US bill proposes jail time for people who download DeepSeek | Hacker News Reader

US bill proposes jail time for people who download DeepSeek

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496 pointssoundworlds312 comments

On the one hand Hawley proposes a lot of things that don't ever get close to becoming law.

On the other hand, we did ban TikTok (which is currently unavailable on the app stores because of the ban).

I can think of few ways to more effectively destroy any US advantage in AI compared with the sheer efficiency of making it illegal to learn from what competing countries have achieved. From the article, it sounds like the proposed legislation is deeply confused about what "downloading DeepSeek" means--they're _talking_ about banning the app, while _writing_ laws to ban "the importation into the United States of artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence technology or intellectual proprietary developed or produced in the People’s Republic of China" which is a lot broader. Is it proposing to ban US citizens from reading research papers written by Chinese citizens? Or from publishing research in places that might be read by them? Apparently the EFF is concerned that the language of the bill is, indeed, that broad.

Not sure it’s even worth speculating on a bill that’s merely been proposed. This one sounds DOA. But yeah TikTok ban was a very bad precedent, mostly because it was based on speculative risks, not hard proof of existing behaviour (TikTok not engaging didn't help at all either). Regardless of the merits I too hope it doesn’t have a ripple effect. National security is such a huge brush you could paint anything you want.

The risk from TikTok is possibly not speculative at all. I think it’s quite likely the national security apparatus knows something and informed congressmen because they went from being opposed to it to being in favor of it in a short time.

Well there’s that and then there is the 2 billionaires with competing social media platforms. Where one is considered a dumpster fire and the other is a retirement home. So why not use that considerable wealth and legislate your competition out of existence.

Zuckerberg came out strongly against the TikTok ban. Unless you mean someone else?

Trump has a social media company, doesn't he?

It has 6 million users. It’s like a midsized subreddit, not a TikTok competitor.

Musk has said he’s opposed to TikTok ban as well:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1880975630646612254

Speculation, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Trump’s change of heart on the TikTok ban is due to Musk’s influence.

Musk needs to stay in Beijing’s favour due to the size of Tesla’s investments in China, which Beijing could destroy in a moment if Musk overly offended them. Opposing TikTok ban helps Musk stay in Beijing’s good books, supporting it would have had the opposite effect.

Yeah, 5 years ago. It’s a much larger threat to Meta now. Specifically its gain in GenZ.

In other words, "just trust us bro"? How do we know the evidence is justified? How do we avoid a "Trust us, Saddam Hussein has WMDs" situation?

Trust, but verify ideally. I have little doubt tiktok was being used for hostile influence campaigns. But so are American social media. Maybe the difference is in what countermeasures the American government is able to coerce local companies into deploying.

> they went from being opposed to it to being in favor of it in a short time.

"Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down TikTok..." (https://x.com/wideofthepost/status/1787104142982283587)

Many speculate that the prevalence of anti-prop on Israel-Palestine was a big motivator.

I thought this was rather reductionist until TikTok was allowed back temporarily, only for pro-Plaestine slogans to be suddenly banned when it returned.

Is it the only motivation? No. Given the above and the fact that dozens of highly popular Chinese apps continue to be allowed, does it appear likely this is a leading reason? Plausible.

That + domestic social media protectionism

Considering that the majority of the Congresscritter rhetoric I heard about the issue concerned TikTok as a vector for the spread of antisemitism, I'd guess you're correct.

While there may very well be security concerns, other countries have handled this by simply banning the app on government devices (eg: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tiktok-banned-on-uk-gover...). You needn't ban the app nationwide to address those concerns. What I believe is more likely is that, this isn't about national security or data privacy, which could be addressed far more effectively with subject-appropriate legislation (such as data privacy laws akin to GDPR), but rather that TikTok was banned over unfavourable speech. It is no secret that TikTok has been used as a platform of citizen journalism, particularly in regards to the Gaza War. Congressmen have admitted as much.

The concerns are about adversarial foreign governments being able to silently target messages to highly-influenced demographics en masse.

I swear I have heard zero people opposed to the ban who seem to even be vaguely aware of that aspect which is the entire actual issue, and instead are completely confused and think it’s about spyware or hacking. Whether or not you agree with the ban, we need to actually be discussing the same underlying issue.

That is speech.

I'm sorry but I have yet to see a single person who makes this point admit that it's a form of speech suppression. This is classic First Amendment precedent. Just because the speaker is someone you don't like, or its content is anti-American (or what have you), doesn't mean it's not protected speech.

What? Many people just don't think the First Amendment applies to foreign nations. (Why would it??) And that restrictions on corporate control/structure for the US-based parts are not speech issues (e.g. imagine if free speech was a defense against an anti-trust prosecution).

The simplest case for banning TikTok is simple reciprocity. China is no longer a market that needs the level of protectionism they currently have to develop. The second best is data privacy. Just a shame they won't apply the same to US companies yet. And then an additional reason is the one that's being used currently - risk of foreign influence. You'd hate to not ban it "because it hasn't happened yet" just for it to happen in the future. China keeping out US apps seems to have worked out great for their local industry, I'm hardly convinced it wouldn't also be a good thing for US citizens. And with the foreign-country thing tossing Constitutional issues out the window, go nuts.

Let's remind ourselves of what the First Amendment says:

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Constitution does not consider Freedom of Speech a positive right, one that can be granted to some but not others. It is a negative right against the government. It's about as broad and as absolute as you can get. This is why the right also applies to legal entities (eg: companies), even foreign legal entities. It is not limited to citizens, it is not limited to persons.

The First Amendment famously has limits, which have been tested and have held, repeatedly. These limits generally arise from conflict with other rights or societal good. On the latter point, obscenity is one of the most well-known exceptions. The government can and does make laws against it.

The idea that a foreign, adversarial government would have a Constitutional right to propagandize our citizenry at-scale is obviously not consistent with the societal good (or the "common defense", for that matter), so is outside of the First Amendment's scope/intent.

If you want to make an argument that it's not happening, that's one thing. But, your assertions about TikTok having some blanket "right" here are false.

> The idea that a foreign, adversarial government would have a Constitutional right to propagandize our citizenry at-scale is obviously not consistent with the societal good (or the "common defense", for that matter), so is outside of the First Amendment's scope/intent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamont_v._Postmaster_General

In this case, a U.S. citizen sued, not the Chinese government.

Again, foreign governments don't have a Constitutional right to propagandize our citizenry.

You seem oddly enthusiastic about giving your government the right to violate freedom of speech for entities you do not like, thus removing a platform used both as a platform for speech and for commerce, for 150 million Americans. It totally makes sense to violate the First Amendment over unproven and hypothetical fears of FYP algorithm misuse. Enjoy your slippery slope :)

Feel free to re-read my comments and address my actual statement, pointing out that your initial assertion is wrong. That, versus changing the subject.

>Enjoy your slippery slope

There's certainly a slippery slope here—and a strawman, but they ain't mine.

You just refuse to accept that entities that you do not like also have Freedom of Speech rights. You continue to believe that Freedom of Speech is a positive right to people, rather than a negative right against the government. You are therefore perfectly fine with preemptively suppressing the speech (and commerce) for over a hundred million American citizens, because you perceive a threat from the FYP algorithm, because you do not value the Freedom of Speech rights of entities you do not like. That is a slippery slope. If you don't want to recognise that either, that's your prerogative.

At this point, why even have a negative-right Freedom of Speech if you're just going to treat it like a positive right anyway? Ridiculous.

No need to keep repeating yourself. SCOTUS has already ruled:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-tiktok-ban/

So, feel free to take it up with them.

This is my last reply. Thanks for the chat. Take care.

Yup, the composition of the Court has changed, thus its stance has changed. But if you choose to defer any and all thought to this Court, who consistently give the government wide latitude to do whatever it wants so long as it invokes the magic words "national security", that's your prerogative. It's a sad way to live though.

If we're parsing at a super detailed level "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech" seems even further away from the TikTok law, if anything.

"Apple has a first amendment right to be able to list any app it wants, regardless of source" seems like the only claim you could make. The Lamont case doesn't directly apply since the government isn't an intermediary between Apple and ByteDance saying "are you SURREEEE you want to get this app from them?" And the existence of restrictions on what you can send/receive through the mail make it clear that Lamont isn't a blanket "you can't regulate messages between people" restriction.

So is "hey Apple, don't list things that meet that criteria" different than "hey UPS, don't send things that meet this other criteria"?

AFAICT the Supreme Court didn't really consider it from this angle anyway and just looked at it as a regulation on corporate control, which also seems completely legitimate. Can the US gov't say "certain things require US-person-owned/controlled companies?" They do for other things already.

