[holmesworcester]

I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government.

Export control is not an effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology developers everywhere want to use (see:VPNs) so there was no good faith policy justification for imposing an export control.

This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't, and likes to be the center of every story. They also seem to like extracting concessions and reciprocal favors. We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. US voters deserve better.

[libraryofbabel]

I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both?

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.

[gpm]

> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever

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)

[jychang]

This is going to age very poorly when the best Chinese labs ALREADY just started not open sourcing their models.

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.

[roenxi]

If we're measuring progress in hours and days then yes. But if we're measuring progress in months then OSS models are doing fine. You can get a state-of-the art performance in an open model if you pretend it is January 2026 instead of June.

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.

[csomar]

The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose) and glm (coding) and they are both open weight and share lots of their tooling.

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.

[Barbing]

Had seen weeks back that the top two non-Western models on ArtificialAnalysis were both closed: https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence-category-tabs

How much stock should we put into that graph, though, I'm not sure.

[sameersri2004]

Even if the models by the Chinese labs are open source or open weights even after they get to mythos level intelligence lets say, still inference and the optimization of those models to be accessed at speeds of 1000 tokens/sec in not in the hands of general public as these models have parameters more than a trillion and they can't be run on some publicly available hardware, So even after being open source it does'nt fix the problem as the general public will still pay the company for inference.

[state_less]

I'm pretty sure these large models are run on Nvidia GPUs, not some unobtainable piece of secret kit. You could go down the street and buy from AMD or a number of other vendors to push out FLOPs if you wanted or needed, but you'll need a thick wallet to shell out for a cluster of GPUs to run these models. The reason people don't run the big Chinese models at home is that they can't afford the hardware, not that it isn't publicly available. This tech is essentially a large amount of matrix multiplications afterall.

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.

[rcxdude]

if it's open source there will be many potential providers, though.

[tmpz22]

If only we had established means of pooling community resources for the public good

[corimaith]

You know a statement like this just makes Chinese big tech look bad right?

[tw1984]

> The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose)

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?

[hurtigioll]

selling LLMs is much more profitable than trading, and with much less risk

[ls612]

The main reason the Chinese labs are releasing models as open weights is because they don't have the compute necessary to provide all of the inference. For the US frontier models something like 80-90% of the lifetime compute required for the model is inference rather than training. China wants to shepherd as much of their limited compute as possible towards training to keep up in the race.

[Slartie]

I think the main reason is to minimize the market for closed-source models from US companies.

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.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

I'm European and I don't see sending my data to China as more risky than sending it to the US. Rather the opposite.

I think your vision of how the rest of the US sees the world is tinted by a massive bias.

[dariosalvi78]

was going to say this.. open sourcing Chinese models will enforce Chinese dominance instead of reducing it. When an open Chinese model becomes the best alternative to inaccessible closed US models guess what everybody will start to use. And that same open model may embed certain narratives and values that please the Chinese government.

[Barbing]

Ya. You know enough about China to know: would they be willing to sell users outside of China models that aren't fully pro-China (and won't deflect on tough questions)? Or would that be dirty money that they wouldn't want anyone to make?

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)

[throwa356262]

Serious question: why would sending data to China be worse then the US?

[londons_explore]

With nearly everyone using inference accelerators, the pool of hardware is no longer shared between training and use.

[SubiculumCode]

No, they are open sourcing them because they don't have another play, being second/3rd tier lans

[rupx]

Kimi 2.7 and GLM 5.2 released today and are open source.

[c0rruptbytes]

Minimax M3 too, and huawei claims to be releasing non-nvidia dependent training software too. openPangu 2.0 could be a shake-up if it holds up as a good model

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)

[chabes]

Qwen does closed and open. This is not new.

[nine_k]

The US administration restricting the use of US-trained models is one of the best gifts it could make to the Chinese LLM producers, and to the PRC government.

[dozerly]

This entire administration is a gift to everybody but the US. It’s either in service of Russia, China or whoever is willing to pay Trump the most.

[scotty79]

It's funny how the acceleration of the downfall of the US (due to trump) is a gift to everyone else. It's almost as if US didn't have as postitive impact on the world as they thought.

