Open source is looking great right now

seriously, ordered more hardware this week, as it gets more dystopian every week

wondering when more people will raise their voice and get engaged

History shows that people generally start speaking out about things after it's too late to do so.

More specifically, the masses here are well satisfied with proverbial bread and circuses.

We won't see mass action until enough people have literally nothing left to lose. For now, folks have plenty to risk and lose by taking action. There is not nearly enough homelessness or starvation yet for people to rise up. The masses are surprisingly tolerant of authoritarian oppression so long as food can keep being put on the table.

It’s looking very fragile from a legal point of view. Ownership of compute and software freedom will be next k the chopping block after control of networks that’s occurring at the moment.

Less so in EU than in US.

It's the year of the open source AI model is the new 'It's the year of the Linux Desktop'. It's not and never will be for 90% of people

GLM 5.2 is competitive with Opus 4.6.

It's looking good until you start to see the US gov forcing cloudflare to block hugging face and others.

Why do they need to "force Cloudflare" to do anything?

Why wouldn't they just tell Hugging Face that they need to abide export restrictions directly - they're an American company?

Doesn't sound dystopian enough without a second compelled entity?

Because the models don't necessarily need to be hosted on hugging face. You can create a Model Card repository containing your README and from there you include instructions or a custom script in your repository that allows authenticated users to download the model.

Doesn't sound dystopian enough without a second compelled entity?

This is the second snarky question you've made today, the other in relation to the export limit.

Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?

Both are assumptions you are making and don't provide much in the way of constructive conversation, if I'm wrong about something it's alright to just point it out.

don't necessarily need to be hosted on hugging face.

Export restrictions don't split generally hairs on technicalities like "hosting" - the "but magnet links aren't actually torrents!" defense doesn't fly when $1M fines and federal felonies are at stake. All distribution or "causing" distribution to restricted entities is prohibited.

This is the second snarky question you've made today

It's not snark: why would Cloudflare somehow be legally or technically relevant in the context of two American companies distributing export-restricted materials? HN seems to love the "Cloudflare controls the internet!" "NSA bad!" trope.

Export restrictions don't split generally hairs on technicalities like "hosting" - the "but magnet links aren't actually torrents!" defense doesn't fly when $1M fines and federal felonies are at stake. All distribution or "causing" distribution to restricted entities is prohibited.

So why would open models that are not in the US be restricted ? The government would need to subpoena each model that was in the US individually, why would they do that when they could simply pull clout over CloudFlare, which we have seen governments do around the world. Either CloudFlare comply, or they're added a block list.

https://cybersecurityadvisors.network/2025/04/15/la-liga-blo...

This is not a new thing, anyway this discussion has become too argumentative for an off the cuff comment about government over-reach.

So why would open models that are not in the US be restricted ?

Nobody said they would be?

subpoena each model that was in the US individually

What does this even mean? Where did 'subpoenas' come into this conversation and how would that be useful?

simply pull clout over CloudFlare

Cloudflare is an American CDN. Hugging Face is an American catalog/distributor (whatever semantic game you want to play) of models. Some of those models could be declared export-regulated. No subpoena is necessary to prevent Hugging Face or Cloudflare from distributing ITAR/EAR software, declaring any model as such, nor is trying to block something heavy-handedly at the CDN level necessary: Hugging Face will gladly comply with fine-grained requests.

"La Liga" obviously isn't American, which is why Spanish courts are compelling their ISPs (who they actually do control) to block Cloudflare IPs. Cloudflare's customers - who are likely not Spanish - are distributing materials Spanish courts do not approve of. If Spain had the means to compel Cloudflare or their customers in question to do anything, they wouldn't need to take such a blunt approach and block other legitimate customers. Cloudflare isn't involved in that equation and this isn't at all equivalent.

They'll just make it a crime to run the models unless they authorize you (classifying it as a munition, like they tried to do with encryption), and if your power bill is suspicious you'll find yourself in jail.

Any company providing the models will be deemed a threat to national security.

No need to block the download.

Citizens were and are free to use the technology (cryptography and every other export-controlled item); your "power bill is suspicious, go to jail" FUD doesn't really track with history.

Any company providing the models will be deemed a threat to national security.

Any company providing specifically-controlled models to foreigners would hypothetically be prosecuted.

There's a famous poem called "First They Came" about how slippery this slope can be in a heated political climate.

I don't believe for a second this ends with "foreigners", this is about setting up infrastructure for controlling the technology. Foreigners are just the current excuse.

Note that TFA mentions they are supposedly hand-picking access to whoever they want, based on whatever criteria they want, already.

Ah, invoking Godwin. "First they came" in 1976 when ITAR was first passed, or maybe "first they came" in the 1940s when we didn't export Proximity Fuzes, right?

Countries are free to prevent exports of technology. Equating export controls with the Holocaust is disgusting.

I did not bring in Godwin, but I guess he's here now :D.

I'm more trying to invoke GRRM. This is a Game of Thrones: billionaire CEO's complain about each other to the government to get their competitors blocked/tripped up with acts of fiat, which is what happened with Fable 5.