I think you're both conflating the concept of "free speech = good" with what forms of speech are, at this moment, permitted or forbidden by US law.

For someone who believes in the concept of free speech, the fact that US constitutional rights to free speech in practice almost certainly do not protect overseas business interests is really an embarrassing corner case. Even if you do genuinely consider national and foreign actors to be different kinds of entity, so that it could be ethically sound to protect one and not the other, there's a simple technical reason for constantly the distinction to be artificial: Free speech protection can be gained merely by funnelling the speech through an intermediary US citizen.

https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/lamont-v-postmaster-...

This case shows that there is a first amendment right to receive.

This has nothing to do with the speech. The speech is protected as always. You are free to say the same things on any platform you like: soapbox, print, a website, social media, anywhere.

What is being prohibited is an adversarial government having complete control over an entity that can decide which speech is delivered to which specific audience.

How I read your stance: You are not allowed to hear what they have to say. They have poison thoughts that will infect you and others around you. We must protect our children from poison thoughts.

We can either strive for an educated populace that can identify propaganda or we use propaganda ourselves on ourselves. Propaganda is winning.

Bold of you to read something completely different than what I actually said. Self-propaganda?

I'm engaging in curiosity to understand. I'd love to understand your position better. You wrote:

> What is being prohibited is an adversarial government having complete control over an entity that can decide which speech is delivered to which specific audience.

That seems to imply that certain voices or ideas must be excluded to prevent this control. Isn't that, at its core, a decision that some poisonous thoughts should not be allowed to reach certain people? If not, how do you see this distinction? Does freedom of speech not include freedom to hear what others may find objectionable?

Not sure what's hard to grasp about a country deciding it's a bad idea to allow adversarial nations to run psyops on its populace at-scale.

Your solution is to open the floodgates, allowing all manner of military/intel-grade psychological manipulation, bots, AI, etc. to be unleashed on our population, but try to educate the entire population to become professionals at identifying and resisting these tactics?

Seems absurd on its face. It's strange to see someone trying to make that sound like the reasonable option.

And you weak-minded simpletons have to be protected from those dangerous ideas for your own safety. We have to fill your heads with only good thoughts, the ones we select for you. I know this is the stated issue, people won't shut up about it. It's a bunch of bollocks. How China handles their media isn't a blueprint for how we should do it. I wouldn't trust this power in the hands of my parents who love me unconditionally, I sure as hell don't trust this power in the hands of the worst people alive right now. If you're a Republican substitute Nanci Pelosi / AOC.

> And you weak-minded simpletons have to be protected from those dangerous ideas for your own safety. We have to fill your heads with only good thoughts, the ones we select for you.

Yes that's the literally the idea of TikTok/Douyin https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17544750.2020.17...

The concerns are that US hegemony over the media narrative is crumbling. Young people, "highly-influenced" as you call them, sees that American bombs are dropped on refugees in Gaza and they don't think that is right. So just do what China itself does and remove everything that challenges the government-approved narrative. Banning TikTok is no different from banning publishers of books the government doesn't like.

Israel is god's gift to Chinese propaganda.Every single Palestinian death further erodes Western moral superiority. It's like the Mai Lai massacre that never ends.

I am quite sure God does not operate through US JDAM missiles and billions of dollars' of ammunition. God doesn't operate the American media which doesn't report the Genocide. If US was willing, this Gift could have ended long long ago. I am sure no other country was forcing US to vote against peace at UN.

I am opposed to the way Israel is handling the war and believe they are committing unspeakable atrocities against the Palestinian people. My Instagram reels are filled with content supporting those beliefs. To my knowledge, Instagram is still owned by Meta.

Banning TikTok has literally nothing to do with silencing pro-Palestinian content. For fuck’s sake, Trump is trying his best to bring it back while threatening to deport students who engage in pro-Palestinian activism.

It might have something to do with 90% of the justification as articulated by the bill's own authors and supporters, and especially in the arguments before the Supreme Court and their opinion upholding it, being about "content-neutral" goal of blocking the ability of China to spy on US data.

Even when TikTok themselves tried to argue that the primary reason was to prevent foreign control over a recommendation algorithm, the Supreme Court said "nope, Congress's primary motive was the data collection."

I have no way of verifying it, but I heard from someone I believe to be connected enough to know things that TikTok is taking marching orders from the Chinese military.

That is kind of obvious. It’s a well known fact that all Chinese companies after certain size/reach are controlled by the Chinese government

True, but it doesn't seem widely appreciated.

But that's, imo, not a reason to ban it. When it comes to media, yes curated media like magazines, journals, newspapers, and social media, Americans have the right to consume whatever media they want (minus exceptions like CSAM). If Americans want to watch hours of CCP-edited brainrot scrolly videos, that's 100% our right. We were never supposed to be a country like China or India who bans websites just because they don't like them and because they think people are too stupid to surf the web on their own.

It's not banned, they're forcing the Chinese to divest ownership & control of it, same as China does to US companies, really. The fact is that they'd rather shut it down than be unable to gather location data or build social graphs of their user base.

Frankly the propaganda aspect is the least troubling part of it because you're right, people can make their own choices about information sources.

But figuring out who various military members are connected to, where and how they're moving around, and especially any leaks where people take cell phones in places they shouldn't (remember that ship that installed a Starlink illegally?), they can get quite a bit of intelligence.

If the don't divest ownership, then what? (The ban)

Sure, but it kinda shows that their priorities are something other than money.

So what? That doesn't make banning media in the US okay

The ranking member (senior Democrat) on the intelligence committee voted against the ban (https://www.ctinsider.com/columnist/article/tiktok-ban-jim-h...):

> One key for him is that it’s only a possible threat. Our best intelligence, including in a briefing for Congress from the Biden administration Tuesday, is that the Chinese government has not actually done the things the ban fears.

Also, from a recent All-In interview (https://www.happyscribe.com/public/all-in-with-chamath-jason...):

> I look to Jim Himes, who is the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, the ranking member. He's in what's called the Gang of Eight. He has the most exquisite access to intelligence. Jim voted against the ban. And I thought, you know what? If this guy is not seeing anything on the national security level.

> [00:44:36] There was an off the record or confidential briefing to the House Intelligence Committee. You think in that meeting, there was nothing that was very meaningful that was disclosed about TikTok?

> [00:44:45] Nothing that I had seen. Is it owned by the Chinese government? Absolutely. But is there a national security risk? I have not seen that.

>The ranking member (senior Democrat) on the intelligence committee voted against the ban (https://www.ctinsider.com/columnist/article/tiktok-ban-jim-h...):

But he voted yes on the subsequent vote?

https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2024145

Moreover your factoid is misleading because it omits the fact that the chair voted for the ban, along with most of the members. Of the 25 members on the committee, only 4 voted against.

He voted against the March bill that narrowly focuses on the TikTok issue, but voted for the April bill which also includes foreign aid for Ukraine and Israel. They are not the same bill.

> The decision by House Republicans to include TikTok as part of a larger foreign aid package, a priority for President Joe Biden with broad congressional support for Ukraine and Israel, fast-tracked the ban after an earlier version had stalled in the Senate. A standalone bill with a shorter, six-month selling deadline passed the House in March by an overwhelming bipartisan vote as both Democrats and Republicans voiced national security concerns about the app’s owner, the Chinese technology firm ByteDance Ltd. (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/possible-u-s-tiktok-ba...)

Putting shit like that in an unrelated bill can be translated as a 'horseman bill' and would have been censored so fast in my country it isn't even funny. What does your supreme court do exactly?

Intelligence is kinda unnecessary at this point. A Tiktok VP already admitted to a UK parliament select committee that they used to harshly moderate anything the Chinese government found sensitive

Q90 - John Nicolson: It may happen elsewhere, and I can tell you what your official TikTok response was to this leak. You did not deny that these were instructions. In fact, you confirmed that these were instructions, but what you said was that the company had changed its policy in May 2019. Previously, you instructed your moderators to take down videos critical of China, specifically talking about incidents in Tiananmen Square, separatism in Tibet, all straight out of the Chinese Communist Party playbook. You confirmed that is what your moderators did, but your defence was that you had changed your policy in May 2019.

Theo Bertram: It is highly regrettable that that is what it was, but it is not our policy today, nor has it been for a long time.

https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/13247/html/

> possibly not speculative at all

There's a sentence

Is it? Because as soon as the ban went into effect and phones started to ring Congress very quickly changed its tune. If it was genuinely a national security threat you absolutely would NOT bend after a few hundred angry constituency calls.

Did congress change it's tune? From what I've seen, congress still wants to ban them, it's just that Trump has exutive ordered that he won't enforce the law.

