Noteworthy that Z.ai, maker of the just released near-frontier GLM 5.2, has already been on the Entity List since Jan 2025[1]. Being on the Entity List does not mean all trade is forbidden. Broadly speaking it means American companies and individuals are not allowed sell them goods and services, but they are still allowed to buy from them and pay them.
AFAIK the Chinese AI companies barely depend on US goods and services, except for nVidia GPUs which were export restricted anyway, so it doesn't seem to be very consequential (see Z.ai). For the RAM maker CXMT it could be a lot more problematic though.
What's the publicly stated/marketing reason for capitalist America to put companies on the Entity List? Genuinely asking. Because to me it screams 'we were only for the free market until there was no competition'
that is open to debate. Any commercial activity with a sanctioned entity has a pretty broad interpretation. Companies might not want to take the chance even if they are "still allowed".
> except for nVidia GPUs which were export restricted anyway,
those export restrictions are a joke. when they were introduced, there was a sudden spike in NVIDIA GPU exports to surrounding Asian countries. and the US government knows this
CXMT memory maker will not be banned, because US AI labs are salivating at the idea of more RAM supply, and are lobbying hard to prevent restrictions
Is DeepSeek really behaving different than other Chinese companies? Intellectual theft is ongoing and has been ongoing for decades. Besides security risks and foul play, it is impressive by just how much DeepSeek undercuts OpenAI and Claude. DeepSeek charges $0.87 per million output tokens compared to $50 for Fable and $30 for GPT-5.5.
What an amazing achievement by America's adversaries.
The Trump administration lists Anthropic as a security risk and kneecaps its best model, despite the fact that compared to the other frontier US labs Anthropic is more transparent, more safety-oriented, frequently honest to a fault, and is clearly acting with patriotic intent.
Meanwhile, the same administration is hesitating to counter certain Chinese companies' efforts of industrial-scale theft and sabotage due to a fear of angering the CCP!
This administration has it exactly backwards. 4.5 months until election day, 7 months until the next Congress is sworn in.
I've always found this line of reasoning troubling and uninformed.
Chinese models first of all can be hosted on your own hardware, I'd argue they are way more transparent than US companies, by well releasing stuff.
Second, the "smoking gun" of DeepSeek training off Claude isn't as bad as you may think, and the amount of tokens was deemed trivial. Did you also know that if you asked Claude's it's name in Chinese it would respond as "DeepSeek" until just a few months ago until they patched it?
Third, I find it a little hypocritical to call out Chinese for "industrial-scale" theft when anyone could create Studio Ghibli style image gen photos. How could they do that unless US companies trained on copyrighted works.
Chinese are just innovating faster at this point, DeepSeek V4 is an actual technological advancement (KV Cache compression) more than a cheap clone.
The administration does have it backwards, but IMO it's more them playing into the big tech companies plans (of course they have their favorites) instead of actually investing in education, and research like the Chinese do.
I wonder about your last point. Certainly there's an aspect of education that Asia values more, however by the US own metrics, they are number 1 in terms of education outcomes.
What VPN provider is this? I could use it because Chinese users of my apps often complain about not being able to download things from my western hosted servers.
I lived in China for a bit years ago and one the biggest issues accessing western websites weren't restrictions against the site. Most of the times the culprit was using CDNs or services from Google or Cloudflare which were restricted totally or partially.
I was working on a site around that time, learned about that fixed it for the chinese user base, after that users from china went up considerably.
Part of the security risk also is the number of different models. I’ve been tempted to try some other models, but how many do I want to give access to SSH or even my repo? Obviously there are ways to work with this, but it’s gonna run through some people‘s heads.
> Anthropic said it identified a campaign by DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI labs to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude AI platform to improve their own models
Oh, won’t someone think of the poor mass copyright infringers.
Opus said to me once without any poking at it something like, "Help Grok understand it better". Makes me wonder if they are all cross-pollinated to an extent.
Prompt: Hello! Introduce yourself in one sentence.
Response: Hello! I'm *ChatGPT*, an AI assistant developed by OpenAI, dedicated to answering questions, providing information, and helping solve various problems. How can I help you?
"illicit" is throwing shade, but Anthropic can decide not to answer those questions if they don't want to. Plenty of companies don't sell to their competitors
This doesn't at all change the irony of big AI labs complaining about Chinese startups stealing the labs' IP, essentially by scraping the responses.