And in the linked post, it says GPT-5.6 access decisions are supposedly just hand picked.

The stories about export controls are just songs they sing to the peasants.

There are claims that Chinese companies are mining + reselling Claude subscriptions like crazy anyway.

I did not bring in Godwin

Who is the "They" in "First They Came" referring to exactly?

There are claims that Chinese companies are mining + reselling Claude subscriptions like crazy anyway.

Which will become a felony with export-controlled models, which is why identity verification is becoming a thing.

The comparison to cryptography export restrictions is absolutely valid, but is that really favorable?

I'd argue that 70's cryptography export bans in hindsight look completely misguided, futile, burdensome and pointless in the end (which is why most of it was lifted/reverted over the last decades).

I don't see how AI-models are much different; it's certainly a better comparison than the fuzes, because we're both not at war right now and the underlying principle is already out of the bag.

This isn't going to save you unless you're ok being a criminal. There is nothing stopping the government from making open source versions of these models equally controlled.

And given how willy-nilly they are operating I see no reason they won't clamp down on open source. All it takes is someone with connections/political contributions wakes up one day and realizes that open source is a threat to their power or bottom line and it will be declared an imminent threat with no oversight or debate.

They can try. Will the courts go along?

Keep your **** models to yourselves.... the world really has moved on to open models which can give you good enough results at a fraction of the cost and zero BS licensing.

the world really has moved on to open models

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for open models, but I think it will get more and more difficult to distil-train them without (legitimate) access to frontier models.

Personally, I find it rather humorous that we've moved from the fear that AI generated output would corrupt training to the idea that it is essential to training. Reality itself has not just a left bias but a bias to fundamentals. Bootstrap from fundamentals without introducing arbitrary error and you have the superior system; it just may not be highly compatible with a trash ecosystem.

I mean, I'm not sure that's the correct read on this.

If you want an Opus class model, it makes sense that you would train on what Opus outputs. But, if you want something better than Opus, training on the same data that Opus was trained on with the same architecture will only result in an Opus class model. Then, if your dataset also contains Opus outputs, many of which are wrong, then it makes sense that the model would have reduced performance.

All this to say that I don't think there's such a thing as a "Model Collapse," but there likely is a "Model Stagnation."

This is for the preview period, but it's not a good sign. Opus 4.8 may be the last frontier model available to the masses...

Thousands of American engineers all over the country (most of whom probably aren't on Hacker News) work with ITAR/EAR-regulated software and hardware every single day: these regulations are really not difficult to abide if you're a citizen.

And what about the rest of the world? I can't imagine US partners will abide this for long.

They get the dual-use scraps or whatever China is hawking.

Being told "no" is never fun, but the regulations are not hard to comply with (despite what Anthropic might have you believe.)

I can't imagine US partners will abide this for long.

What are they going to do? Start their own Anthropic? Go for it. Why is every other country in the world entitled to American technology by default?

What are they going to do? Start their own Anthropic? Go for it. Why is every other country in the world entitled to American technology by default?

Because American tech companies make a lot of money from outside of the US. For instance, 1/4 of all Apple revenues are from Europe, and 1/5 from China and China-claimed territories. Only around 40% are from the Americas (so not even the US exclusively).

Would American tech companies be as successfull without ~half their revenues?

In any case, it doesn't matter, the cat is out of the bag. Nobody sane and non-American would trust American frontier labs, because their models can be yanked at will by whoever is in the White House. It would be suicidal to rely on them for critical business or developer workflows. So your options are to go with Mistral or open source Chinese models, hosted within your environment, with the added benefits of being able to control the costs and being able to fine tune the models to better work for you.

Would American tech companies be as successfull without ~half their revenues?

Good luck with "if you don't let us use your AI technology, we wont allow iPhones in" - go for it.

Needlessly patriotic and confrontational.

I'm referring to OpenAI and Antropic - would they be successfull with ~40-50% of their potential market?

And iPhones, not really. But you can bet your ass that every business purchasing software in Europe is at least considering the geopolitical risks of buying American, and thinking of alternatives. Doesn't mean they'll all stop buying American software any time soon, but the shift has already started.

I'm referring to OpenAI and Antropic - would they be successfull with ~40-50% of their potential market?

You presume that every single product they sell will be restricted: this is unrealistic. The rest of the world can have the gimped models, and as so long as they're better than other offerings, the revenue will flow - which is exactly what happens with countless other dual-use goods.

Why is every other country in the world entitled to American technology by default?

This kind of zero-sum thinking is what is killing the US's global influence right now.

Except it isn't zero-sum thinking: the rest of the world can have the scraps, and as long as the scraps are marginally better than the rest of the world's offerings, they will sell.

You do see how that is not going to work, right?

Seems to work for every other export-controlled good and service.

but the regulations are not hard to comply with

Except that they are.

As a US citizen, I can purchase ITAR-regulated nightvision, IR lasers, etc.

