If that happens it'll be an absolute disaster. Imagine a scenario where Anthropic and OpenAI prohibit most US companies from using their latest models because of safety.. And meanwhile attackers use equivalent open source models to attack US companies.
Any prohibition on open source models will do nothing to fix the problem.. since attackers will never feel bound to the law. All advanced models must be available for defensive purposes.
Right, but is there any evidence of intelligence behind any of these (government) decisions? It’s just regulatory capture + marketing (plus some people living out an imaginary fantasy that they’re in Neuromancer or something), absolutely no reason to think they won’t try and target open models as part of this.
> since attackers will never feel bound to the law.
But that's the whole point.
Fall out of favor with the admin and you lose access to the good American models, aren't allowed to use Chinese ones, and fall prey to the attackers and behind your competitors.
> GLM export controls incoming? I predict Commerce will force OpenRouter, HuggingFace to take some open models down within the next few months.
I’m sceptical they could find the legal framework to do this even if they wanted to
They have legal authority to (a) prevent export of US goods/services; (b) ban imports of physical goods; (c) ban transactions (including purchasing services or license agreements) with foreign firms
But I’m not aware of any legal authority which lets them ban US firms from running a Chinese-developed open source AI model in the United States, if they are at arms length from the vendor, and aren’t using it for government contracts or regulated applications
That’s because the Department of Energy originally funded and contributed IP to the EUV Corp joint venture between several semiconductor companies (including ASML and Intel). Their ability to export control EUV was part of that original agreement that the entire technology is built on.
The weights are already available and downloaded, is it going to be a crime to have them, run them, make them available? Constitutional rights still exist (I hope)
> is it going to be a crime to have them, run them, make them available?
Now you're getting it! Commerce will call it a munition and those harboring it as harboring illegal/foreign munitions.
No business will take the hit, so they will quickly deplatform the models.
No end user has the GPU capacity to use GLM 5.2 or similar models at full precision so the government will call the problem "mostly solved." But they might choose to "make examples" out of a few people using p2p software to download the weights if they choose to.
Or we use the models to work on fixing vulns and stop over-blowing the doom scenarios. Gotta save the kids and kill the terrorists though!
I'm for making software better instead of banning it based on what the rich and powerful claim.
I suspect the real fear is that open weight models undermine the financials and token prices they thought were going to pay off their ludicrous spending because they have all raced and raised hardware prices.
We're still in the middle of the cambrian explosion.
If Anthropic was capable of developing Opus 4.49-4.5 2H 2025.... then any company with a research team capable of reading all the papers and press releases will be capable of producing Opus 4.8 by the end of 2027, either raw model competency, or in a harness like claude code (or better with both). I guess what I am trying to say is that Opus 4.5 does not represent the edge of agentic capability, merely somewhere in the thick meaty layer of "functional and achievable".
We can draw the line at Sonnet 4.6 in the US but much like encryption export restrictions in the 1980s, the line drawn will be laughably low within a few years and simply unthinkable in a decade.
I do not think the government thinks this deeply. Market manipulation might be a rational, if unethical reason to ban open source models.
But this admin banned Anthropic models to "own the libs." They will continue to ban what they want for whatever reason they want. I don't think those reasons will be particularly coherent.
Reaper and Predator are both drones and there’s really no comparison to toy drones in terms of sheer destruction and capabilities in general, the comparison is actually quite apt imo.
Any prohibition on open source models will do nothing to fix the problem.. since attackers will never feel bound to the law. All advanced models must be available for defensive purposes.