Congress didn’t change its tune. PAFACA is supported by 80% of legislators. It has more support than virtually any other legislation.

I know it's stupid to get upset over an app like TikTok, but the ban really did shock me a little, even more so because of how widely supported it was.

What party or politicians support individual freedom in this context? How could libertarians support banning an app?

The left doesn’t support individual freedoms because they believe that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. The right no longer supports individual freedoms because they believe that the privileges of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

I hate to get involved with this one because it's not my fight and I don't personally care. That said, I have no issue reconciling the concept of someone who supports individual freedom and banning TikTok. Banning TikTok, at least theoretically, is more to do with TikTok's right to do business here, not your right to use TikTok. I don't think it is illegal to use TikTok if you were to bypass the block. It's illegal for them to let you in.

Not even that, it's unlawful for another business (Apple or Google) to carry TikTok. TikTok can let you in just fine (what are we going to do, sue China?) and you can use it, the app store just can't carry it. It would also be illegal for Oracle to host it.

"it is unlawful for companies in the United States to provide services to distribute, maintain, or update the social media platform TikTok, unless U. S. operation of the platform is severed from Chinese control."

I’t’s very clear now that it was the Palestine support among tiktok users that was the main reason. I’m guessing Israel issues typically get that level of support in congress.

I actually think this is the most likely culprit. I think Tiktok deliberately showed Americans all sorts of videos of the horrors going on in Gaza (which certainly there are) but none of the videos from 10/7. They show us people talking about how evil Israel and us are, nothing about Hamas's actions, motivations, etc.

If they wanted to do the opposite, they could show us videos from 10/7 (there are a lot), talk to the survivors, show us historians talking about Hamas's particularly insidious brand of extremism, show videos of them hanging gay people from cranes, etc. Whatever agenda they want to push, it's clear how they could do it.

I think they probably do this with other things too, to make us hate our government. Our chaos benefits China. I think the intelligence agencies showed Congress data they collected on this.

I admit, this is a giant mound of speculation, but even if China didn't do that, it's quite obvious they could and seems likely they would. Whether or not they've exploited TikTok in that manner is certainly debatable but I don't wish to leave them the option in the future.

The other big social media apps were banning or suppressing pro-Palestine content during that time, so tiktok was the only place you could post that stuff. Whether they were deliberately pushing it is debatable I suppose. I am fairly certain it was organic since it was the only big place you could post it.

Is there really evidence that pro palestine content was intentionally promoted or demoted any any social network? Obviously the possibility is there. But US social media can do it too, which kind of just proves that it's worth having a foreign controlled app. If everything is being manipulated to push different agendas, at least have the option to be exposed to one not controlled by the US gov

> How could libertarians support banning an app?

because they calling themselves libertarians don't make them stand for liberty!

Libertarians might actually want authoritarianism, but it's their authority!

> national security apparatus knows something

For some stuff like this it's hard to imagine why they wouldn't be able to make it public. You need public support if you're going to ban an app that a lot of the public likes. Almost certainly IMO, no substantive evidence existed.

You clearly don't need public support to force TikTok to be sold. They did it.

> I think it’s quite likely the national security apparatus knows something

I couldn’t help but lol when I read that.

The security apparatus should understan that anything they do in this case will be performative only. 5000000 downloads already, all legal many many instances up and running publicly if it was me, the first task I would give a deepseek model, would be to obfusicate itself and pattent the results, and start selling copys realy cheap......deepcheap

https://spectrum.ieee.org/deepseek

the only reason the ban came down was AIPAC was not able to get them to ban or silent ban pro Palestine sentiment and voices like facebook etc do.They were wary of it before but suddenly a bill banning gets passed in days something that normally takes months

Are you saying the closed door intelligence meeting had no bearing, or that it was… Israel? Or I’m not sure what you’re implying.

It is true that the reasoning mentioned by the commenter was also given as an example of why TikTok needs to be banned by a few legislators.

I don't think the closed door intelligence was about that though. I think they probably said that the persuasive power of TikTok was dangerous to the US, but imo, that's very against the First Amendment and the idea of democracy. Americans are allowed to be influenced however which way we want. We run the government, not the other way around

The First Amendment doesn't give any foreign entity any rights. There's no censorship of Americans here, whatever you posted on TikTok you're free to post on Instagram. In fact you can even still post it on TikTok, it just can't be in the Apple or Google app store and it can't be hosted on Oracle servers.

I think a closed door intelligence meeting is unlikely to just be them telling Congressmen scenarios they've already heard. I think they much more likely had some receipts. Some of the Senators in that meeting (from both parties) have sponsored a bill to declassify it and share it with the public, so we may find out.

> The First Amendment doesn't give any foreign entity any rights.

Wait, what?

Are you suggesting the bill of rights only applies to US citizens? Like, does the 5th amendment not protect foreign entities from illegal search and seizure? Does the 2nd amendment not apply to foreign security companies like Securitas?

> I think it’s quite likely

This is speculating. In other instances, the national security apparatus has provided specific evidence when it existed which makes me believe there isn’t anything more than “XYZ could happen”.

In any case, I think we can do better than make laws based on secret evidence. This is supposed to be a democracy after all. Or something.

> possibly

> not speculative

So it is speculative, right? Even your comment is just speculation.

lol that’s such wishful thinking and seeing those congressmen in a way too competent light. If they had any hard evidence they’d have published it. It isn’t hard to understand is it.

one thing bothers me is that: americans, even americans in tech industry, seems place a ton of trust in the CIA. you know the government often lies, and the media does too. but you seem to really buy into everything the CIA puts out. I'm curious to know why.

> bill that’s merely been proposed…

No harm in pulling down R1 right now anyway (which is what I might have done…).

The risk is obvious and it has nothing to do with privacy... It's the fact that CCP could deliberately alter the algorithm to influence a significant portion of the US in any way they please.

Oh yeah, we wouldn't want the United States to be influenced into making a stupid, irrational mistake.

Uh oh, scary ideas. I am more scared of christo-fascism within the US than any pro Chinese messaging. To counter these ideas, I want more discussion, more education. I have learned a lot on tiktok

Maybe christo-fascism is pro Chinese messaging (not really but they definitely could push messaging that encouraged division and instability if they wanted).

TikTok executives lied under oath about what they do with user data. That alone should have resulted in its ban. But the bigger issue is that we allow a foreign adversary market access who doesn’t allow it in reverse. And yes that has the capacity to skew our political process.

What did they lie about and how do you know it is a lie? What I saw was purposeful ignorant questioning. "Sir, I'm Singaporean."

This bill is a terrible idea, but it's worth mentioning

> yeah TikTok ban was a very bad precedent

The TikTok ban didn't set a precedent, it's following a general precedent. The most obvious precedent is Grindr [0]. What makes TikTok unusual is they refused to sell.

The precedent is also very old. There are usually laws regarding doing business with enemies during wartime, for example. That's the same basic idea: restriction on business/trade due to national security issues. The ones everyone knows about are US car companies and IBMs doing business with the Nazis. Typically, AFAIK, companies are required to divest to a subsidiary, which is what the US wanted ByteDance to do.

At least that's the right conceptual framing IMO, whether or not you think the ban was a bad idea.

CISA considers China the "most active and persistent cyber threat to the U.S. Government, private sector, and critical infrastructure networks" [1]. So while the US isn't technically in a cyber war with China, they basically are.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21168079/grindr-sold-chine...

[1] https://www.cisa.gov/topics/cyber-threats-and-advisories/nat...

The problem with tiktok is not speculative at all. It doesn't matter what you can prove they did, it only matters that you can prove they can.

It is not speculation at all to say that tiktok can both collect data and manipulate populations. Whether they actually do doesn't even matter. The problem is you can't prove that they have not, are not, or will not.

The only problem is 50 other apps all pose essentially the same risks, and tiktok is hardly special.

The contrast is any of the various open source activity pub apps. Any given server could be doing anything, but there is no single black box server that everyone has to live on. There are 1000 different servers and a bunch of open source code that all serve as verification checks on each other. No aberrant server can hide its skewed behavior for long when there are other servers that didn't F with the code and so their behavior matches the public code, and so the aberrant ones can be exposed by their behavior and stats deviating from the norm, even if you can't trust that a given server is really running clean code.

For what it's worth: in the jurisprudence of HN moderation, stories about proposed bills are off-topic.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> National security is such a huge brush you could paint anything you want.

This exactly!

i think the tiktok ban ought to be considered unconstitutional.

