[zarzavat]

Someone explain to me how the US would stop people from using Chinese models?

Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US. What can the US do about that? The only thing the US can maybe do is ban exports of high powered GPUs to the EU. However the EU can retaliate by banning export of ASML machines to the US, so I don't think the US has that card to play.

[andix]

Just declare it illegal (national security risks). Treat it like sexual abuse material, scan cloud services for copies, and jail everyone who has them.

[zarzavat]

It's probably too slow for them. Anthropic and OpenAI need Chinese models banned soon to stay in business. The moment China has the most capable model it's game over for them.

They're spending vast amounts of money on the premise that they will be able to monetize it later. A Chinese model with the same capabilities that you can run privately, without obnoxious guardrails, would eviscerate their value proposition. China isn't there yet but it seems it's a matter of months until crossover.

If a ban has to go through Congress then A\OAI will have bled out by the time Congress gets around to doing anything, especially for a law as controversial as jailing people for running Chinese models.

[andix]

Congress? Who cares about congress anymore? The president declares it a national security risk. Done.

[claw-el]

Have you seen my latest model, called HLM, from y.ai, there is one single model weight that is different from the popular open source model, but I promise you it is no longer the same thing..

[SamuelAdams]

You jest but this is exactly how Anna’s Archive was set up. Anyone can copy the infrastructure code’s git repository and set up a mirror of the site and trackers under a new domain relatively quickly.

Maybe a similar setup can be done for banned AI weights?

[mft_]

Yes. It feels like we're heading into a dystopian Neal Stephenson novel - there will be a grey market trade in custom models with different specialisations, which people slot into their hacked-together hardware to help with different tasks.

[andix]

Does it have a valid signature from xAI? No? Busted!

[syradar]

That wouldn’t hold up in court and you would be jailed. Your intent is still to provide the illegal model.

[Buttons840]

The actual way to do this is run a few fine-tuning passes on some pro-America nationalistic freedom loving anti-China propaganda, and then you can tell the judge with a straight face that it's a new model.

[dmuso]

Probably in a similar way to how they go after IP/copyright currently. One method they use is to push for law changes in free trade agreements. US would use whatever leverage they have to get other countries on board and locked in to US providers.

[surajama]

That might stop European companies from buying inference directly from China. I don’t see how anyone could possibly stop them from taking an open-weight Chinese model and then modifying it and selling it to Americans as a European model.

[mft_]

It would become known and be blocked. You think if the EU started rebadging and reexporting Chinese EVs to the US the EU tariff wouldn't jumt up to the Chinese level very quickly?

[e44858]

How can you prove that a modified LLM was based on a Chinese model?

[mft_]

IANA AI researcher, but there are different technique for fingerprinting or assessing the similarity of different LLM models. Or it could become known via a leak, or good old humint.

If it wanted to, the US could make model inspection (with direct access to the weights) a condition of access to their market.

[ianm218]

The government can strong arm enterprises in a million ways. If they just issue a vague executive order large public companies won't want to buy inference from these models without regulatory certainty. Anyone in regulated industries is going to be weary of regulatory retaliation.

I.e. for Google to build data centers they need the US gov to play ball, so if they were considering a service of hosting open source models on their TPUs they wouldn't do this. Another example is the merger between Paramount and Skydance where they paid out Trump to get the merger approved [1].

[1]. https://www.yahoo.com/news/paramount-settles-donald-trump-la...

[dosisking]

Companies would simply move away from the US. Kind of like how Britain killed it's own car industry back in the day.

[satvikpendem]

The US is trying to stop them for US companies, it doesn't care about non Americans.

[monooso]

The parent comment, emphasis mine.

> Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US.

[marmarama]

Sure, but if you are a business in the US, you might not be able to use it legally.

And, through the US exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction, businesses in Europe doing business with the US might not be able to use it either, for fear of reprisals. Even though the model is Chinese and hosted in Europe.

This sort of thing happens all the time, especially in the finance and defence sectors.

[zarzavat]

This might work if Chinese models are on par with US models or slightly worse.

However if Chinese models start to become noticeably better[0] than US models, it will be hard to hold the line and businesses would start risking using illegal models to get an business advantage, which would be as simple as making HTTP requests to an inference provider outside the US.

The AI companies themselves show that there's a high capacity for lawlessness in corporate America, such as e.g. Meta and Anthropic downloading Library Genesis and getting away with a slap on the wrist.

[0] Chinese models exceeding US models could come sooner rather than later. Stock Kimi K3 is slightly worse than the frontier but it could improve with further post-training, and the weights will be released imminently. All it takes is for China to get a good pretrain and release that model into the world.

[cloakandswagger]

US banks would be prohibited from processing payments for those model providers, and those model providers would update their EULAs to prohibit American-usage.

Look at how online poker was "banned" in 2011. It was and always has been legal to play online poker in the US, they just made it illegal to accept wire payments for online gambling which destroyed the American market for it.

So many comments in this thread miss the point; an American "ban" on Chinese open-weights is not aiming to make individual usage impossible and wouldn't be accomplished by throwing people in jail. The point is to make their usage difficult and uncertain enough that large companies will opt for American alternatives.

[satvikpendem]

No they cannot, legally speaking, and companies do not want to face sanctions avoidance charges, so practically speaking no American company will touch the European model hosts either.

[pbgcp2026]

In 5 to 10 years most of EU will be partnering with China, not US. Banking will become more "Chinese centric" and most of EU will show a middle finger to US with its FATCA, DMCAs, sanctions and other BS.

[sharpshadow]

The US will stop you from using it with sanctions. As a US citizen anywhere in the world intentionally circumventing sanctions grant you up to 20 years prison time.

That’s just the short version not to speak of secondary sanctions and further mechanisms which take place then.

[Buttons840]

Won't EU companies just announce they've "developed" a new model named Komo, and then we can just use that? Or is the US just going to straight up prosecute plebs for using any model not owned by one of the 5 Americans?

[skrebbel]

I'm partial to their proud 100% European competitor Doopsook