Updating restrictions of sales to unsupported regions | Hacker News Reader

Updating restrictions of sales to unsupported regions

anthropic.com

34 pointsyurivish16 comments

> including adversarial nations like China—continue accessing our services in various ways [...] our commitment to ensuring that transformative AI capabilities advance democratic interests

Ah, right, China, the only country which actually releases open weight frontier models. Anthropic definitely doesn't want Chinese companies to use their APIs because of their commitment to "advance democratic interests", and not because they want to prevent them from distilling their models and releasing them for free for everyone to use. Definitely. Fortunately since this use case is already breaking the TOS I doubt any extra legal maneuvering is going to stop anyone.

And people complain the TSA is "security theater"...

Yeah, I'm sure whatever restrictions they put in place will make it so hard for Chinese entities to access their APIs.

This is simply an attempt by Anthropic to pretend to play nice with the current administration (and to be clear, I don't blame them - let's just not pretend that this actually prevents China getting access to Anthropic).

I have a feeling that China will be OK. Wouldn't these restriction protect the native LLM ecosystem and will give them room and revenues to grow? Strong internal-only competition will still make them competitive.

China can train on pirated books all day long, unlike Anthropic or other Western competitors

The 20 countries that Anthropic won't do business with:

  Afghanistan
  Belarus
  Central African Republic
  China
  Congo, Democratic Republic of 
  Cuba
  Eritrea
  Ethiopia
  Iran
  Libya
  Mali
  Myanmar
  Nicaragua
  North Korea
  Russia
  Somalia
  Sudan
  Syria
  Venezuela
  Yemen

I took their list here[1] and diff'ed it with Wikipedia's list of sovereign states.

They don't accept the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the Republic of Congo is OK. There are indeed two Congos with ridiculously similar names, and apparently the one that calls itself democratic is the bad one.

Anthropic is fine with Taiwan.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/supported-countries (They give two lists, one for API and another for Claude.ai, but the lists are identical.)

> There are indeed two Congos with ridiculously similar names, and apparently the one that calls itself democratic is the bad one.

Similar to Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and People’s Republic of China, hmm.

Before the Berlin Wall fell, East Germany, the communist side, was the German Democratic Republic.

(West Germany was the Federal Republic of Germany.)

So what is stopping anyone in principle just reselling API access through a middleman?

Should I set up the company now and rake in the billions?

I think you’ll get banned a few millions in.

> I think you’ll get banned a few millions in.

So? I'll still have those few millions.[1]

Besides, how will they know? Creating a new proxy account for every real account would make it almost impossible for Anthropic to know that someone is coming from China, only that some set of accounts (say, 100k) are coming in from a small set of IPs, but they're still paid accounts!

================

[1] The idea is probably DoA for other reasons, such as why would someone proxy through you when they can use a VPN. Or openrouter.

Yeah, sorry, that was a joke :-) In addition to Openrouter, I think big users from China can fairly easily set up a company in Singapore or something (to get volume discounts, perhaps).

> So? I'll still have those few millions.[1]

You almost certainly agree when paying for Anthropic not to do this, so they’ll sue you for those few million

My understanding is Anthropic is closed source and has been unavailable for Chinese companies for a long time, and if they wanted to use offshore entities to use closed-source LLMs, they would have gone to OpenAI...?

People who work at Alibaba (yes, the same company that released Qwen weights for free) told me that they were given access to Claude. (In a restricted environment that I presume is intended to prevent leaking too much of Alibaba's code to Anthropic.)

Alas there was no way to pause my $200 Max subscription while I'm in China for two weeks...

The Chinese who famously don’t have vpns…

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