate successful modern American companies to death, or home grown ones too? Probably not a gamble worth taking.

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Something commercial? Mistral is the only significant European LLM I'm aware of, and it's not frontier level. Then a dearth of EU-owned hyperscalers, AI-focussed data centers, GPU/CPU/memory manufacturers, even cheap energy...?
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The issue with EU is its not one market, for funding or deploying a company of any kind. There is both no funding scale and no easy distribution scale. Same thing with any kind of lobbying you need to do to move laws to be more amenable to tech, you have to do it 20+ times. Nobody does this, which is why smart EU and UK talent migrates to the US, scales, then just uses the weight of their US business to change reality around them in the EU anwyay. For the most part.
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Yes, the EU is a bit of a strange half-measure. I understand why the cultural barriers are resistant to change. But standardization of regulations across the single market has been incredibly slow. I'm not sure it will ever happen.

I wonder if the incumbents in each country actively lobby against it. I suppose it's easier for massive corporations to deal with cross border issues. The onerous regulatory boundaries are a nice price of entry for them that keeps out upstarts.

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Does any other place have the infrastructure Anthropic requires to train their models and run inference?
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No. If we cannot even have an EU CloudFlare, then we definitely do not have the infra for this kind of computing.

The EU options are not even close to what CF can do

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There are fortunately some initiatives and interesting developments in the European market. Take bunny.net for example. We have to start somewhere in Europe, right? Better late than never.
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This infrastructure may not even be needed in the next decade. Europe should have done this 20 years ago.
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>EU CloudFlare

What limitations does bunny.net have?

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> What limitations does bunny.net have?

A huge free tier (technically, none)

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You have to apply (and they presumably need to approve).

It's probably indicative of a less predatory model, but CF got a ton of mindshare by offering their free tier. I do basically nothing in the frontend space, but I default to CF because I'm used to using it due to using the free tier for personal projects.

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UAE would be happy to pay for it
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> Does any other place have the infrastructure

That's not the problem.

The US government can export ban GPUs like they do now to more countries if needed. Even if the infrastructure exists, the GPUs won't.

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China
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Why settle for play pretend autocracy when you can go all-in amirite?
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Better to be firmly under the boot of a sane autocrat than have the illusion of freedom under a madman.
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Somehow it's looking more and more appealing.
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Hey at least there are adults in the room.
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Suddenly its not in SV's favor? Depends who you ask, I guess
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Oh please, the earlier spat with the Trump admin was the best thing that ever happened to Anthropic. Before that, Claude was really only well-known in developer circles, not the wider normie-sphere. After Anthropic got the "Trump hates them, so it MUST be good!" stamp of approval, the company's recognition and popularity took off.

This too, will end up being a good thing for them. The ban will end up getting lifted due to some "amazing deal" in the coming weeks and Anthropic will now have the "Trump tried to ban them, so they MUST have the most advanced AI model in the world!" stamp of approval just before IPO.

All this stuff is pro wrestling kayfabe.

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If you’re implying that the government is in on it and is doing this stuff intentionally in order to boost Anthropic, that’s ridiculous.
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Yeah that would be ridiculous, this administration pumping stocks.
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