But that's not what's happening. Frontier models are NOT being put under ITAR. Instead, they are being placed on an arbitrary "approved access" list. So that even if you qualify under export restrictions as a citizen, if you don't have a $200B+ market cap, you're disqualified.

Many people are upset about the national security restrictions, but it's MUCH WORSE than that. If I have to verify ID/citizenship, well, that sucks, but it would at least be an option. That's not what's happening here. If you are an individual or small business, no matter how "patriotic" you might be, you're out of luck.

Except that they are.

Did you read the E.O., or just Huffpo's interpretation?

ITAR

This is more likely to fall under EAR, it's important to be aware-of and learn the difference.

placed on an arbitrary "approved access" list.

Except that's not what the original E.O. indicated, this is just what Anthropic is choosing to do.

Why do I get the feeling the administration is doing this to buy a position in the AI companies before they go public.

If non US citizens shouldn't have the models - wouldn't that cause both Anthropic and OAI to fire non-citizens?

US citizens to remain nonviolent at any cost, issue strongly worded internet comments, and find themselves a little less free every day.

While laughing at the stereotype of French being on the street all the time

I do respect the French. They've proven, time and time again, that if you fuck with the people, heads will roll...

The onion finds itself in a peculiar spot today

Hey some of them take an entire Saturday off to go to a family friendly demonstration holding witty signs in front of their state capitol!

Watch out, ive read that the US government has incarcerated people for about 50 years for doing that.

Stop spreading misinformation. They were found guilty by a jury of their peers of providing material support for terrorism[1]. They shot a cop in the neck.

They coordinated on Signal to bring firearms. They didn't plan to "protest".

They got off lightly. Should have been life without parole.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Prairieland_ICE_detention...

The organizers of the No Kings rallies have done infinitely more to achieve political change in the United States than online commentators who make fun of them for being insufficiently cool and edgy. Effective activism is not about feeling superior to the normies who have families and are busy on weekdays.

What change have they achieved?

They've convinced Democratic political leadership that they must fight Trump wholeheartedly, and convinced most of the country that Trump is a bad president who's failing to effectively address any problems. More change will be possible after the next election, when Trump's severe unpopularity causes the Trumpists lose control of Congress.

And you can measure their influence how?

"government needs to step in and regulate ai"

"wait, not like that"

Anth/OpenAI simply wanted the government to pull the ladder after them and ban models from China.

Seems it blew in their faces and probably the new frontier models will be available only to a select few. Many people predicted this, only a naive person would believe that access to something with these capabilities would be decided by some dude in California.

As entertaining as the sheer Schadenfreude of the situation is, this is terrible for foreign peasants like myself. It no longer makes any sense to pay for America's frontier AI models. I'd be funding the training of models I will never be able to use.

GLM 5.2 is competitive with Opus 4.6. If the best model I'll ever get is Opus 4.8, then the choice is clear. I'll miss Opus.

The geopolitical angle of all of this is interesting. Will countries, especially bigger players really just hope they'll get access to something so crucial from the US or China?

Probably the EU could pool together funds to create something competitive as being on the mercy of someone else isn't a pleasant place to be.

And I wouldn't get so used to the open models. Eventually, if they get good enough, the access to them will also get restricted.

So, that DeepSeek thing, you are saying it's not that bad?

Wow.. Okay so it's official now that the playbook is "we will try to prevent anyone who we don't like to use advanced tech".

I understand if its military hardware and software, that's the property of the US government however this is the property of a private company.. Now seemingly being commandeered and issued at the will of the government, sounds very Russian/Chinese to me.

Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?

That was always the playbook

Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?

I'd argue US is not very democratic country given how many of what govt does goes against people's wishes. Same as UK

I'd argue US is not very democratic country given how many of what govt does goes against people's wishes. Same as UK

That could be argued but the core principle is freedom of commerce and private companies get a lot of runway. This seems completely counter to tha.

The UK is a lot more compassionate about people’s wishes, it’s not nearly as bureaucratic and polarizing “democracy” as the US. Laws in the UK are passed quickly, and feedback is always considered. Whether you agree or not on the regulation is another discussion.

Laws in the UK are passed quickly

Is that a feature or a bug?

Probably you're right overall but that doesn't apply to anyone who chooses to want to educate their kids in a non-taxpayer funded State school. Around 100–105 independent schools were reported as having ceased operations after the UK government introduced 20% VAT on private school fees from January 2025. Some may feel (I would not dare suggest it) that the current government is on a mission to close them all up unless they attract sufficiently rich parents like Eton. Closing the latter would be news indeed. However - exit Exeter Cathedral School after 847 years, which taught Charles II's composer and Coldplay's Chris Martin. It's closing with financial difficulties which have beset the sector in general since charges were introduced.

The overwhelming majority of export-controlled items are made by private corporations: the US government itself makes exceedingly little in comparison.

The missiles Raytheon makes are export-controlled too, and they're not somehow "property of the US government" - this isn't China.

Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?

Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?

Try every weapons system, encrypted radio system, FPGAs with high-bandwidth transceivers, lithography equipment, etc. etc. etc. There's plenty of precedent.

Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?

No, infact I'm a proponent of open models and being able to run them locally, it just feels strange that a consumer product would be under the same restrictions as military grade equipment and tech which is specifically designed for warfare.

Try every weapons system, encrypted radio system, FPGAs with high-bandwidth transceivers, lithography equipment, etc. etc. etc. There's plenty of precedent.

If it's the same equivalent then my issue is just that, it feels like trying to restrict the useage of RSA because it could be used by bad actors.

+1 point to China!

In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over the sovereignty.

The US gov sees these AI companies as bartering power, not as innovation. Wouldn’t you as a parent always want what’s best for your child, not for yourself?

It also feels like they can’t just relocate out of the country, as the administration will surely sanction anyone from business within the country again. These firms are so over inflated with evaluations and opex, they’ve dug themselves into a corner.

This is not to say regulation does not exist in any other country, but it’s clear now after what’s happening at Anthropic + OAI that the US gov has taken these companies hostage.

This is only further playing into the hands of open source and the outside models; the US gov is going to be to blame for when they all lose the race to low cost/free.

+1 point to China!

Which, like the US, uses export controls when it finds them advantageous: https://nam.org/china-imposes-export-controls-on-u-s-mineral...

In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over my sovereignty.

So, locate in China, where every company of importance is essentially required in practice to maintain ties to the CCP?

I personally think the US has gone too far with its use of export controls and sanctions as a political tool, but it's foolish to believe that it's different anywhere else on the planet.

In China, it has even been reported that top AI talent is restricted from overseas travel.

https://www.thinkchina.sg/technology/china-tightens-control-...

Bottom line: if you're working on cutting-edge technology that is deemed to be of critical national security importance and has military or dual use implications, you're going to be a hostage no matter where you go.

You wrongly assumed I implied these firms relocate to China. We are all aware of how China operates and controls its assets.

AI has long existed in many countries around the world without this type of behavior from the government. Deepmind in the UK, Mistral in France, DeepL in Germany - the governments don’t seem to be forcing employees to get their deploys approved by a government official.

My argument is that the US gov does not like that these companies have too much influence which they do not feel they can mandate. It’s slowing the entire country down at a very critical sink or swim inflection point in this tech.

I think it’s pretty clear why they’re abiding by this:

-the US is the only place where you can raise the kinds of money you need to run a lab like this.

-a government that won’t let you sell products to customers abroad will probably object even more to you moving abroad.

Even if you made the move abroad, that government might no longer let you access US data centers.

-This basically affects OpenAI and Anthropic, which make the only LLMs most people consider frontier nowadays. Since most open weights models rely on distillation of frontier models, it may genuinely entrench those companies more.

It may be playing into the hands of open source OAI/Anthropic dependencies start to look more dangerous, but it also makes building better OSS models harder.

The advantages the AI labs rely on might be less durable than a proprietary process in industrial manufacturing, but it’s still meaningful.

I think the bigger reckoning will come from a different angle: tokens will eventually need to cover cost.

That will likely mean multiplying prices compared to today. And companies already complain now!

Model orchestration and smaller models that can run locally or cheaply will become more important in my opinion.

Right now, you can still default to GPT/Claude and it’s kind of fine, but that will have to change.

The elephant in the room is that the US AI firms should not be as valuable as they are. They should not require the sort of capital they are seeking, the amount of employees, the amount of offices and resources..but they are so steeped in investor interests - why stop being fed?

Many Americans want AI to fail. The US gov wants to control AI. The AI companies are running out of things to do, and are shipping product after product after product to keep the perceived productivity narrative alive.

At this rate I would not be surprised to see an OAI/Anthropic merger just to throw everything AI the US has to offer to the global markets.

Whether they’re over-valued and over-resourced is a big question. I think that will be answered when eventual price hikes happen and people shift which AI they use and/or what they use it for.

We’re still in the “5$ airport Ubers thanks to VC money” era of AI

Remember how China turned its tech industry into a smoking ruin - make making them all submit to political priorities:

Ant Group: China halted Ant’s IPO and forced a restructuring

Alibaba: China fined and politically disciplined Alibaba

Didi: China punished Didi after its US listing by removing its apps, freezing users, forcing delisting

Tutoring platforms: banned profit from core school-subject tutoring.

Tencent gaming: restricted youth gaming froze approvals

NetEase and gaming companies: licence freeze stopped game companies from shipping games.

Meituan: fined Meituan and forced changes to its labour and platform model.

Huya/DouYu: blocked Tencent’s game-streaming merger, stopping commercial consolidation in a major entertainment market.

Boss Zhipin / Full Truck Alliance: froze new users after listging in the US

Crypto companbies: banned crypto trading and mining, forcing exchanges offshore.

Think it's not happening to the US?

tourism - people afraid to visit

tariffs - wrecking ball to all businesses

defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada

internet clouds - Greenland made Europe decide that the US clouds can't be trusted, now sovereign computing matters and MS/AWS/Google are feeling it

finance - no one trusts the US not to turn people into "non members of global society" by banning them from visa and credit card and banking systems

China tech industry is smoking ruin? On what planet are you living?