HN has a higher proportion of AI promoters than AI skeptics, and for a good while, the default response to complaints from book authors, bloggers, and other content creators was that "you put it on the internet so it's fair game", or "it's no different from a human learning from your works". So yeah, unless we're willing to revise these answers, I think the same "tough luck" reasoning should apply here.
For folks who are at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, or Google, and think it's fundamentally different, I would ask you to think long and hard about that answer.
Completely agreed. I would go further and say that it should be legal to scrape responses from LLMs to train new LLMs, and that forbidding that in your ToS should be considered an illegal contract. That’s simply the best way to avoid complete monopolization of the space, without requiring more drastic measures like antitrust down the line (which we seem to not manage well these days, given the number of monopolies). As long as you pay for your tokens like anyone else, "Big LLM" shouldn’t be allowed to control what you use the output for.
So... anybody who was hoping for CXMT (or YMTC) to maybe cause RAM or flash prices to maybe drop, maybe just a bit, pretty please, can go pound sand? (YMTC of course is already on the Entity List.)
The US government exists to defend capital interests. It's why we can't buy BYD cars. It's why we can't import any cars unless they're 25 years old. It's why a Tiktok sale was forced. It's why the US is seeking to block states from banning prediction markets. It's why the federal government is seeking to block states from blocking data center projects.
As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China was going to make sure that no US company was going to "own" AI. It is an issue of national security. It's why the US essentially blocks US tech companies to maintain sovereignty.
I'm reminded of the browser wars of the 1990s that led to the antitrust suit against Microsoft. Microsoft used the "commoditize your complement" strategy [1] against Netscape. The US has blocked the export of not only EUV lithography but high-end chips to China. China doesn't want to be dependent on US platforms or policy.
So China is going to make sure there are open source models available and the US government is going to try and stop them to protect US tech companies.
The reason why some Capital Interests want to blacklist DeepSeek in the US is so that you are forced to buy Claude/GPT/Gemini, which will feed revenue into an industry that requires revenue (or it’s a big problem).
The reason why some Capital Interests don’t want to ban DeepSeek is so companies that utilize AI have more options, and running your own DeepSeek cluster acts as an independent cost comparison for enterprise inference contracts.
The raising AI valuation is giving more weight to those that want to blacklist DeepSeek. The AI Safety narrative is strong. I see a path where any institution with enough compute might be watched in a similar was chem labs are observed by the DEA.
and it would be great to have an independent auditor have access to all the training material and good search tools, so that take down requests can be made by copyright owners
only if you really believe that the recent incident was about ```safety``` and not about punishing Anthropic for its blatant attempt to score brownie points with the other party, which will likely be in power for a while after the current party loses the Joker to dementia and/or diabetes and inevitably begins to nominate milquetoast apparatchiks once again.
if anything, the safety, copyright, and other narratives died down significantly for the time being, at least compared to the artificial hysteria of 2023-2024 when OpenAI, Anthropic and Google attempted to zerg rush regulatory capture and delulu Yuddites still thought they could kvetch the genie back into the bottle. unlike Llama and Stable Diffusion, new models are no longer greeted with a deluge of "And That's a BAD Thing" articles urging the proles to be scared and the politicians to "do something!"
at this point, when even the hourly "AI bad" article on the front page here is authored or at least co-authored by ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, and when Chinese models are 10-20% behind those three, the inevitability of it has more or less settled in.
Seems like interests of US government and US capital (monopolize and corner markets, jack up prices, extract economic rent in perpetuity) run strictly against interests of the broader US consumers and overall global population
I don't use TikTok, but a cursory search shows that there's a #tiananmensquare tag that has a few thousand videos, including many about the protests and Tank Man. So while I haven't seen a TikTok about it, someone has.
are you sure it has nothing to do with the fact that those cars are very heavy, potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels that can be rooted (or are already) at any time by their manufacturers in China?
Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity, which is why they are basically the only ones left publishing research in the open. That's probably part of their socialist nature.
But also a financial one. They believe that models are commodities, that you can swap one for the other and that the only thing that matters are the applications built upon them.
So they want to make sure that the world, and their own companies, are not limited in their business and application by a protected US commodity.
They will keep releasing in the open no matter what for quite some time.
It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.
But it's increasingly clear that since the last decade protectionism and nationalism is taking the place of globalization, even though globalization has been a terrific success in lifting billions out of poverty and making the US thrive.