Unless proof can be found that tiktok is being used by foreign actors to manipulate votes or some other shady shit (and only via tiktok itself, rather than a broad scheme that uses all social media), tiktok should not be banned. It is against the free speech that the US stands for.

If algorithmic manipulation of voters is considered a threat, then pass a law to social media companies that they must explain the algorithm etc, and audit it. It's exactly what GDPR mandates, in their automated decision making and profiling clauses (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/). Therefore, this is not without precedent, and is also more effective at regulating social media, not just tiktok.

Therefore, the tiktok ban is performative. Like how the claims for DEI and such are performative.

It's not about a US advantage in AI. It's about politicians restricting our freedom and violating their oath to uphold the Constitution.

Josh Hawley needs to be in jail.

How is this confusing? China spies on you. If you use an app that's tied directly to headquarters, headquarters can read what you think.

Were you able to read the parent comment at all?

Are you confused by the questions/arguments in it?

Yes I read the parent comment, do you mean the two questions

  > Is it proposing to ban US citizens from reading research papers written by Chinese citizens?

  > Or from publishing research in places that might be read by them?

Clearly, both are impossible to implement, wouldn't you agree? The bill talks about "AI products," as per the article, and that would be what a consumer uses, not what a researcher uses. Can legislators ban the reading of papers in America? There are 1st amendment issues there. But for protection against external states messing with our population, there's a different set of rules.

> the importation into the United States of artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence technology or intellectual proprietary developed or produced in the People’s Republic of China

... That seems _absurdly_ broad; would arguably hit open source software, academic papers, patents... Like, taken at face value, this would mean "no longer do AI stuff in the US _at all_"; it would be impossible to do anything much without risking violating this.

That pretty much sums up the objection from EFF: as written, it would ban both publishing research and reading research for pretty much all of AI.

It's unlikely that this will ever get out of committee, of course.

US didn't ban tiktok. They banned adversary owned tiktok

> The Republican Senator from Missouri Josh Hawley has introduced a new bill that would make it illegal to import or export artificial intelligence products to and from China, meaning someone who knowingly downloads a Chinese developed AI model like the now immensely popular DeepSeek could face up to 20 years in jail, a million dollar fine, or both, should such a law pass.

You get less jail time for committing 34 felonies.

up to 20 years. Realistically some kid downloading a model would get probation, and you'd only get 20 years if you were making an entire enterprise out of it.

relevant: https://web.archive.org/web/20130208124604/https://www.popeh...

You and I know this isn't how this works.

The moment the government wants to punish someone over this they will grab some random kid that's barely done anything and threaten them with the full 20 years to serve as an example to others.

Where's the kid rotting in federal prison for downloading a mp3? Does the music/movie industry not have good enough lobbyists to make an example of a torrenter?

I don't know, you tell me what happend to that Aaron guy that ran Reddit?

Thanks for proving my point. Schwartz was offered 6 months in a minimum security prison, but he declined it because he specifically wanted a trial. Moreover that was for effectively DoSing JSTOR, a much more serious crime than some guy using a vpn to download an AI model. I don't think 6 months was justified, nor the string of crimes he was charged with, but OP's assertion that "You get less jail time for committing 34 felonies" is still false.

>During plea negotiations with Swartz's attorneys, the prosecutors offered to recommend a sentence of six months in a low-security prison if Swartz pled guilty to 13 federal crimes. Swartz and his lead attorney rejected the deal, opting instead for a trial where prosecutors would be forced to justify their pursuit of him.

Facts need not apply. We’re righteously indignant for goodness sake! Stop with all the nonsense “facts” and “reality” unless they fit the narrative.

It's a shame Swartz was downloading JSTOR articles to share. He could have DoS'd half the internet and gotten away scot-free if he'd been training an ML system instead.

You just need articles of incorporation and all crimes become civil matters.

I think the issue under discussion is whether or not this kind of law is applied gently and with consideration to seriousness, or whether it tends to be used as a club to make an example of people. I think Swartz is seen as an example of it being used as a club to make an example of people.

>I think the issue under discussion is whether or not this kind of law is applied gently and with consideration to seriousness, or whether it tends to be used as a club to make an example of people.

I'm not sure how you got that impression from the original exchange of:

>>[...] You get less jail time for committing 34 felonies.

>up to 20 years. Realistically some kid downloading a model would get probation [...]

I didn't get that impression from the original exchange, I got it from the thread I am responding to involving Aaron Swartz being given as a counter-example to the last point, and inferring why somebody would use Aaron Swartz as a counter-example.

Seems I was right in that inference, given other responses to the thread since.

I think it's not about examples. Every attorney graduating with a quarter million in student debt that gets a low pay government job is trying to punch a lot of notches in their belt so that they can be picked up by a major law firm with a pretty paycheck. They'd be stupid or magnanimous to look the other way on easy wins.

Last I checked, 6 months is still more time than 0 time. Not sure your point with this comparison

Last time I checked, entering an (unlocked) IT closet, using it to DoS a site and continuing to do so despite being IP banned a few times is slightly more serious than "some kid downloading a model".

Yes, but all the way back to the top of this specific thread was 34 felonies got 0 months. You're now comparing 6 months against a hypothetical where nothing has actually happened.

I finally got around to watching "The Internet's Own Boy" the other day. He told his girlfriend as they were driving by the Whitehouse that didn't want to accept the plea deal and plead guilty "because felons can't work in that building" [the Whitehouse]. Oh, man, how times have changed.

Capital Records vs Jamie Thomas where Capital Records was awarded around 2 million in damages and Sony vs Joel Tenenbaum. These cases are not uncommon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records%2C_Inc._v._Tho...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_v._Tenenbaum

Civil vs criminal. Federal sentencing guidelines don't apply.

You want federal then take a step out and look at all the people who got 10-15 years for carrying an quarter ounce of weed. Sentencing is very selective based on who they want to make an example of and when.

>You want federal then take a step out and look at all the people who got 10-15 years for carrying an quarter ounce of weed.

Source? My impression is that in basically all of those cases, it's either because:

1. the guy is a repeat offender and/or on probation

2. the guy decided to wanted to fight to the bitter end and they threw the book at them

I'm not saying either are justified, but the implication that someone will get 20 years just because he downloaded deepseek through ollama or whatever is still false.

> the guy is a repeat offender and/or on probation

“It was for two or three quarter ounces of weed!” isn’t the defense you imagine.

https://nitter.net/ddmeyer/status/1220480907393372160#m

(The graphs in the first tweet are from page 55 of the linked PDF.)

>mandatory minimum [...]

Which isn't applicable to the law being proposed. Moreover if the idea is "threaten them with the full 20 years to serve as an example", then the mandatory minimum kinda works against that? If you catch some guy and then he serves 10 years, you haven't really proven much. You're just acting in line with expectations.

Those cases are extremely uncommon. In nearly every case what happened was:

1. The RIAA sent a letter telling how many songs you were distributing and offering a settlement of around $2-5 per song. Most people at this point realized that they were in fact guilty and that the RIAA had enough evidence to prove it in court and agreed to settle.

2. A small fraction ignored this or refused to settle. The RIAA then files lawsuits in some of those cases, typically over a small number of the songs that the person was distributing rather than over all the songs being distributed.

At this point most defendants would get a lawyer and be told that they will almost certainly lose and advised to settle.

3. A handful of people ignored their lawyers (or had crappy lawyers) and plowed on. Their extraordinarily bad decision making often continued during their trial. Thomas for instance lied in court and tried to destroy evidence.

This is not wise since in these suits the plaintiff is asking for statutory damages, which is a minimum of $750 per song (not per download--if you were offering 2 songs for download and they were each download 1000 times the minimum is 2 x $750, not 2000 x $750) but can go up to $30000, and it is the jury that determines the amount in that range. You really want the jury to find you sympathetic, and lying and trying to destroy evidence doesn't help with that.

4. After the inevitable victory in most cases that got far the RIAA would again offer to settle for an amount much lower than the damages awarded by the court, although higher than their original settlement offer.

I don't know how many reached this stage, but if many did most of them came to their senses and realized that appealing would probably only make it worse.

The very small number that didn't are the ones that ended up like the two cases you cited.

A very small number end up with a high profile but there are many John Doe or Jane Doe cases where names aren't publicized.

This is a good point. If one thing didn’t happen then a different unrelated thing cannot happen. You would think that the reason for nobody being in jail for downloading mp3s would be that there is no criminal law against downloading mp3s but actu

Pirating is not a criminal offense in America. It is in other parts of the world, like Japan, which, tangentially, is why Japanese piracy is so underground and tends to use different software stacks to the norm, cf. Perfect Dark (the filesharing program, not the game).

You get less jail time for an insurrection aimed at overthrowing a free and fair election and beating the shit out of cops while doing so.

