- China is the largest open weight provider, with Mistral and Cohere delivering a few other models. There isn’t much else internationally
- (I think OP is suggesting) this would effectively ban Chinese models in the US, which would be an interesting case. Who knows if they could have theirs reviewed, or if we’ll see another FCC approved router situation.
- that Chinese models are censored is a very common criticism. If American models are also censored that looks bad.
- this will be awful for self hosters and local inference. Imagine if HuggingFace had to drop non-American model weights. That would effectively kill them.
It's even worse than that for American models.
As an American, if I want to run a model locally and have to choose a censored model I will choose a Chinese censored model over an American censored model especially if it is the Trump administration doing the American censoring.
Chinese censorship is mostly directed at things that would not reduce the usefulness of the model for my applications. I doubt that would be the case with Trump censorship.
Same for products that spy on me. If a car for example is sending my travel log to Korea or the EU or China it is annoying but none of them are realistically going to do anything with the data that would seriously harm me. The risk is orders of magnitude higher if US governments or US law enforcement gets it.
Instead we'll be actively lied to. American exceptionalism.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/28/we-tried-...
* This might be regulatory capture for OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Any new entrant will have a harder time getting approval.
* This is going to be terrible for the industry in general because this administration will not hesitate to demand bribes and force their propaganda into the models.
* This might cause the US to ban the use of Chinese models for US businesses and governments. After all, Chinese models won't need white house approval to release. So the only way to "control" them is to simply make them illegal.
Ultimately, this will grant more power to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google due to regulatory capture but it hurts the AI industry overall.
The thing goes both ways. They have to secure their people from Russian and American propaganda that will be coming by the petabyte once a few more us data centers go online. The US is trying to elect fascists in Europe.
At the same time it's a terrible practice for privacy and human rights. Especially in the wrong hands.
In the us we have products we sell to china to automate their factories. China soon wont need those. The US goal of laying off anyone who thinks for money is really different than chinas goals of automating product manufacturing.
Deepseek costs less because it actually costs less. Chinas electrical infrastructure is so much better than the uses. Meanwhile the us has ai data centers running on effing gas. On literal gas generators. The only budget discussions for infrastructure in the us are basically for the DHS too. It's not sustainable.
Who or what will stop them?
I also don't think we're going to have top tier free models forever. It's going to end within a few years.
I think we will see model size shrink more and more and become more efficient. Ideally to the point where they run on high end computers and not data centers. That's the future in my opinion.
At that point you could run them on your phone or chrome book for free or with ads like Google search. Or pay for privacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Good_Life_(The_Twilig...
That's his authority.
Edit: I'll take the downvotes. Every time I say this, I get downvoted. Weirdly, even EU politicians are beginning to see that they've over regulated their tech industry so much that it can't compete but HN just can't accept this opinion.
And before someone comes out saying that only "bad" websites want to track you, the official European Union website has a cookie prompt. https://commission.europa.eu/index_en
The web has gotten worse since cookie prompts and websites lost a bit of competitiveness to mobile apps because of these annoying prompts. Load a website on a phone screen and 30% of the screen is covered by an intrusive cookie prompt.
As an industry, we learned a long time ago that people hate popups. European Union decided to make a law that causes most websites to show a popup or face potentially bankruptcy level of financial punishment.
And you know what irks me the most? These politicians weren't smart enough to write a law that does this to all digital places. Yes, they only wrote this law for websites while apps are basically free to collect the same data on users freely without any prompting.
Sure. To a point!
But then you go to, say, the Daily Mail, and its cookie banner tells you they'd like to share with their 1,300 ad/tracking partners, and that you can turn them off only individually.
An extremely strong claim. You're making a generalized argument against any attempt to influence market forces. I can maintain the position that regulations can sometimes succeed and sometimes fail to achieve their goals, whereas you have to prove that, say, banning mining companies from hiring child coal miners has caused more harm than good in the form of unintended consequences.
Yes, it feels a bit weird to me that the HN crowd is a fan of regulation although much of the crowd works in the least regulated profession.
Maybe we need to have regulation that puts an automatic expiration on regulation and there's no way to bypass that. Existing regulation nearing expiration can only be extended by a democratic voting process. Just the burden of handling this should naturally filter out regulation that's unpopular or no longer relevant.
Instead we tried something that look like a punt, and even then tracking/adtech ghouls aren't happy. I say we should lobby hard to get my version at least examined in the EU parliament (or in any parliament in a EU country, really), that will probably scare them into removing the cookie banners.
I remember Google maps existing on iOS before Apple Maps was ever released.
> I remember Google maps existing on iOS before Apple Maps was ever released
You couldn’t change the default map app on iOS before the EU forced Apple to allow default apps to be configured. That’s what the person you responded to was claiming, and they are correct
be equipped with the USB Type-C receptacle, as described in the standard EN IEC 62680-1-3:2021 “Universal serial bus interfaces for data and power – Part 1-3: Common components – USB Type-C® Cable and Connector Specification”, and that receptacle shall remain accessible and operational at all times;
incorporate the USB Power Delivery, as described in the standard EN IEC 62680-1-2:2021 “Universal serial bus interfaces for data and power – Part 1-2: Common components – USB Power Delivery specification”;
What gave you cookie prompt is malicious compliance.
I'm sure that's not the only thing they've used it for. Definitely looking for any exploit they can use to enhance data gathering, and cracking into IOS, private networks, etc. Gotta keep an eye on citizens, but hey, it's the only government body that really listens you.
at this point it almost seems like citizens should review AI models before the government can access them.
If anything, this measure seems like it would create a scenario where services hosted outside the US would become a lot more attractive relative to Trumped AI.
This feels like an attempt to enact regulation capture where only the large AI vendors can afford to have their models vetted by the government.
Administration officials will insist that this will be bipartisan and just for national security.
Trump will then just come out and say it: that they won't authorize models that provide "fake news" such as him not winning the election by the most votes ever.
There will be a big fuss as people and media point to this as the smoking gun, but then it will turn out that American voters just don't care.
I guess we could learn to appreciate Mistral sooner than expected.
moneycantbuy•2h ago
ahurmazda•1h ago
“Nice model you got there… shame if someone prompt injected a regulatory framework into it.”