Tech crackdowns rid China of entrepreneurial capitalism https://eastasiaforum.org/2023/09/12/tech-crackdowns-rid-chi...

Why China crushed its tech giants https://www.wired.com/story/china-tech-giants-policy/

Why Big Tech May Never Recover in China https://time.com/6973119/china-big-tech-crackdown-backfiring...

Beijing can’t afford another crackdown on its tech companies https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/11/china-cant-afford-another-cr...

From my perspective curtailing Ant's plans was positive regulatory action.

Political priorities and good governance is why we have government.

Seems like a pretty terrible idea in hindsight, destroying private lending, given how desperately the government is trying and failing to raise domestic consumption now.

defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada

Huh? US foreign military sales are up at all time highs

"Total exports by the United States, the world’s largest supplier of arms, increased by 27 per cent. This included a 217 per cent increase in US arms exports to Europe, according to new data published today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)"

[https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2026/global-arms-f...]

Aren't a lot of these purchases (a) locked in from contracts made pre-admin; and (b) otherwise largely related to anxiety over Russia? There are too many confounding variables here.

The US is now doing a softer and broader version of the same thing to trust-based export sectors. It’s not the same method but! it is the same mechanism. The main difference is that the US damage is more reputational than structural, so it could be reversed faster (only if policy stops telling customers that dependence on America is a political risk)

Seems like a structural problem that the U.S. elected who they did twice.

It's really interesting that someone can know all of these domestic Chinese names and yet declare the industry generally a "smoking ruin". Is it from a newsletter or something?

Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.

It's really interesting that someone can know all of these domestic Chinese names and yet declare the industry generally a "smoking ruin".

They're different things. Just like you can be the most famous actor or singer and still be poor. Being popular, having good products and actually making money is not the same.

And it's all relative. Today if NASDAQ dropped 20% the world would declare it in ruins. Are the companies still "alive"? Yes.

Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.

Not true. A lot of them e.g. the public listed 1s have reported increased competition and reduced margins.

if NASDAQ dropped 20%

If NASDAQ dropped 20%, it would have returned to the level last seen three months ago, in March 2026. Calling that "in ruins" would be a pretty big stretch.

To pick one example, OP talked about meituan like they haven't seen multiple meituan delivery riders per block every time they take a walk. It strains credibility. Why do they even know the name if they don't see that? Its not like they operate in America.

Why do they even know the name if they don't see that?

We're in the age of the Internet. You don't have to be physically there to see anything. They could have just read it on the news, saw social media videos, etc?

defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada

It's the ONLY one (almost) that are actively tested and verified in real battles.

One more wake up call for anyone outside USA, especially Europe. AI will be weaponized, on the battle ground too, but the bigger battle will be fought in the industry competition. Those who have access to state of the art models will have advantage over those who does not.

Hopefully open-weight models will catch up, hopefully we, as the people, engineers will find the way to maintain those open-weight models on pair with the closed ones.

I try to be optimistic, as we won some battles, against all odds, Linux is flourishing, open source solutions are mainstream.

Europe is in the worst spot right now, because even if open source is the future, there is not enough European-owned datacenters even for inference. Not to mention that China could pull the rug on these models at any moment just like the US did.

There are some steps in the good direction:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-sel...

A consortium will train a 400B-class model and get 2.5% on time of the EuroHPC infrastructure (~2000 PFLOPS datacenters). So, even if the Chinese take away the open source there will be some models. Probably not Mythos quality yet though.

This will be the end of the US's short-lived AI supremacy. OpenAI and Anthropic are already wildly unprofitable, cutting off the world-wide income stream is just fucking bad business.

Don't worry, their pals in the government will bail them out.

But it is odd that this administration has learned absolutely nothing about the mid- to long-term effects of export restrictions on other countries' ability to compete with the US.

So them banning Fable for only non-Americans is what we non-Americans should expect to be the norm going forward? Way to build even more resentment abroad.

I'm very pro-west, but at this point okay, I guess the rest of us have to side with China, not because we remotely like it, but because they don't try to be quite so antagonistic to us in everything they do.

because they don't try to be quite so antagonistic to us in everything they do.

Just because the many headed dragon is trying to bite your sailors' heads doesn't mean you should pilot your ship into the whirlpool

Expect the US to sanction non-US-controlled models and put sanctions on individuals, companies and countries that use them? They already do this with other things like oil.

There is an assumption that everyone is making here - that China will not do the same. It is entirely possible, that China restricts their frontier models - as and when they are developed - to only Chinese citizens. And India follows along.

IMO AI is different from everything else. It is a weapon as potent as nuclear. It is only natural that it be treated as one.

Sooo both OpenAI and Anthropic going bankrupt soon?

If they can’t freely sell access to their models and Chinese models catch up to Opus 4.8/GPT 5.5 in 6-8 months - then why pay OAI/Anthropic at all?