Truly, what do you even do as the CCP or some other party that would like to spread anti-American propaganda? Literally just point to the actual, factual state of this country and tell me it isn't a rolling joke.

CCP is no stranger to chaos and self sabotage either. China is probably the least affected and most likely still standing in one piece

Thats how most propaganda works. Russia, for example, has been publicizing cases of extreme racism in the US for years to demoralize black people. [1] Hell this has been going on since WWII, when other countries saw how the US treated their black troops, and used it to damage loyalty. [2]

Nothing works like the truth, if the US could just stop being so racist it'd be that much harder to divide us. It seems like that's fundementally against our nature though.

1. https://www.npr.org/2017/10/30/560042987/russians-targeted-u...

2. https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/german-leaflet-for-black...

US is a racist country though, at least at the government level. See how BLM and January 6th demonstrations got treated.

It took bipartisan pardons/commutations across 2 disparately ideological faction leaders to even the outcomes for both groups of people who purportedly aimed to overthrow the government that let them all be free.

So the outcomes are even now?

Black Lives Matter only sought to "overthrow" the system in place if you presume first that racism is a core component of it.

The thing that makes it a wedge issue that's useful for propaganda isn't that the US is racist, it's that the US is racist while (ostensibly) aspiring to be more in its creed.

The funny thing is Russia an China can claim to be less racist as they are homogenous societies.

Russia is homogenous? Interesting.

China is homogeneous?

... What?

That is completely nonsense. Absolutely ludicrous.

Neither Russia nor China are homogenous. Both have large Muslim minorities (and both are be pretty racist against them). Eastern Russians are not European descended and are looked down on by Western Russians. Tibetans are not Han Chinese.

Even the Asian nations that actually are pretty "homogenous" like Japan and Korea are also famously pretty racist.

There are also a ton of other ethnic groups in China and the government just call them all Han Chinese. Tons of ethnic groups in Russia too. These are countries with very long histories that span a large area, with many areas that were multiple kingdoms, tribes, etc. Makes perfect sense that they would have a lot of different ethnic groups.

If you were not aware, Russia is famously diverse and a large number of their oblasts(province level equivalent jurisdictions) are drawn up along ethnic lines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Russia

... Homogenous in _what way_?!

They're both the remnants of large land empires, each incorporating many ethnicities, languages, religions... They are not at all homogenous.

Like, that whole thing with the Uyghurs, what did you think that was about? Or Chechnya?

There's a museum in Shanghai with posters going back to Mao that take the same strategy. Lots of highlighting American racism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_Poster_Art_Centre

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g308272-d18871...

The Republican party could pull a 180 and stop instituting policies that prove CCP anti-American propoganda correct, and pass universal health care, free education, civil rights, and all those other socialist freedom crushing commie pinko ideologies.

It's open source, hosted on an American Github server. If you don't trust it, prove it.

If you really don't trust it, copy the algorithms without forking it. That's the big allure of OSS. You should be scutinous, but you should be able to base that scrutiny on cold hard facts.

It's kind of like the export controls over strong encryption that we dealt with in the 90s. There used to be separate binaries for Netscape or Mozilla back in the day.

You mean one time-barred, victimless misdemeanor that got transmogrified into 34 felonies by an overzealous political hack of a prosecutor?

Lawfare was tried, and it failed. I hope it dies the death it deserves instead of becoming the new normal.

If you're an actual attorney, you should be disbarred. Not sorry.

Disbarred for being realistic and honest about what a mistake that prosecution was? I voted for Harris BTW.

No, you did not.

I did though.

It’s possible to support Harris and still be reasonable about the utter failure that the lawfare campaign against Trump has been.

Ga's are still elected. "Hard on Crime" still works as a campaign slogan to this day.

We have a deeper societal perception to fix first before we can even think about a justice system focused on rehabilitation. It'd also be nice to remove that certain clause in the 13th amendment while we're at it.

And you can invade getting any jail time for 34 felonies if you become a president and strike deals with billionaires!

> “Every dollar and gig of data that flows into Chinese AI are dollars and data that will ultimately be used against the United States,” Senator Hawley said in a statement. “America cannot afford to empower our greatest adversary at the expense of our own strength. Ensuring American economic superiority means cutting China off from American ingenuity and halting the subsidization of CCP innovation.”

Oh goodness me!. If that's true, then why not just completely block China's IP addresses from our Internet? Why not just block all dollars from entering China?

Oh right, because that's not the truth. It's certainly not the whole of it anyway.

There's a point to be made that the Chinese don't play by the same set of rules; I don't know why Hawley doesn't just make that point.

Oh, wait, I do know: he's an idiot.

Americans also tend to forget the tech they've stolen. Raytheon only exists due to radar technology stolen from the Brits in WW2 under the guise of American engineers underhandedly telling the UK they needed to bring the prototype to the US.

Or the USA taking the UK's research on nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project and cutting off access to it by British scientists.

I'm not even British and those are just two examples from the top of my head. The hypocrisy is absolutely infuriating...

This congressman is either just engaging in the typical hustler-level political grandstanding of many congressmen, or he's a pig-ignorant idiot who doesn't know how to connect data points and form reasoned concepts of reality from them.

Total U.S.-China trade is roughly 760 billion dollars and includes some of the most wealthy and best connected companies in the U.S. Dollars of wealth and investments created through trade with Chinese companies (many of which are connected right to the CCP) pervade various levels of American society and the finances of who knows how many high.level politicians. The exact same thing applies to Chinese society and politicians with money gained from Chinese trade with American companies. That's how large.scale trade just works between two societies, and it's usually a good thing because it's better to trade goods and services than it is to trade bullets and missiles..

For his incoherent idiocy to be a bit more coherent, he'd have to talk about cutting off business relationships that affect and involve the majority of his colleagues in government and a great number of other powerful people.. But why think of that when some silly little media-popular cheap shot against a specific AI company can be vomited out for the public and your constituents?

It is useful context for people who aren't American to know how ridiculous Josh Hawley is, and has always been. The current authoritarian chaos could lend some weight to the possibility that this becomes law, but it is still unlikely.

Yes, this is the same guy that was photographed raising his fist to the crowed, but then seen in video scurrying away from the scary crowd

> It is useful context for people who aren't American to know how ridiculous Josh Hawley is, and has always been.

Hawley looks like a clown and acts like a clown but he knows how to play the game. The only two things the guy talks about is how much he loves israel and hates china. With those credentials, he might be president one day.

Check his raised fist salute here, and the entire article:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Hawley

Funny we used to say that about Trump. There are moments in history when anything can happen.

Good rule of thumb: when something seems too stupid to actually happen, it's time to accept it'll probably happen.

is he ? he's a pretty smart guy - with tyrant tendencies. he is toe dipping to see what he can push through. with how things are going he might be up next to be the next extremist president.

> It is useful context for people who aren't American to know how ridiculous Josh Hawley is, and has always been

You could write this sentence about the current President. And yet, he was elected. So much of the EOs and bills passed recently are utterly absurd — and while that perhaps stops some of them, it has far from stopped all of them.

Stop giving the GOP a free pass because it is "ridiculous". The Overton window of "ridiculous bills" is moving at a breakneck pace as it is. These people ought to be leaders. Hold them to account. Unelect them, ideally, though clearly my fellow Americans do not agree with me on that point.

Guess what I, a person who mere minutes ago had little interest in downloading DeepSeek, am doing right now? Paging Ms. Streisand…

Maybe they spent the marketing budget on lobbying ;)

Streisand effect is overstated, censorship/bans work.

What is a shell one-liner that downloads DeepSeek ?

ollama pull deepseek-r1:671b

Would be one option...

If you have ollama installed and 404GB free space: ollama pull deepseek-r1:671b

Genuinely curious - if one did not have any tooling at all (other than curl or wget or fetch, etc.) is there a one-liner to download only the deepseek model ?

  git clone --mirror ... ?

Yes, you need git with git lfs. Then just: `git clone https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1`

You probably want the GGUF versions, though, which are the ones you can actually run on reasonable hardware.

Full R1 version here: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/DeepSeek-R1-GGUF/tree/main/De...

Various smaller versions: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/DeepSeek-R1-GGUF/tree/main

There is also a 'BF16' version on that page with 16-bit weights, but I don't understand what it is or where it came from, given that the original model is FP8-native.

  ssh user@rsync.net git lfs install
  Password:
  Git LFS initialized.

... so far so good ...

  ssh user@rsync.net git clone https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1
  Password:
  Cloning into 'DeepSeek-R1'...

... success.