> It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.
I'm not sure that this is because China is suddenly a great place or political system so much as a reflection of many western nations speed running to autocracy in the name of manliness.
Also, the open-weight local models are proving that the commodity can be delivered for most applications at a far lower price than frontier is charging.
realisticaly, the united states has no right or moral authority when it comes to human rights or rule of law given the last few years. given that, the admonishment of china's human rights violations against uighurs run hollow and hypocritical.
just happy to have more models that I could eventually play with if hardware ever becomes cheaper.
I think you’re assigning magnanimity to a competitor that is lagging behind and has every, state backed incentive to capture the market the only way they can. By making the models dirt cheap to access. If the roles were reversed you wouldn’t see open source versions of Chinese models. Much like you don’t see them open sourcing their blade battery design.
The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.
Before anyone starts talking about the free market, there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.
Unilateral surrender in a core aspect of statecraft, which involves maintaining our industrial power and skilled labor force, is absolutely insane. I hope my government never gets convinced by market fundamentalist idiots to do such a thing, any more than it already has, to our great detriment.
The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.
> there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.
Aside from countless other ways before and after this, the US government handed over tens of billions of dollars in cash to GM and Chrysler in 2008 and 2009.
This is absolutely true. Remember that automakers greatly contributed to war efforts in the past. It is an indispensable domestic industry, just as much as energy.
Then there is the issue that BYD cars are presumably connected to servers in China and most probably backdoored. They are too much of a security risk. I would absolutely not drive such a car, without permanently disabling the onboard cellular modem.
> The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.
Yeah, that was the argument against Japanese car makers, too.
A shitty system needs destroying sometimes. Competition from Toyota/Honda was critical in making US auto makers up their game.
It is terrible public policy to fall decades behind making expensive shitty versions of what the rest of the world has.
automotive platforms are a key military asset
it's not like the pokemon dildo industry, if you stop building jeeps your abolity to bully third parties is diminished
it is not anymore, because US doctrine has changed after losing war in Vietnam.
US can no longer sustain massive motorized and armored forces, because it implies heavy casualty rate.
The doctrine changed to shock&awe and lobbing standoff munitions from far away, which we all saw in Iran (and how it turned out).
US strictly protects boomers at Big Three and their regional dealerships and the entire supply chain that makes money off of financing, extended warranty, selling overpriced parts, overpriced heavy vehicles, etc
It's not like I don't understand the argument on the other side of this. I've heard it my entire life. It's been dominant since the late 1970s and 1980s.
It's just that it's wrong.
We need a competent industrial policy and support for skilled labor and policies that encourage domestic production.
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but our country has become fucked, overwhelmed by financialization, scams, monopoly rents and extraction, and all of the wealth accumulating to a handful of people, while we've become less resilient and, at this point, almost certainly have lost our place as the most dominant economy and industrial power in the world.
Of course it is part of an industrial policy. It is, however, not nearly sufficient, and if it's the only thing we do, it will become increasingly untenable and eventually fail.
But it's an essential first step to prevent our audio industry from just being summarily destroyed. Other steps are also needed to encourage domestic manufacturing and homegrown successes.
Also, I'm not sure why this is even controversial. Why do you think there's BMW and Hyundai plants in the American South? Tariffs are already heavily employed by us and every other industrialized country.
IMO the problem is that we've been given the excuse of market fundamentalism for the past several decades on the way down, as most everyone lost their middle class jobs, wages stagnated, etc. Now we're supposed to accept some last ditch attempt at protectionism based on directly blocking choices for consumers, when the US manufacturers aren't even really competing? It just seems like open hypocrisy. At this point the reasonable protectionist policy would be based around subsidizing American industry so that they become competitive options, not merely trying to keep the better foreign options out.
Every single load of bullshit shuffled into our faces has been presented as a benefit to consumers.
Google gives away their search and Gmail for free, don't you know? So it can't possibly be a monopoly.
And so on. It's just propaganda. It's bullshit. That's not the way that you determine whether firms have excess market power, and this fraud (called "the consumer welfare standard") was the deliberate choice of right-wing policymakers who were bent on dismantling antitrust policies and succeeded.
US note remotely capable of doing a China playbook which is: _OLD_ IP. In exchange for allocating cheap land, building cheap factories/infra, staffing with cheap technical labour etc etc... the IP sharer just sits back and collect checks. The Chinese playbook actually offers value US (and west in general) not capable of providing.