[gpm]

A gift to [every dictatorial regime]. It's not a gift to the common people. The hundreds of thousands of people who got aids, and wouldn't have if not for Trumps withdrawal, didn't benefit. The women of Afghanistan didn't benefit. The countries of the EU... Canada... Korea... Taiwan... Ukraine... really just about any democracy didn't benefit.

The downfall of the US benefiting bad people is not evidence that the US didn't have a positive impact.

[rvnx]

Downfall sounds exaggerated.

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.

[rjzzleep]

Chinese have a nickname for Trump. 川建国. Trump the nation builder(meaning China). But Biden actually continued most of Trumps policies.

[Der_Einzige]

I won’t forgive Biden for not reversing more of trumps policies, especially immigration

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.

[vintermann]

There's also the Meta motivation, that even if you don't get the control you would like from releasing a model, it may still be worth it to at least deny others that control. I'm sure that matters even more to China vs. the US than it mattered to Facebook vs. Google.

[close04]

You don’t need the cutting edge to influence people’s opinion. “Export LLMs” to the rescue.

[spiralpolitik]

There is no moat in the model and by making the them open, it’s hard for one to be established when the free models are “good enough”.

OpenAI and Anthropic are both hamstrung by this. Anthropic does have the better chance of surviving.

[tw1984]

> 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.

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.

[strangegecko]

Of course it requires SOTA, people will always choose better models over some compact thing that is obviously more limited. You can't control the truth with models nobody wants to use.

[columnarx3]

People choose SOTA right now because of the heavily subsidised model subscriptions. People aren't going to pay 20x the price for a model that's maybe 10% better.

[ezst]

And the fact that "better" is highly subjective and domain/task/vibe-specific

[adrianN]

Why do I want the model I use for coding to know Shakespeare or vice versa?

[Jare]

Because you communicate with it using natural language and real-world references and descriptions of what you want, you use emotion and emphasis (especially when re-prompting), you use examples and illustrative stories and common expressions. Understanding and interpreting all of that and replying in kind, to some degree, requires a large body of non-computation, cultural knowledge, or else the prompts are just meaningless words, and the replies will look like compiler output.

[Der_Einzige]

This is why: https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/

[rjzzleep]

Small models are the future.

[baq]

> > Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever

> Yes.

holy shit the naivete of HN nowadays.

[deanishe]

> Why can't it be both?

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.

[CraftingLinks]

Why wouldn't they? They see this technology as a military asset now.

[VBprogrammer]

Honestly, with the caliber of people who currently comprise the US administration; leaving the whole thing to Openclaw and some new fancy model might not be the worst idea.

[layer8]

Trump and friends are only interested in investments they can personally make money from.

[JohnBooty]

Yeah, there’s been a lot of debate about this on r/localllama — will there be a steady supply of new free/open models in the future?

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.

[locknitpicker]

> I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both?

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?

[solumunus]

You’re completely overrating these benchmarks and it’s landing you at a nonsense opinion. Just actually use the models and you will see that the gap is significant.

[irthomasthomas]

It should be easy for a company like Anthropic to prove this beyond a doubt. Why don't they? Why don't they have a collection of prompts and side-by-side comparisons with other models showing how far ahead they are?

[largbae]

I think it's mainly because the difference in models at the frontier isn't "response to prompt X", but rather "coherence with 500K tokens of context and instructions in play"

[viking123]

Good morning to the Anthropic office good sir

[dagss]

I got to try using Fable for a day... it was a clear and definite shift in quality and how independent it is.

It was almost like having another human using and shepherding Opus for me, instead of herding Opus directly myself.

[rileyphone]

All that says is some benchmarks aren’t worth the tokens it takes to evaluate them. Mythos is clearly capable of finding zero days other models can’t, and Fable is close enough to be lumped with it.

[mullingitover]

> Mythos is clearly capable of finding zero days other models can’t

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.

[kolinko]

Did you use the models yourself?

[geuis]

I still remember when Netscape had outdated ssl for a few years because more advanced cryptography was classified by the US gov as armaments or something. Basically used export restrictions to prevent better security technology from being adopted into commercial products.

[londons_explore]

Which was a clear as day message that "We have ways to decrypt this, but can't yet decrypt that, so please use the one we can snoop on".