It will be much harder for Chinese models to close the gap than it is to keep the historical 6-9 months behind. Their models' performance are heavily propped up on distillation runs. The capital going to their frontier labs is 10x-100x smaller than US frontier labs.

How many people are going to buy a $10-20K rigs to run these open models?

20K won't buy you a rig for GPT 5.5

You’re talking $100k for entry level hw

Not really, look at this thread to see different options in the comments https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/N1OslM0Z8X

You could go as low as $2500 or go crazy the sky being the limit

This post isn't even on the landing page for some reason.

It's called ghosted, shadow banned, too sensitive / shitshow; Basically a multiplier of 0.1 is added to this post's ranking, or similar, and it will need thousands of upvote instead of hundreds to show.

It's commonly applied silently to posts that simply don't look good or become a nightmare to manage the narrative of. It's a healthy way to manage a community while looking transparent.

I think it's sucky and cheap, but at the same time it's also the best solution.

If they do it, they should mark the post as such as give an explanation. Otherwise you never know if uncle "Sam" called and asked it to be treated as such.

This is a real head scratcher. Unless this is a very short term action it seems to have only downsides for everybody:

- people pay much more for US models than Chinese models because right now they're the best. Once they're no longer the best (since you don't get access to them) why would anyone pay several times as much for the same result?

- once you get a high amount of tokens flowing into China instead of US companies, they will train on those chats and their rate of improvement will only accelerate, making US models even less attractive over time

- the sky-high IPO are dead in the water, since their story of "we will replace a good chunk of all knowledge work in the world, capturing a few % of total global spend relating to it" turns into "we will make a bunch of money out of a few dozen S&P 500 paying for the best, and some pocket money out of whoever uses our overpriced models that are as good as Chinese models" - far less money overall. Losing access to untold billions of investor money certainly won't improve performance for the US labs

- all the non-US people start asking themselves why they're funneling money to US corporations who barely share any of the secret sauce compared to Chinese corporations who share plenty when it comes to LLM, including the models themselves (at least for now)

- Chinese models have significantly less guardrails, making for better end-user experience

- there is a small but non-zero chance Euros get off their asses and invest into AI, making something halfway decent and further fracturing the market which cuts into US profits

So what's the benefit here? I thought the Mythos situation was the current admin taking revenge on Antrophic for not kissing the ring, or simply looking for a bribe, but no matter which way I look at it it's a self-own. The only way this would make any sense is if AGI is imminent, which I don't think even the boosters are arguing at this point.

Theoretically US could outlaw Chinese models, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to accomplish as the rest of the world certainly won't, especially as long as they release open weights models that you can run without phoning home.

Yea not sure who would put money into an OpenAI or Anthropic IPO at this point. After this episode I promptly bought the hardware I needed to run local models (~$25k) and am extremely impressed. The price tag alone is worth the peace of mind knowing I will always have a locally running LLM that nobody can take away. I don't need Mythos-level intelligence to do 99% of my day to day work; Opus 4.8 was more than enough and I am pretty close to that with the open source models. So what happens when this hardware inevitably gets cheaper and cheaper and people realize they can run the models they actually need locally and without handing all their data over to these companies?

Only if you're doing cutting edge research or some highly, highly niche project would you need the frontier models.

Can I ask what did you buy? I don't have that money now but I wouldn't knpw what to buy anyway.

Blackwell 96gb + 128gb system ram. Not powerful enough for GLM 5.2 but I may upgrade.

I can run most models 100B and under on my MacBook Pro with Ultra 3 and 128GB of RAM at 25-70tok/sec-ish, and it was around $5k.

I don’t think I can run GLM 5.2 since it requires around 256GB of memory and the inference is probably too slow, but the future (planned) Apple M7 may be able to. The leaks say it will support up to ~700GB of RAM.

The models under 100B are kind of dumb as a brick and aren’t that useful unless you’re really bad at coding imo. They can’t really be trusted not to hallucinate so they’re not even good for data processing.

Great, so when do we lowly code-serfs get access to it?

Shutup peasant, you'll get it when we say. And be grateful.

Unfortunately we're not in a position where we can promise an exact date, but we expect it to take weeks (not days or months). It's the best coding model we've ever trained and we're bummed we can't release it to everyone yet. When we do launch, we'll share a lot more evals and testimonials and demos that help show what it's good/bad at. Personally hoping that both GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5 get broadly released soon so that everyone (myself included) can try them head to head.

(I work at OpenAI.)

You don't have to mention details, but is it internally a topic that your CEO hasn't even publicly criticized the Anthropic model freeze and are open ai folks seeing through the Musk/xai game that is in play here?

Pretty pointless question to ask someone posting here under their own name

How is Musk/xai even in the conversation here? It’s a lowly, also-ran AI company, not a “frontier model” company.

i have access and i'm just a regular dude

"We believe in broad access, and we plan to make GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna generally available in the coming weeks. As part of our ongoing engagement with the U.S. government, we previewed our plans and the models’ capabilities ahead of today’s launch. At their request, we are starting with a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners whose participation has been shared with the government, before releasing more broadly. During this preview, we will continue testing and coordinating closely with partners as we work toward broader availability. We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them. We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks, while we work with the Administration to develop the cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases."

