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.
People have no idea and everybody pretends to be an expert and ignore how good China is on AI research
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."
If non US citizens shouldn't have the models - wouldn't that cause both Anthropic and OAI to fire non-citizens?
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...)
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.
"wait, not like that"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
> 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
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.
Is that a feature or a bug?
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.
They literally asked for this.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
- instant, total world war if it's not coming from USA
- let's finish all oil's reserve first otherwise
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 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.
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.
Just because the many headed dragon is trying to bite your sailors' heads doesn't mean you should pilot your ship into the whirlpool
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.
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?
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.
[dupe] Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48678789
OpenAI Leans Toward Waiting Until Next Year for IPO
- 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.
Hey OpenAI model go hack the new mythos for me.
Battle bots, oppression version.
(I work at OpenAI.)
This amount of courting the current administration is pretty scary imo.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
First of all, who said this is a disaster?
Second of all, OP never even said anything about no regulation - they specifically said they wanted transparency which is 100% valid and better than a world where the government baby proofs everything for you
Models are already censored - and who they are or aren't uncensored for has a lot of implications which are way worse
And the jets is a terrible example - you picked one of THE highest regulated industries where NOBODY has a problem with regulation
This is Mr. Fart's Favorite Colors all over again. Our "vetting" process is not any more useful than the billion-dollar metal detector you can skip with a TSA Precheck. It arguably does not deter the most dangerous attacks even slightly. What happens when a mentally-ill pilot locks their copilot out of the cockpit? Well, we write off a crowd of passengers and then "vet" the next jet as a safe vehicle.
AI will be the same way. These "safety" measures are performative and do not even slightly address the actual threat surface of the technology. Arguably, it cannot even be done.
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"?
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
The idea that OpenAI is the one who are meaningfully pushing back against the USGov is risible.
I'm very glad to see them say this explicitly and prominently.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/47857230937/luigi-zi...
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.
You may have to make similar offerings if you want to use the latest version of ChatGPT.
I hope the country doesn’t become the new USSR.
We obviously can't A/B test this... but if Dario hadn't been doing that, would any of this been happening right now?
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.
Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689028
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.
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.
1. https://www.rand.org/global-and-emerging-risks/centers/ai-se...
Thank you Chinese Robin Hoods
/s, maybe
GLM on LLM Asics is going to be amazing, US hosted or otherwise
there is no need to imagine, this is what is literally happening
You're two steps behind.
This is rich social classes claiming more for themselves.
Someone convince me otherwise?
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.
It was a lot better. I can't believe people say this.
Why do you say it was a lot better, what type of tasks were you testing it on?
“Alice is supposedly smarter than Bob, but they both take the same time to tie their shoes.”
Censorship. Surveillance. (Hi, PLTR!)
It’s available to large companies. The WH gives them a competitive advantage against the rest of the market.
... that are friendly to this administration.
It's a matter of time before the Chinese models are banned.
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.
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.
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.
Any company providing the models will be deemed a threat to national security.
No need to block the download.
> 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.
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.
Countries are free to prevent exports of technology. Equating export controls with the Holocaust is disgusting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If anything I bet these people will just use their knowledge to make even more money reselling tokens.
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.
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?
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.
Good luck with "if you don't let us use your AI technology, we wont allow iPhones in" - go for it.
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.
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.
This kind of zero-sum thinking is what is killing the US's global influence right now.
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.
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.
I don't think they have done much real, if anything.
Would you levy the same two quote criticism of the reasonable call for regulation?
BTW this isn't an opinion on the availability of GPT 5.6. I couldn't care less about that.
It's also more typical of a Reddit or YouTube comment, rather than HN, but that's a separate issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
-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.
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.
We’re still in the “5$ airport Ubers thanks to VC money” era of AI
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.
Political priorities and good governance is why we have government.
- 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.
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...]
Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.
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.
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?
Not really, no. What planet is this on?
It's the ONLY one (almost) that are actively tested and verified in real battles.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, oops, looks like our model weights got leaked on 4chan. How unfortunate."
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/podcasts/the-daily/trump-...
It’s just getting ridiculous at this point. There are plenty of industries regulated and certified by national or international agencies. And no they don’t get to do what they want.
Unfortunately I have just as little trust in this instance of the US government as I do the corporations. Hopefully it's only two more years of this.
ppl are acting like limited release is unprecedented when, in fact, has been the norm until a few years ago.
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.
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.
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.
As predicted, [0] it has now been applied to OpenAI and soon anyone else releasing highly capable models.
No amount of rules can stop people who are willing to break them. Only enforcement can.
It’s a perfectly good system for government regulation.
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.
I wonder if he understands why, now.
Anthropic was "begging" to make it harder for competing companies to be founded.
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 would've much preferred if Dario hadn't run his mouth so much.
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.
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.
The fact that they couldn’t clear an already low bar is a really bad sign.
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.
The appropriate level would be regulation though? Like I just don't get how we can argue that arbitrarily throttling companies is ok.
So here we are, it's probably going to me messy and err on the side of over-bearing.
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)
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 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.
We must clutch our pearls and cite National Security as a reason to pick winners and losers, just like the government did for Fable.
This is not something to joke about, its real.
The Project is almost here.
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.
What Trump is doing at the moment is, as usual, only a distraction.
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.
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?
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.
lol that’s a good one.
It’s bad, okay? And it’s not usually like this.
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?
digitaltrees•13h ago
verdverm•13h ago
wondering when more people will raise their voice and get engaged
King-Aaron•12h ago
hdgvhicv•12h ago
helloplanets•12h ago
necovek•11h ago
small_model•12h ago
ed_balls•12h ago
Argonaut998•12h ago
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.
matheusmoreira•11h ago
irthomasthomas•6h ago
bilekas•12h ago
15155•11h ago
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?
bilekas•9h ago
> 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.
15155•9h ago
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.
avaer•11h ago
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.
amanaplanacanal•4h ago
HaZeust•2h ago
braebo•1h ago