Done in the spirit of the Streisand Effect but I suppose the protest is watered down by the fact that this account is in Zurich ...

Ollama has underlying plain URLs but they are parts so you'd need something to combine them. But you can use curl.

Otherwise a docker one liner to run ollama should do it.

Docker is a "core util" right.

If you have ollama:

  ollama run deepseek-r1:671b

That is 404GB, but there are smaller versions too.

AstonJ explained on DevTalk [1] how to download and run DeepSeek using LM Studio.

[1] https://forum.devtalk.com/t/how-to-run-deepseek-on-your-mac-...

This is performative and obviously stupid, but to add some technical color to it: in the alternate universe where this passed, rather than floating around as a signalling tool for Josh Hawley, ordinary violators would see nothing resembling a 20 year sentence.

This statute falls under the 2M5 section of the sentencing guideline (for export violations); it has a base offense level of 14 (15-21 months) and is probation-eligible at that level. There are lots of accelerators for 2M5 offenses, but it's hard to see any of them applying to casual, or even commercial, users of DeepSeek. There are level-reducers that would apply.

(2M5 crimes can optionally be sentenced under 2B1.1, which is what most crimes we talk about on HN, particularly CFAA, are sentenced with; there the penantly would scale with financial damages. Again: hard to see how that would meaningfully apply here).

None of this is to suggest any federal prosecution for using DeepSeek would ever be reasonable. I don't even think Josh Hawley believes that. I think he just feels lonely and left out.

Too many people have it now. What would be likely to happen if the bill passed is selective enforcement.

Many dictatorships have very broad laws that almost everyone inevitably breaks, but as long as you don't challenge the dictator or speak out against them in any way, you are safe.

But the moment you speak out against the government, suddenly the law gets enforced, since in the governments eyes, you have now committed the one true crime.

Among the many reasons this could never pass: it would require extensive cooperation with the Senate minority (the majority holds control by just a thread, and not by enough move anything but reconciliation bills through) which isn't going to cooperate on anything resembling this.

There's only one Senator I trust to be able to understand the nuances of these kinds of issues and that's Ron Wyden, he's a Democrat. I would hope he would filibuster this if it came to the floor. As an Oregonian, I would definitely call his office if this came up for a vote.

It's not going to require a Ron Wyden filibuster. The Senate minority is not going to jump onto a grandstanding bill by an especially right-wing member of the majority. The bill will never clear cloture. That's before you even address the question of whether it'd get near-unanimous support from the majority, which is what it would need.

This is why stories like this are "officially" off-topic for HN ("proposed bill" is the search query you want). The actual mechanics of US politics are such that stuff like this pops up all the time, with everybody playing the televised game, as opposed to the home game like us, understanding that none of this is actually going to happen. Us talking about it was the entire ballgame for Hawley.

It's kind of funny to compare the Napster lawsuits, Aaron Swartz, DRM campaigns etc with the Ross Ulbricht type cases. Turns out you can download as many cars as you want, just make sure to pad the right politicans running for president.

"challenge the dictator or speak out against them" No chance of that.

Oh good, so it's just a tool to selectively and arbitrarily make examples of people. I'm sure the government would never abuse that power. Carry on, then, citizen.

In addition big AI are swinging their clubs with Trump so this is a good way to jail the competition.

You are both talking as if this could possibly pass, and it cannot.

We are replying to the "the alternate universe where this passed" comment.

We've lived through a number of "That could never happen, though" scenarios in the past decade. I'm feeling a bit skeptical towards skepticism at the moment.

It is so deeply painful to witness in my lifetime how our nation's law makers have openly become so profoundly morally and intellectually bankrupt.

It was probably always a game. Explaining the difference between downloading the weights and using the website hosted in china is beyond our collective scope of interest/attention, and that's probably a bit worrying. The Crown would call Franklin intellectually bankrupt but here we are.

If the rationale is to avoid sending data back to Chinese servers, then shouldn't there be a carveout for downloading a model you run locally?

There's nothing rational about any of this. Just political crusading and posturing. Probably to appease trump and musk. Who were probably heavily affected when the stock market shocked last week.

From a normal legislator in normal times, yes... but this is 2025, and the author happens to be an evil idiot.

(I already spent the first Trump term trying to discern "malice or incompetence", it's a red-herring, the investment is unreasonable, I'm declaring it "both.")

This would assume that Hawley knows the difference, or that the court will care after the carelessly written legislation passes. (It's unlikely to ever get close to passing, but as the changes to R&D expenditure rules and the TikTok ban demonstrate, having the legislation make sense and be something everyone agrees upon isn't a requirement for making it the law of the land.

> The bill, which also prohibits the “transfer of research,” could create an unworkable environment for computer scientists who make their research public, and regularly read AI papers published by Chinese researchers.

> “Beyond just impacting people downloading models from China, the bill's penalties for the import to or export from China of AI technology and intellectual property could also potentially extend to anyone who publishes AI models or research papers on the open internet knowing they will be downloaded by people in China,” Bankston said. “Researchers are also threatened by the second half of the bill, which would directly outlaw American collaboration with researchers at basically any Chinese university or company—with a fine of up to 100 million dollars for any company that violates the prohibition, amongst other penalties.”

Model? Or Malware?

Why is the model malware?

That word has a meaning, and a model that isn’t politically aligned isn’t it.

That said, I’ve been using deep seek distilled to qwen, which should yield an incredibly censored model if they had been censoring the models, but instead yields a pretty balanced model that is more than willing to talk about Tiananmen and Xi Jinpings human rights failings.

The rationale is to damage Chinese commercial interests. Otherwise, the billions of IOT devices that dial back to Chinese manufacturers would be way higher up the list than an AI tool that has shown five minutes of adoption.

We’ve gone beyond being able to damage their interests with protectionism. We’re only hurting ourselves by denying access to any Chinese innovation.

Exactly. Talk about closing the barn door after the horse ran out, started his own family, watched his foals grow up, sent them off to horse college, and watched them all settle down and start their own families in new barns that don't even have doors. Nonsensical stunts like this make me wonder if Hawley and company are also on the Chinese/Russian payroll and it's not just Trump/Musk. Is it too much to ask of my fellow Americans to pull up from your grievance politics before these people completely hand our country to China?

Yes.

It’s not just to avoid sending data back but to recognize the national security threat of allowing an adversary country’s products to access American markets (of users). It has implications for politics and technology competitiveness. When the adversary is an authoritarian communist dictatorship that provides no equal market access for American social media or search engines or whatever, I think a ban on everything is justified. In fact we should extend this beyond software, which is what tariffs would do.

The rationale is a lie. Stop treating it with the good faith it doesn't deserve.

I thought that Hawley had fallen into obscurity after he tried to steal the White House in 2021. I was kind of hoping that that would be the last we would hear from him.

That's what I get for hoping for a better world.

>[I]nterpreting this law in such a way would further solidify the dominance of proprietary AI over open or academic research.

This goes to the heart of the debate here. Obviously forking an open-source model of Chinese origin is not “sending dollars and gigs of data” to China.

Hawley is a non-stupid person so he almost certainly gets this. The issue is that for a few US companies with >>$100B of market cap/valuation whose boards happen to be extremely plugged into Washington’s money machine, their strategic enemy isn’t China; it’s open-source models.

While he’s at it, he should also make cryptography and math illegal too.

But MAGA math will still be allowed

2+2=America?

No joke, the bill is so broad that is essentially would ban mathematics research if the math could contribute to AI development in any way whatsoever. So, essentially all math...

Nah, it only bans Je- I mean... woke math.

BREAKING: Chinese Remainder Theorem Will Now Be Called the American Remainder Theorem

For those that don't get the reference or remember their history... this is exactly what the US has been trying to do since the Cold War eras. [1]

It's absurd, and while it was mostly reformed in the last 1990's, parts of it still linger around.

There's also plenty of good stories from it too, like how Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" was approved for export, but the exact source code that was it in, but on a floppy drive, was not. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th... [2] https://www.ka9q.net/export/

I was planning on doing a lot of writing when I retire. I'm starting to feel like it might not be allowed.

And for bonus points he could square the circle.

From the article:

> Hawley introduced the legislation, titled the Decoupling America’s > Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act, > on Wednesday of last year.

On Wednesday of last year you say.... hmmm what wrote this article

Deepseekv3 was released in Dec. and already had really good non reasoning benchmarks and most of the inference cost savings.

As if they could enforce this. The model is out there and the number of spinoffs is insane. We will have so many different AI's available that there is no way they will know if it was DeepSeek at all.

They likely can't enforce it against the people they "need" to, but that won't stop it from stifling innovation.