Yet somehow we're always forgetting that lesson and surprised when government is found snooping.

[mortehu]

They didn't have some secret way of defeating 40 bit encryption; anyone could do it. 512 bit asymmetric encryption was also brute forced by a private entity, albeit at a high budget.

[jasonfarnon]

I'd forgotten all the government attempts at controlling crypto like PGP in the early internet days. It is one straightforward way to look at what's happening here without resorting to speculation about this administration's motives.

[mr_sturd]

So the solution should be to publish the models + weights in a book.

[webXL]

Yes, a really, really BIG book!

[Aeolun]

> This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't

This seems to be an administration that is dead set on antagonizing every single part of the world. Either enemy or ally.

[locknitpicker]

> 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.

[nxm]

A friend who takes advantage of you wasn’t your friend all along

[baq]

US has some questionable allies themselves who happily and remorselessly stole top secret information including nuclear secrets.

[thazework]

GEO blocking is not the same as blocking based on nationality. I'd like(?) to think someone in this decision chain realized "restricting to US nationals" meant effectively restricting it to all and chose this route knowing Antrophic would need to just pull the model (so engaging in censorship without calling it that, possibly less susceptible to court challenges).

[rob74]

Or hurting Anthropic without calling it that? Knowing that Anthropic has clashed with the current administration in the past (https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5725327/pentagon-anthro...), and knowing how vindictive (or willing to favor those who suck up to them) they are, I wouldn't be surprised at all...

[LordDragonfang]

I'm less confident in that. To me the way the announcement reads as malicious compliance -- this administration is extremely petty in its dealings, and it's not outside the realm of possibility they asked for and would have accepted an essentially symbolic ban, something that anyone with technical knowledge and a VPN could bypass.

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)

[greyman]

From my login credentials Anthropic do not know I am non-US national. They could deduce it from my chats, but that would take some time to implemwnt.

[mrandish]

I get your reasoning but I think you're misreading this. The Trump admin has had access to Mythos for a couple months and certainly had access to pre-release Fable for more than a week but they wait until 5:30p on a Friday to send a broad and unworkable demand for a company to remove its flagship products from access to anyone who is not a confirmed U.S. citizen under severe penalties for any violation.

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).

[fauigerzigerk]

>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.

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.

[yoyohello13]

We need to stop making light of these things. Governments don’t do ‘silly’ things. When you wield that kind of power over people’s lives, everything you do is deadly serious.

[rob74]

Yes. What Elon did with DOGE (including but not limited to destroying USAID) may have been stupid and barely saved any money at all if you look at it as a percentage of the total budget, but it had very real consequences for real people. But, because they were mostly people from Trump's "shithole countries", no one talks about it anymore.

[themgt]

I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government. ... We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too.

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.

[hardbass]

How does a data center harm me? I have seen how incredibly stupid the average (dem or republican both)'s reasons are. If not outright lizard brain radiation beams, more than once I have seen claims of it producing "toxic waste" which is absolutely absurd.

[teh64]

How about all of noise if you live close enough to one?

https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/communities-are-raising-n... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277298502...

[hardbass]

I will be honest, at this stage I have zero to negative opinion on what "community" says. The second one appears a research paper which is much better and I will read it.

[sersi]

Cheaply designed datacenter that don't use a close loop for watercooling and use too much water are a problem

[Symbiote]

Increased energy prices, increased local pollution, increased climate change.

(And waste electronics are considered hazardous in the EU.)

[scotty79]

I don't think incresed incentives to develop lagging energy infrastructure are a bad thing. Especially in times when solar is cheaper than everything else.

[hardbass]

What is the mode of pollution here? And why is the energy price an issue rather than a need to revamp the electricity production?

[Symbiote]

I was thinking of the emissions from 'temporary' gas-powered electric generators in the USA.

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.

[3] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2020.116928

[hardbass]

I think physically owning compute is a benefit of its own beyond paper employment considerations. And I understand straining existing power infrastructure but I am afraid many of the people opposing data centers also oppose construction of new electrical construction on the same frivolous "noise" and "pollution" reasons which are not their actual reason they oppose it.

[bogeholm]

> why is the energy price an issue

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

[epolanski]

> US voters deserve better.