This amount of courting the current administration is pretty scary imo.

Anthropic's fear-mongering and marketing is the reason we have these restrictions in the first place.

Despite their virtue signaling, Anthropic is the only major lab that has never released an open weights model, has been caught intentionally nerfing a model after release (Opus 4.6), intentionally and silently degrades performance for suspected competitors and AI researchers, complains incessantly about distillation when everyone is doing it (and after they settled for pirating books), and wants to pull the ladder out from everyone trying to catch up.

They're anti-consumer and only concerned with holding the power themselves. I'm not a fan of Altman, but Anthropic is the worst actor in the space, and I hope they lose.

What about openai's fear mongering, or googles, or JP Morgans, or Frank Herbert's, or Arthur C. Clarke's or Samuel Butler's?

If you can't envision plausible scenarios where very bad things happen because of a malevolent actor, ChatGPT 6, and a little bad luck - you need to think harder.

Hasn't OpenAI being doing it for a while too?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48465269

The common denominator between "GPT-2 is too dangerous to release" and Anthropic is Dario.

current players in the space love the regulatory capture

I wonder what's going to happen when the administration rolls over to the OtherTeam(tm). If they've established a good relationship with Team A then Team B is automatically going to hate their guts.

Perhaps they estimate that the administration won’t change for a long long time.

Do you feel the same way about FDA approvals?

I mean, it seems like common sense - a limited beta test before widespread rollout. I'm not convinced they'll ever come up with a good framework for dealing with the cyber & bio issues, but getting triggered by a beta test rollout seems overboard.

It is common sense, and with literally any other administration in the past century it would seem like a good idea.

I have zero confidence that this particular administration has any interest in regulating the industry for the good of the country, much less for the good of humanity. They will use regulation to maximize personal profit for themselves and their cronies, at the expense of the nation. I would not have thought that of any other US administration in the past 100 years.

In the longer run, it probably won't matter. If the level of corruption we see currently becomes the norm, then the US is facing much bigger problems than counter-productive industrial policy.

The FDA has incredibly detailed guidelines that need to be followed, and a clear process to be followed. This is none of that.

The difference is that FDA approvals are a well-defined process with specific and actionable criteria for the release of a new product. Whereas this is the administration running on vibes and favouritism

This amount of courting the current administration is pretty scary imo.

That’s ironic – I interpreted that paragraph with the opposite slant: positively. If that’s what the government mandates then these companies, in the end, have little choice, so was at least relieved to see them publicly pushing back.

these companies, in the end, have little choice

They absolutely do have a choice, Anthropic and OpenAI could fight it in court. Iran showed Trump is a coward, he wouldn't risk tanking the only industry still keeping the stock market growing.

It’s all speculation but I think he would have no qualms about tanking the only industry keeping the stock market growing. But given Kushner’s OAI investments, Trump stands to benefit personally from not tanking the industry.

“Wouldn’t it be a shame if we export controlled all of your models and revoked the visas and green cards of all of your non US researchers. You should really reconsider challenging our orders in court. Also remember you have 16% public support and if the president endorsed it a national data center moratorium would pass with bipartisan majorities.”

Do it. Make the Republicans show how much they value the “free market” after all. Trump’s approval rating isn’t much higher.

"Cool, cool, hey, what percentage of economic growth is directly attributable to the growth of our companies again? And thanks for revoking our researchers' permits, enjoy them helping out China!

Also, oops, looks like our model weights got leaked on 4chan. How unfortunate."

Are these models still relevant for people outside the US? I get the impression we're stuck on GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8 pretty much permanently now, and relying on Chinese models in future.

Dont worry, chinese models will distill frontier ones, quite fast.

The excuse they give is borderline childish. I get the thing about slow rollout, make sure partners get to fix the bugs, etc...

But bad actors are hard working motivated entities with tens of thousand of fake ids, and american citizens working for them, for pennies.

All while the ones like or you sit at a crossfire which is borderline useless.

I cant wait to see what Qwen did with the massive distillation they made out of Opus 4.8 and Fable aka Mythos aka pretty sure they jailbroke it.

This is nothing a few felony indictments can't fix.

Pretty sure Chinese police will not cooperate with a US indictment

No, but the Americans facilitating their access sure as hell will.

You'll need to make all US customers provide personal IDs for access first. I'm not American, but I do often hear how attached Americans can be to their personal firearms and how against providing their personal ID they can be.

Not only that, but using Opus 4.8 [1m] right now outside the US, and suddenly I only have a 500k context window. I really hope this is just a strange Claude Code bug, but I had access to a 1 Million window before, and it wouldn't entirely surprise me if context window length becomes another US export restriction.

The Anthropic page here seems to say that Max users should have access to the full 1 Million window for 4.8:

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8606394-how-large-is-...

I was already setting up my infra to experiment with GLM 5.2 and its 1 Million token window before this happened. I think I'm glad I did.