It mirrors what we saw in other industries that they basically had zero effective enforcement for, such as Cannabis sale and usage. It did not stop the sale or usage of Cannabis at all, it was very common for people to purchase and consume while illegal. But, it was "effective" at ensuring if anyone who wanted to explore that space or improve it essentially had to be a criminal and market forces were absent or distorted at best.

Fast forward and look at areas that have passed recreational sale and usage laws and they are flourishing in this respect. They have innovated the market, reduced cost, created a safer and better product, etc. In every measurable way it has improved the situation for everyone involved, including people who are basically uninvolved but benefit from the massive tax revenue that often gets redirected to schools and other social programs.

Banning DeepSeek and any other model ensures that when a kid comes up with something cool that using one of those models, he has to either make sure to keep it on a secret GitLab account or run `sed s/deepseek/muricahai/i *.py` before he shares it anywhere that might come back to him.

They don't care about banning it, hell they'll be fine with you downloading it... until you get caught and hung and quartered in front of your peers.

This is about instilling commercial fear, and stopping any US open source distributions to depend on it.

Several states also couldn’t really enforce the porn ban. They still passed those bills.

So crazier things have happened!

Everyone seems to start with the premise that it benefits “the United States” to “lead” in AI. But that’s not obvious at all!

It seems bad for rights holders of many kinds of intellectual property (or else they wouldn’t be filing so many lawsuits).

It seems bad for progress in the field: for the most part our frontier vendors don’t contribute innovations back to the commons in anything like the way that DeepSeek has. This seems to mean that effort is duplicated at tremendous cost in a way that props up famine gouging markups for NVIDIA but little else.

It seems bad for the employees of those same vendors: they’ve been getting laid off left, right, and center with AI as a (dubious) justification.

It’s far from obvious that further growth will be powered by renewable energy, there is a lot of talk indicating that much of it will end up being coal brought back on line.

And even the investors are shaping up to be heavily in Japan and the UAE if this Stargate stuff is real.

It sounds like Mag7 shareholders maybe? And even that isn’t clear?

Maybe I’m missing something obvious, but extremely influential people in the space are selling this family of plan with visions of “wages crashing to zero”, which yeah no thanks.

https://x.com/pmarca/status/1882993091784880557

in an environment where the government isn't clearly working at cross-purposes to the people, the argument would be that the country where the leading AI companies are based will be the country who has the most power to regulate AI.

Can't wait to tell my cell mates what I'm in for.

The bill is political theater and this article is playing into it.

A downloaded model that can be run on US servers is covered by the first amendment as free speech. This is not the same circumstance as the law that required TikTok divest of its platform, which was over spying concerns[0]. You can’t spy on Americans when data is kept on US servers.

0. Per the TikTok Supreme Court ruling:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf

There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community. But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary. For the foregoing reasons, we conclude that the challenged provisions do not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights.

> A downloaded model that can be run on US servers is covered by the first amendment as free speech.

Even Google AI said that an LLM is not itself covered under free speech; only the content it produces, which itself is ironic since AI companies stole world copyrighted data to feed into their LLM software machines.

> A downloaded model that can be run on US servers is covered by the first amendment as free speech.

This is absolutely not settled law.

Other than intellectual property concerns and some obtuse arguments about the model inciting others to break the law (which isn’t specific to China anyway), I’d be really curious what good arguments can be made about how it isn’t protected by the first amendment and how those arguments could target Chinese models specifically

Downloading and running software is not speech. (Just trying to steel-man the opposing argument.)

There is ample precedent in Bernstein v. United States that it is, in fact, free speech, and none that ought to be revisited here.

AFAICT, there's a differentiation that should be made between the model and the mobile app. TFA, and I'm assuming the bill, too, AFAICT, don't differentiate. The model seems unequivocally speech. Whether a mobile app can be banned seems like a different question; from other reporting it seems like the mobile app is laden with lovely things like keyloggers, and there, I can see "national security" might withstand scrutiny.

If the Senator were actually concerned about American's data, he'd pass some privacy laws. But the GOP is all laissez-faire capitalists these days, and they would not want the government telling American companies that that can't sell American data for money.

From my understanding, downloading and running software could be considered a form of conduct or could be considered a form of expression, depending on the intention (e.g. using an LLM to generate poetry would be expression). The latter would put it in a category that is covered by the first amendment. I'd imagine there would be quite an uphill battle to argue that using a specific LLM that has been made permissibly available isn't protected in some circumstances

I dont see why it matters that it's covered by the first amendment

It would be good if we could create a digital fortress around the US that stopped unwanted things from coming in. Like a firewall for the country.

. . .

A Great Firewall.

Building the wall....

The firewall just got ten feet taller

I propose the death penalty for politicians who propose ineffective laws.

(P.s. I'm not a politician)

That would be "Running Man" Hawley who was recorded scurrying like a rat through the House while his buddies were trying to overturn the election.

I have no idea about the intricacies of US law, but reading the actual proposed bill[1], it seems incredibly broad. Like, "this may make publishing linear algebra papers on faster matrix operations illegal"-broad, as it includes everything which may contribute to AI research.

Also: Preventing the import of "foreign" knowledge / research seems completely insane to me, no offense, no matter how one stands on export. There is nothing justifying this, you're just kneecapping yourself.

[1] https://www.hawley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Haw...

The reality is that this should fail under first amendment rulings.

Or it would if the courts abided by the principles they were supposed to.

Wow what a sensationalist clickbait. The bill says nothing about deepseek.

" bill that would make it illegal to import or export artificial intelligence products to and from China"

Also it makes importing illegal, which means that you as a consumer wouldn't even be able to run it (ip or dns block).

The bill was specifically introduced because of DeepSeek (words of the congressman) and has the effect of banning DeepSeek.

I didn’t think I could be further shocked by how dangerously incompetent our leadership is, but here we are. It’s mind blowing that someone would propose this without talking to a single person that understands the subject area.

"Underpaid? Backbench MPs, Darling? Being an MP is a vast subsidised ego trip. It's a job for which you need no qualifications, no compulsory hours of work, no performance standards. A warm room and subsidised meals for a bunch of self-opinionated windbags and busybodies who suddenly find people taking them seriously because they got letters "MP" after their names. How can they be underpaid when there're about two hundred applicants for every vacancy? You could fill every seat twenty times over even if they have to pay to do the job."

-- Honorable ex Prime Minister Jim Hacker

A lot of people in this new federal government are terrified of China

I think it's the opposite, despite the people who are extra loud about it.

Trump admires Xi and Elon loves China. The people at the very top are more China-friendly than the last administration.

The tariffs are about undermining the progressive tax system in the US and around the world (after retaliation the retaliating country's tax code gets less progressive) not China. That's mainly why they are being applied to everyone. Other reason is Trump can get favors and distractions on tap for negotiating each case.

China was Tesla's largest market and major manufacturing base for the international EV market. Up until this year when Chinese domestic EVs took over, and it's looking like Tesla will never get anywhere close to the top ever again.

>” America cannot afford to empower our greatest adversary at the expense of our own strength. Ensuring American economic superiority means cutting China off from American ingenuity and halting the subsidization of CCP innovation.”

Meanwhile we seem interested in cutting research and pissing off our neighbors… presumably opening opportunities for China.

I don’t understand what if anything these Senators are thinking.

These guys are China’s best friends.

Firstly, i have to say i am not surprised it's coming from a Republican senator. Secondly, he proposes lots of shit. Nothing gets close to law. The real question is how did he even become a senator? It has to be investigated.

I feel like there’s an opportunity to revisit this with those "You wouldn't download a car." jokes.

If DeepSeek is data harvesting downloading it and running it locally should be the preferred option?

Good point

Perhaps … except for the "believe it or not, straight to jail" part of the proposed law?

Can you just... download it before it becomes illegal? The wording suggests it's the importing that's illegal, not the possession. And once I possess it, I can... give it to a few of my closest friends? Without crossing any borders of course.

By my understanding, yes. But this does mean you can’t use the internet to share it, because you can’t really guarantee internet communications aren’t crossing borders.

The cat is out of the bag. Latest gen chips are all the "moat" USA has left, and even that's gonna be cracked by China in a few years.

Hopefully Europe will start closer bilateral dealing with China, and not hang itself to the future hermit kingdom of america.

Hopefully, yes. Considering the situation in Germany, Scholz was Biden's errand boy, the prospective new chancellor Merz has worked at Blackrock, even the Germany-first party AfD is led by Weidel, who is ex Goldman Sachs.

In Italy, the purportedly nationalist Meloni has caved in on all issues during the Biden administration and is now courting Trump.

There needs to be a new generation of politicians who remember the more independent days from 1970-2000.