We're kind of doing it with the tsmc fabs, but yea, there are civilizational problems in the west which goes beyond cheap resources, talent, and labor.
it would destroy it, but then new more competent US automakers would pop up, similar to tesla.
US Big Three are simply full of incompetent boomers who want to maintain monopoly using tariffs, chicken tax, and banning of competitors that actively harm consumers.
Suddenly US government thinks that capitalism and free market is not desirable... huh
> The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.
I generally agree with most of what you said but not this. China's chief advantage is having a billion people. On average, they aren't that wealthy or powerful. And their leadership makes plenty of idiotic mistakes - look at their real estate market.
That's not the chief advantage, insofar as there is a difference between China, India, and Indonesia, which there is.
Their chief advantage has been a coherent, long-running national industrial policy and trade policy that encourages industry while keeping the financial sector from taking over the economy and ripping everybody off.
We used to do that too from the late 1930's to the late 1970's, which is why we were the dominant industrial power in the world at that time as well.
> We used to do that too from the late 1930's to the late 1970's, which is why we were the dominant industrial power in the world at that time as well.
I think there's another world event that happened in that time span that might better explain America's world-wide industrial dominance.
I wouldn't consider India. It's been plagued by protectionism and tariffs and won't achieve anything close to China any time soon. The only industry of value for its people which is software services is now crumbling with AI created in US and China.
Edit: probably your point too and I misread
We're in late-stage capitalism here. The pitchforks are already out and spreading across the globe. Unless the big companies get broken up, this nation will split into either a police state or socialist state.
I'm sure they think of them as a matter of national security, because they think of everything as a matter of national security, but a few analysts I respect say that the mood there is not nearly as AGI-pilled, and I have no trouble believing that.
China is far more focused on robotics. Deepseek is largely bootstrapped by the hedge fund that developed it. They received a grant from the government of China, and recently an investment. Imagine thinking text autocomplete is a matter of national security.
China will flood the west with affordable robotics and watch the West eat itself alive. They know Western capital owners are so greedy they'll screw over their entire society to chase a buck and replace labor..
Of course its a matter of national security if there are military applications. The point of robotics is also weird because they've already widely adopted robotics within their own manufacturing and also America already replaced the majority of their labor by offshoring so I dont know how they would destroy american society by introducing robotics.
In the 1990s, web browser SSL encryption was export restricted, classified as a munition because it involved cryptography. That was under Clinton.
For all the current admin's insane, ridiculous, corrupt, and criminal flaws, it's not clear to me how much of this particular issue is just the US government doing what it's always done, knee-jerk react to tech it doesn't understand by passing stupid laws.
Or that time that we parked an army on the Rio Grande because a bunch of people from the US decided to settle in the Mexican territory of Texas? That was a whole thing and the President of the US at the time, James K. Polk, ran on a platform of "Manifest Destiny" -- that the US should span "from sea to shining sea." There were a whole host of other countries with interest in that territory, not to mention the Indian tribes who would be displaced by that policy. The US has had a lot of dark periods in our history, and we shouldn't let those periods displace us from the moral certainty we derive from the Declaration of Independence and things like The Bill of Rights.
To give credit where credit is due, it is good that the Trump administration has not avidly played these stupid export control games. They tend to do little except hurt open collaboration; I remember when all open source cryptography had to be developed outside the US due to ITAR.
It is very possible that Trump and his cronies are just too incompetent to do that. In this one particular aspect (i.e. open source) I prefer having a stupid enemy than a "smart" enemy.
Their website literally has chinese characters on it even in english mode and everyone under the sun including crappy money talk show hosts know them as the chinese player that undercut western players. It's not exactly a secret.
You'd think anyone with two brain cells and confidential data could apply some judgement of their own...
Not sure I'd go that far but I do use them almost exclusively for my coding on the basis that it is an acceptable trade-off. Far cheaper and my shitty apps are really not that valuable as training data
If Chinese LLMs are successfully making people in the west defend China, then I think we have all the evidence we need to explain why they are giving away their models.
The next step of course will be to get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers. Which will also be defended because "I would never trust an American Lab".
AFAIK the Chinese AI companies barely depend on US goods and services, except for nVidia GPUs which were export restricted anyway, so it doesn't seem to be very consequential (see Z.ai). For the RAM maker CXMT it could be a lot more problematic though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z.ai