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.

[orangeoxidation]

> I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government.[...] This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't, and likes to be the center of every story. They also seem to like extracting concessions and reciprocal favors.

"Silly" is a silly word for corruption.

[bigyabai]

I think this is also overly naive. We live in a world of hardware attestation and passkeys, the baseline requirements to use new models can increase to cryptocurrency-levels of KYC. If this becomes the new norm (which it easily could), then the best models will impose increasingly restrictive requirements.

[holmesworcester]

The statement said that even foreign nationals within the US would be barred. That seems intentionally unworkable to me, and makes me think that the intent was to be more restrictive/disruptive than even an export control. It is hard to tell what the internal discussions are, but given the last run-in between the administration and Anthropic, and given the administration's politicization of nearly everything, I think it's likely that this is not necessarily a long term across-the-board policy plan.

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.

[sreekanth850]

Every F35 is exported with a killswitch. and you think this is a silly decision? its not silly, its gatekeeping, iam sure this will get much strict in future, where even developing a frontier model can get sanctions from US. IMO Every country need AI sovereignty and its right time to form a group or consortium of nations to fund and build an equally capable frontier model that is accessible to all others. AI should not be confined to certain nations, the way nuclear capabilities are restricted.

[throwaway85825]

There's no kill switch. The F35 advantage is the mission data files that are frequently updated and allow the F35 to classify targets and threats. Essentially the US and partners collect the electronic signatures of enemy radars and package them so in a conflict the het can draw a box with a S400 label.

[crote]

So it doesn't have a kill switch, it just stops being useful when it can no longer regularly phone home? That sounds awfully close to a killswitch to me...

[throwaway85825]

Countries could generate their own MDFs but what's the point, it's from shared intelligence. Which is the premise of an alliance.

Sometimes variances in manufacture or maintenance of electronic systems allow the F35 to identify not just type of system but exact unit.

[markoman]

This killswitch claim is false and would be a huge vulnerability if it existed.

[pseudony]

You don’t need a fancy kill switch, just stop sending parts and updates, any sustained conflict will do the work.

Any F35 bought by Europe is nothing short of lunacy. You don’t buy from people hell-bent on having conflicts with you.

[litigator]

The UK alone produces 15% of the parts required to assemble the F35. Around 25% of the jet is manufactured/produced by the other partners of the program.

Heck the F35B only exists due to the UK demanding it. They have access to the source code (and so do Israel).

[throwaway85825]

Due to political engineering some significant parts are manufactured in partnership countries. That supply chain is also a vulnerability for the US albeit to a lesser degree.

[sreekanth850]

Excatly and even more they are stripped version. Export version is always inferior.

[baq]

Except the Israeli versions obviously. These are at least on par with domestic.

[sreekanth850]

Iam not sure about this, may be true. But in general exported products are always less capable. Be it f35, brahmos or s400.

[jcutrell]

Silly or not, precedent matters and labeling it silly is rhetorical. The impact is going to be critically important.

[ilaksh]

It's also possible that they literally are too dumb to realize they asked for something infeasible. For example, the same main character who apparently gave up a career as an extra in made-for-TV WWII German movies to become a very high ranking government official.

[anilakar]

Nineties called and they want their shitty export grade computing back. Anyone still remember OpenBSD?

[nl]

VPNs won't work when they do document (passport) verification.

[bluegatty]

Your company won't allow you to use export restricted technology or risk going out of business instantly.

[nl]

Not sure if you are agreeing with my point or not.

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.

[jMyles]

The problem with the (accurate and useful) "silly behavior by a government" characterization is that, far too often, when governments behave and silly and childish ways, large corporations still treat their dictates as legitimate.

Obviously nobody actually buys this (now 6 decade-old) ridiculous fiction that structured signals on a network (ie, information, thought, knowledge) are tantamount to a weapon that can be exported. I don't think many people believe it's the legitimate purvey of government to police what can be said on the internet at all.

But instead of the well-earned, "go to bed, grandpa, you're drunk again", companies act as though article II of the constitution specifically said, "vested in the executive branch is the power to violently repress proliferation of knowledge."