It is a disgrace that first the US led the EU into their pet conflict in Ukraine, (deliberately) ruins EU-Russia and EU-China relations and now Trump mocks the EU, demands Greenland and EU payments to Ukraine to the tune of $200 billion.

So russia deliberately mabipulate energy prices, plans for years to invade their neighbor with purpose of annexation them and somehow it's US fault. Lol.

US have many faults and I would surely appreciate bigger independence for Europe. That's a fact.

But the rest is just made up nonsense. I wonder why your account was created only for this post, have one comment and is under two weeks old. Comrade gopnik.

Another one of the 1.3 million Ukrainians in Germany, 250000 of whom are evading military service. All of them collect social security, live in relative comfort, take our apartments and lecture us if our opinions are not approved by the U.S. State Department, Biden edition.

You do know that Trump admitted that the invasion was provoked by NATO?

schizo post more please lol

Oh another fresh new account. What a coincidence.

So the Bill is proposed by the same Hawley who was giving fist ups to the mob that was chanting for the hanging of the vice president, attacking police officers, and literally defecating and breaking the Capitol building?

oooo the forbidden linear algebra equation. Bold move, lets see how it plays out.

So does this mean we will not be able to download works like open-r1, an open reproduction of deepseek?

https://github.com/huggingface/open-r1

Am I reading the bill text wrong or is it really so general it would also apply to devices assembled in China that can perform AI operations?

Seems like there'd be pushback from Apple, MS, etc on that one.

Ah, nevermind, just saxophones:

> ... tenor processing unit...

The bill is here: https://www.hawley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Haw...

I'm reading this and it can't possibly mean what it says.

Section 3 says:

    (a) PROHIBITION ON IMPORTATION.—On and after the date that is 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the importation into the United States of artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence technology or intellectual property developed or produced in the People’s Republic of China is prohibited.

    (b) PROHIBITION ON EXPORT.—On and after the date that is 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the export, reexport, or in-country transfer of artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence technology or intellectual property to or within the People’s Republic of China is prohibited.

Note that in (a) and (b) the third part of the "or" clause is "intellectual property". It isn't qualified as (say) "artificial intelligence intellectual property".

And in Sec. 2 (6) "Intellectual property" is defined as work protected by copyright, property protected by patent, stuff which is trademarked, or trade secrets.

But any preprint on (e.g.) arxiv.org is copyrighted, hence "intellectual property" under this definition. So as written, this seems to prohibit the exchange of research in general with people in the PRC. The restrictions on AI are problematic enough, but this is just ridiculous.

This is dumb. But I guess I shouldn’t expect any better.

Someone on LinkedIn posted how “dangerous” it was that AWS was going to make DeepSeek available and hosted on Bedrock because it would give China access to data. Not understanding that if it were hosted by AWS, China wouldn’t have access to the data.

This is like this bill where he doesn’t understand that if you “download” the model, you aren’t giving China access to your data.

Funny enough, this is the kind of bill I’d expect to see in China.

China already doesn’t allow a lot of US tech companies to access their market. The EU does so with heavy restrictions and lots of fines. So denying access to American audiences only seems fair in terms of trade reciprocity. This is leaving aside the obvious national security risks of course.

I know a bunch of people that voted for Trump because they were worried government overreach had gone too far.

They are going to protect our freedom of speech by banning the little blobs of bits we use in this new method of speech. It's the most complex newspaper ever built that can talk back to you. Any attempt to describe it will almost instantly use the word "speech" or "talk" or "chat" or something else so adjacent how could you not realize this my brain is actively fighting against continuing to type this

They ain't seen nothing yet.

That would disincentive this type of research, for example:

"DeepSeek's Hidden Bias: How We Cut It by 76% Without Performance Loss" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42868271

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42891042

TIL about BBQ: Bias Benchmark for QA

"BBQ: A Hand-Built Bias Benchmark for Question Answering" (2021) https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.08193

Well if you have not banked these files already, you probably should. Bank any open model. OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta are probably behind the potential ban lol.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42904838

Badly written and likely fair to characterize it as dumb. It's probably more about the theatrics of politics than a real intent to pass such a stupid idea as a bill.

That said, there has always been a serious imbalance with China that has yet to be addressed as far as I know. This isn't a US-vs-China thing. This applies to every country in the world. In most nations around the world China is able to buy land, property, businesses, etc. The reciprocal isn't true. We could say a similar thing about intellectual property. Good luck enforcing yours in China. Entire industries in China have been built on the back of, to be kind, borrowed IP.

One could have made the argument to look the other way 40 or 50 years ago, when China was an agrarian society in need of economic help. That is no longer the case, by far. Why is it that residents or companies from western countries cannot fully own property in China in the same way as the Chinese can do everywhere else in the world?

This concept of lack of reciprocity extends into such things as data and privacy rights and ownership. Everyone knows that any service based around user data (TikTok, AI, whatever) based in China creates 100% exposure of that data to government entities, without any level of transparency or accountability --particularly if you are not Chinese and likely worse if you are.

I think it is good and likely necessary to call China to task on these issues and apply (or continue to apply) pressure for them to open the doors to reasonable levels of reciprocity. The relationship, otherwise, is decidedly one-sided, and this means that nobody will ever trust them. Why would anyone send AI queries and data to servers in China? Or use any current or future code generator offerings to work on projects? That would be, at a minimum, suicidal.

So, while this bill is bonkers, maybe it launches a conversation that might, in a few years, drive reform that could open China and Chinese services like TikTok and AI to the world without fear of use, abuse and repercussions stemming from the nature of their society and government. To be sure, I think China would benefit immensely from a greater degree of openness.

Why throw them in jail when you can just run them over with tanks then deny it ever happened?

Does anyone have a magnet link for the weights? In case it's removed from HF.

aww man, you telling me I gotta go download this huge thing now even though I don't actually care about running it myself...

(I just assume it's huge. I'm Spartacus and Spartacus doesn't really know about such things.)

Am I losing my mind, or have there been a lot of links to 404media.co recently?

If it becomes law people could just put it on hard drives and pass them around.

Trump made this big announcement, and China bitchslapped him with math :

We want it to be in this country and we're making it available. I'm going to help a lot through emergency declarations because we have an emergency. We have to get this stuff built. So, they have to produce a lot of electricity, and we'll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily at their own plants if they want, where they'll build at the plant, the AI plant, they'll build energy generation and that will be incredible.

But it's technology and artificial intelligence all made in the USA. Begin immediately, Stargate will be building the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of advancements in AI. And this will include the construction of colossal data centers, very, very massive structures. I was in the real estate business, these buildings, these are big beautiful buildings that are going to employ a lot of people and physical campuses in locations currently being scouted nationwide.

I felt like I was having a stroke while reading your comment and had to scroll back up to realize it was a Trump quote. Makes sense now.

"Being in possession of a contraband Chinese Artificial Intelligence" is honestly one of the most cyberpunk things I can imagine. I hadn't felt like I lived in the future until now, honestly.

I remember this being mentioned as the next step in the previous thread haha. It's getting old and they need to find a new slant (ode to Bryan Colangelo).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42872142

Submitted this a day ago and it got flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907234

Hawley limited power this is an attention ploy.

God, do I hate my state's politicians.

Deepseek still no.1 on App Store. How..

Where can I download it as a zip file?

I'm just amused that when Chinese products were hurting the average manufacturer in US, and the majority of goods on Amazon, Walmart, Temu, Shein are "Made in China" it is good and capitalism. When Hollywood movies or music are pirated- its just kids having fun. But dare you try to hurt tech/software companies investments or revenue streams, and politicians suddenly get patriotic and want to send you to jail for 20 years!

oooo the forbidden linear algebra equation. bd move lets see how this plays out!

the bar for proposing a stupid bill isn’t very high, but go on now take the bait

Dogshit "pick me!" bills that they introduce/sponsor for no other reason than to get the attention of corporate overlords.

Practically zero chance to get through house and senate.

And here I was thinking North Korea was the one with extreme laws on imports.

these people are majestically stupid

you need this :

https://github.com/deepseek-ai

“Import” is not the same as “download”.

pure comedy

What a steaming pile of shit from this current administration

genius

dear god this is idiotic. please no.

Pretty sure that would be considered a hostile act

Yet another egregious violation of the Bill of Rights.

We are living in strange times.

I wonder if one could get some member of the current congress to introduce a bill that proposes jailtime for the entire presidential cabinet?

It wouldn't be any more stupid than this, and would probably solve a lot more of the US's problems...

The "Life Begins At Erection" bill is some good satire by a sitting Congress person

Reply on news.ycombinator.com