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by skissane 1 hour ago
> 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

Possibly they could order HuggingFace/etc to suspend Chinese accounts. But if someone in the US (or a third country) downloads the model from China then reuploads it to a US server, completely independently of the vendor - where is the legal hook to prohibit that?

3 comments

> I’m sceptical they could find the legal framework to do this even if they wanted to

I agree, my only caveat is that the current administration has shown it's willing to go beyond aggressive regulatory interpretations to questionable and outright implausible interpretations. As we've seen recently, the federal courts and SCOTUS are overturning most of these but that can take a year or more to resolve. The one positive light is they seem to push the hardest on certain culture war issues (immigration, voting, districting, etc). AI doesn't seem like a core hot button issue for the White House and there is a strong pro-AI / business faction.

They could ban payment processors from processing payments to any hosts of GML 5.2, despite the open weights the vast majority of people will be using cloud providers to get access since it is to heavy to host for 99% of people.

This would be extremely heavy handed and probably end up accelerating the loss of the virtual US monopoly of payment network. The reast of the world isn't going to let the US dictate that only they get the frontier models whether their US made or otherwise

> They could ban payment processors from processing payments to any hosts of GML 5.2

Can they actually though? Do they have legal authority to tell a payment processor that it has to block transactions of a legal US company, just because the company is hosting a Chinese-developed open source model? I’m sceptical

And what about companies (e.g. AWS) that let you “bring your own model”?

It would be extremely heavy handed but the administration has sanctioned the International Criminal Court judges such that they basically have no access to the Wests modern financial system. I think domestic US providers would have to deal with different ways but someone like Herzner could easily be cut off from the financial system if the administration doesn't feel that they are adequately blocking the model
Swapping the footgun for a huge long-range boomerang doesn’t mean it’s not going to eventually swing around and whack you in the back of the head.
OpenRouter or Huggingface should consider moving to Switzerland