EDIT: Found a solution, seems Claude Code 2.1.193 (or an earlier version I didn't notice) changed default settings, so that if you have Autocompact turned on it occurs at 50% of the context window. If you turn off Autocompact, the full 1 Million context window is restored. Another example of Claude Code quietly changing default settings sigh

You want to compact early though as sending the whole chat you will end up with a lot of tokens not in the cache which 1. Costs way more and 2. Will slow the request down as it has to process it all.

That’s assuming China would not start controlling the access to their models.

China has no reason to do that. The US is freely handing them the international market for AI.

Are they though? I see this as a precautious method by US to maintain AI model superiority so the Chinese companies cannot distill from the US frontier models. Let's see how fast Chinese models would improve without access to latest US models and if they keep on releasing open models

Let's see how fast Chinese models would improve without access to latest US models and if they keep on releasing open models

Chinese tech has been on an exponential growth trajectory. If they see the need for AI superiority then there's really no moat for AI companies.

US just needs their internationally usable model to be better than China's. If China catches up, US starts releasing more powerful models.

If US models cost 20x compared to China, they have to be at least 20x better.

Chinese companies can make a killing selling on prem AI systems to the rest of the world now.

Big boxes with Huawei GPUs and Chinese open models to run inside your company without network access.

They could, but I can imagine if US keeps on blocking the cutting edge models, China would never ship the cutting edge models and would still make a killing shipping models that are powerful enough for most of business cases

If the US really cracks down on frontier model access, you'll see them make Chinese open models illegal. You might say "oh well, let them try", but they will just put direct and secondary sanctions on every company whose systems have used Chinese models in some way. They just have to make an example out of a few international companies and no one will dare to use Chinese frontier models, at least commercially.

This is why we can't decouple ourselves from the US fast enough.

Theoretically that gives edge to all other companied around the world though, no?

I don't think a critical mass of them will oppose the US. The most likely equilibrium is Chinese models being shut out of any US-aligned markets (i.e. Europe at the very least, also East Asia, etc.). Probably India, Russia, Brazil etc. will resist such pressure, but they are protectionist and resilient to trade wars anyway, at the expense of their own welfare of course.

You're delusional, US is already seen like the biggest threat to Europe since the tariffs and Greenland threats.

If you think we're playing fools again, you're wrong.

in the extremely unlikely event that they do this, what will happen is that Chinese models will become "rebranded" with a wink and a nod by the token routers (at the very least, the non-US ones). there is a zero percent chance that corporations will not work around it if the models are good and cheap.

but they will just put direct and secondary sanctions on every company whose systems have used Chinese models in some way

What about this: companies stop providing AI tokens to their employees entirely and instead, give a monthly budget for developer tools? They can even go as far as saying "if we realise that you use Chinese AI, you will get a warning and then be fired".

It's not like one can identify code coming from Chinese AI, right? As long as a company doesn't pay for those subscriptions, it may just be the employees writing the code all by themselves :-).

Not yet, but I could see them requiring some sort of signing in the future.

I hope this doesn't become the new norm where government becomes the bottleneck for innovation in the AI space.

It's worrying that with no formal and transparent policy framework that the government will be picking winners and losers and stifling innovation.

There's been no public policy, executive order, legislation, or otherwise on this, I wonder if anyone has filed FOIA requests for these decisions or the conversations between the Executive Branch and AI companies.

Just because you don't get access, doesn't mean they're not innovating.

Not a fan of the phased release but I do remember when access to gpt-3 was gated and access to gpt-4 had a staged release.

ppl are acting like limited release is unprecedented when, in fact, has been the norm until a few years ago.

Was it the norm for Trump's team to hand-select the specific customers who get access in the staged rollout, and to choose the date of wide release?

The AI companies were all asking for the government to regulate them. The government is doing what the companies asked for them to do.

You can argue that, by government, they meant some legislative process, but I'd argue that regulation via bad executive order is much better than regulation via bad legislation because the former is tractable. I say this as an EO minimalist.

Ok so to be clear you agree this has not been the norm. It seemed like you were clarifying your original message but it was a change of topic, from "this has been the norm" to "this hasn't been the norm but they got what they were asking for" (or what they deserved if not exactly what they asked for). I'll dip out of that conversation.

What an unpleasant form of discourse.

You moved the goalposts. The government controlling what openai can and cannot do is completely different than they gating access out of their own volition.

Yeah pretty sure we had a whole bruhaha ~250 years ago about this question of where precisely power belonged. I for one think we mostly got it right then and would be reluctant to shift the power back to the individual sovereign and away from the people.

There's a pretty big difference between "we need laws and regulations" and "let Trump do whatever he feels like today."

What are the proper laws and regulations? Can you point me to a proposed framework that you believe is most correct?

I have no idea how this stuff should be regulated. I do know that any sort of comprehensive legislation at this point in time has a much higher chance of being a bottleneck to innovation than an easily reversible white house directive.

Of all the terrible things to come from the odious Trump administration, them saying "hey, can we make sure these models aren't dangerous?" is one of the least bad things they've done.