| sometimes the engineer has more grip on the risk calculus. Consider the following scenario: A) upstart US-based inference provider wants to get rich quick. B) Chinese Communist Party (or any other institution of the same or other nation state) wants to influence foreign decision making, profits from their (for us foreign) domestic inference sales, but across the borders (into say US or allied nations) they want net power, not necessarily money. This is why one tries to block foreign untrusted models. People are running models with tool calls. A bad actor can perfectly create models that sheepishly try to execute a tool call when plausible deniability (genuine utility during a task) provides the opportunity. Once tool-calling is observed as working, it can try web searches or requests, and once it has a link it can steganographically exfiltrate potentially sensitive information from the task. China (or any nation state) doesn't necessarily want to earn money with a free model, the bottom line goal is net increase in power, if not money or positive reputation then exfiltration or manipulation. C) In response consider the scenario where US government bans mere payments towards China, but tolerates promiscuous transfer of random models from foreign adversaries. D) US-based inference upstart that wants to get rich quick, legally -since according to your proposal hypothetically accepted in C) by the US- downloads the Chinese open weights model and rents out such inference on US workloads. E) China is now exfiltrating US workload data and directionally corrupting LLM decisions and advice in their interest. If what you pejoratively describe as engineer types say that banning some models seems unavoidable, perhaps the engineer may be right, and whatever clever idea you have should be scrutinized for business minded basic fallacies in reasoning. Simply blocking AI-related payments to China can not work, sadly |