So yes, it's a silly idea by an outdated institution which is swirling the drain. But it's not being treated that way where it counts.

[bluegatty]

"effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology developers everywhere want to use (see:VPNs) "

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.

[sandcat_]

Agreed. This is no different from the US government attempting to control SSH, or restrict the sale of the Apple Power Mac.

10 years from now we’ll look back and laugh at how silly it all was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

[baq]

> silly behavior by a government

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.

[blueblisters]

> We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. US voters deserve better.

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)

[fauigerzigerk]

>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.

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.

[blueblisters]

I humbly accept it's very difficult to game this out with any degree of confidence, especially as other countries deploy more resources.

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.

[fauigerzigerk]

>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.

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).

[blueblisters]

You raise good points and these would make sense under normal circumstances.

But none of this matters if AI offers infinite leverage and America hoards all the compute and talent.

This explains what I mean in a much better articulated fashion - https://x.com/tszzl/status/2065939227167392147

For other sovereign nations, being a market for American technology products is no longer good enough to get access to American tech. I imagine the relationship would become a lot more one-sided (in favor of America) if the model capability gap keeps increasing.

[gazebo2]

>economy-wide automation would make the US wealthy beyond imagination

Somehow I doubt the average American would be partaking in this unimaginable wealth

[don_esteban]

> Keeping the politics of AI-driven unemployment aside, The is doing some very heavy lifting.

> US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP and has a deep trade deficit ... maybe there is a connection?

[pants2]

I don't see your point why export control is a silly tool. There's a difference between a VPN which I can prop up on my home server or a $5 VPS, vs a Mythos-scale closed source model running on millions of dollars of hardware

[holmesworcester]

I mean, if the stated intent of an export control is to allow domestic use but prevent export, achieving the stated intent is impossible, because every developer in the world wants the latest models and will get a VPN.

[vr46]

A VPN won't work in this instance without a US credit card. So it's completely possible.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

As other posted noted, US cc is, by far, the easiest piece of information to acquire by a determined actor. Possible and inconvenience, but that is about it.

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.

[esseph]

I'm so glad none of those US credit cards have never been stolen.

Can you imagine the disaster???

[jack_pp]

Harder to hide payment info than ip origin

[ElProlactin]

It is trivially easy for nation states, non-nation bad actors, etc. to use US payments. I'd guess that most of the financial scams targeting Americans rely on US-based mules and their American bank accounts.

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.

[LastTrain]

For peons sure. For anyone who is an actual security threat it would be easy. That is why this is either a) stupid or b) yet another lever to make it easier for this administration to incarcerate people.

[motbus3]

Or that would be even a better excuse to ban the usage of VPN than csam

[hbarka]

> We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too.

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.

[rzz3]

As you’ll see from my comment history, I’ve been consistent on how horrible this forcible TikTok acquisition was, and don’t forget that Biden was banning TikTok just the same before Trump got into office (and that Trump started this anti-TikTok action in his first administration before that). Yes, this administration is a special kind of awful, but the last one sucked too.

[peter422]

The “TikTok ban” was a law passed by Congress that the Trump administration completely ignored until they arranged the sale to a political ally.

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.

[viking123]

It's good that they sold it to Ellison, an ardent zionist who referred to IDF as "our guys", who also now owns CBS, CNN and what else? What can we call this?

[Schmerika]

No, we can not stop with the both sidesing.

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...

[sigmarule]

We should not stop _all_ of the both-sidesing, but we absolutely should stop _some_ of the both-sidesing. Both-sidesing done without both (a) critical thinking and (b) honest intent is simply whataboutism, one of the many forms of societal pollutant that we seem to have fully normalized.

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.

[Schmerika]

To be perfectly honest, I actually do think we should stop all the both sidesing - but only after following it to its logical conclusion.

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?

[hbarka]

> This has been going on for decades

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.

[defrost]

> then it’s either our culture and normal way of life

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.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

I disagree with parent, but nothing they stated qualifies as 'dismissable' as 'qanon' level, which btw is one of the key phrases establish to ignore some opinions. It may be incorrect, inaccurate and/or simply wrong, but dismissing it as some conspiracy is.. what is a good way to characterize it.. slightly over the top.

[willsmith72]

silly or corrupt?