US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks
reuters.com
reuters.com
- generating types for APIs
- generating boilerplate based on existing code
- improving existing code (adding error handling, timeouts, things like that)
- Writing SQL repository boilerplate / queries
- Creating implementations against hand written tests
- Helping me understand and implement APIs from third party libraries
- Writing documentation
I've spent like $2 in the last month and have used over 100 million tokens.
It's doubled my productivity and unlocked work that I could not have done before.
As an Australian, I'm not sure that I care about the safety of my data when it comes to LLMs. US companies already stole scores of data to train their models on and it's hard to imagine they suddenly grew some integrity. I'll care when regulators step in, until then it's out of my control so I'll just use the best price-to-productivity product available.
As a non-Australian, I enjoyed very much reading about Australia in a book by Tim Marshall titled "The Power of Geography". I didn't quite realize just how vulnerable they become with China's ambitions and expanse in the South Pacific due to their reliance on vital sea lanes for trade with its Asian partners. After reading that book, I can appreciate your comment much more.
Economic safety is 1 angle of national security. They're not "wrong".
Unless you need enterprise multi-model management, I don't see the point in OpenRouter as it just adds cost overhead and you can just self-host an open router alternative (LiteLLM, Bifrost, etc). Running an LLM gateway locally is kind of nice as it allows you to normalize your configurations against your internal gateway - but I haven't really needed to.
> As an Australian, I'm not sure that I care about the safety of my data when it comes to LLMs. US companies already stole scores of data
Also, isn't Australia in a more contentious situation with China? Them being more allied with the US and all? Not to mention the whole nuclear sub issue. Having data stolen is shitty either way but isn't data taken by an adversarial country a worse situation?
> Having data stolen is shitty
Fun fact: Deepseek can be hosted by third parties even yourself.
https://youtu.be/sgspkxfkS4k?si=JgnhenF0qeTZXeGS basically explains the situation.
While having data/code stolen isn't ideal, there is a certain point where you need to assume it's already out there. There's actually more probability of harm from shady US companies imo, because people are less suspicious about data sovereignty
In actual personal practice, no. China having my data presents no actual impact to me, America will do things that impact me.
China is mostly interested in geopolitical stuff and getting an economic advantage, plus they have no jurisdiction in the US. Your data in the hands of the US government however could potentially land you in prison.
China has been far more beneficial to Australia by comparison, with the downside being the encroaching influence of CCP propaganda. Many of our strengths are tied to our relationships with Southeast Asia.
Paul Keating has famously declared US as an "aggressive ally", "our colonial masters", AUKUS as our "worst international decision", and that "our future is in Southeast Asia". This was under Biden too.
So the situation is much more complicated, and the feelings on the ground right now is that the US are not our friends (of course, the CCP is not great either).
c.f. Kim Dotcom
There are much better examples to use to showcase the US's extrajudicial/international reach than this guy.
Yeah but is that a jailable offense though? What about his freedom of speech?
Or should we just lock up everyone who says things we don't like?
The godly person, doing no wrong, that through unfortunate circumstances, is brought before the court does not advance our understanding of a law.
It's the messiest case, by unscrupulous persons, in unconscionable circumstances that ultimately decide if the execution of that law gives the public more or less rights than on initial interpretation.
Also, not sure how anyone except bad actors or sloppy readers could have gotten that I was defending the US here instead of criticizing using Kim Dotcom as an example in characterizing the US's actions.
It is inconsequential if the US or China have my data, both will misuse it and I am powerless to protect myself from that fact.
Not using LLMs presents a bigger threat to my career than protecting my data.
> If I spoke freely about how I feel about the US right now
> It is inconsequential if the US or China have my data
But the main point is really that 2 > 1. 1 country scraping your data is bad. 2 is worse.
Yet you voted for it
And even with our westminster system, One nation has swept the right wing. Considering how many seats they will likely get in the next election, my high horse has shrunk a fair bit.
Do you support everything the Klingon Empire does? That doesn't seem like the Worf I know. The Worf I know can distinguish the people of a civilization from the leaders of their societies. To conflate them just creates the problems you are criticizing
But you turn a democracy into a dictatorship through tribalism. So forgive me if I get mad at you trying to place me into a nice well defined box. You're helping erode the democracy I (and so many others) desperately want to maintain (and improve).
What would Worf do?
I'm certain he wouldn't have done what you did
I have friends in blue states who didn't vote because it wouldn't have changed the outcome given the electoral college - it's unfair to blame them for not participating as they were never able to in the first place.
Not that democrats are angels. You guys are damned if you're blue / (extra) damned if you're red - given the state of both options.
I appreciate that you're doing what you can
So, by their own metric, they aren't helpless at all and should appreciate other countries aren't as savage as they are with civilians, instead of complaining.
Whereas, China does not ask for my social network logins, or for me to be pre-approved to travel there. So that is unlikely to be affected.
Given what happened January 6th the unsettling truth is the USA is essentially an occupied nation.
China does not run 'rendition flights' to kidnap other countries' citizens and hold them in gitmo style prisons for decades. China cannot compel and does not compel random countries to extradite foreign citizens to China to persecute them and lock them up. Guess who does.
If you expanded the list to very hard research tasks, Fable was so far ahead of the others that it doesn't even deserve debate. If you are a researcher doing something involving scientific computation or mathematics that wasn't rejected by the guard rails, and you were using Fable, that week was probably your most productive week ever. A couple of my PhD students effectively finished their current projects in that period by getting Fable to chew on it for 30 hours straight (not sure how I feel about that).
Experience allows you to design the skeleton where the implementation details are often inconsequential. There are relatively few scenarios where an LLM would need more guidance to render an outcome, but even dumb local models can do that.
Building a simple UI component vs an efficient multi-threaded bidirectional socket implementation (both examples of things I did recently with DeepSeek flash).
Angular can only be written in one way so the UI was trivial. I know the architecture for the socket implementation and the trade offs for various approaches, so I sketch out the implementation and get DeepSeek to complete it (error handling, keepalive messages, timeouts, etc).
I don't think I would have saved much time if I just asked Fable to "make the socket implementation" but even if it got it right the first time, it would have only saved me a few minutes given that's how long it took to write any way.
Even in more conventional applications, Node.js / React CRUD applications - "write a graphql query for blah" "add an endpoint to run query" "add validation to endpoint" are all trivial for DeepSeek flash. In most of these cases, I have found you're constrained by context window size because these are rarely well architected applications.
Expanding on this thought a little more: it is possible to set up scaffolding that make incorrect implementations inconsequential. If the LLM can detect when the implementation is wrong, it can retry with the errors feeding back into the loop. This is shored up by up-front investments in tests, API definitions, strong types, linting rules, etc. the various cheap, fast Flash models do not need to 1-shot solutions if capable of autonomous reiteration.
I have had great success with contract driven development workflows in this regard.
LLMs being effectively very knowledgeable jr engineers, slot right into those patterns.
Another interesting thing is that Rust _really_ shines with LLMs. The compiler gives very helpful messages which the LLM bounces off very effectively. If it compiles, it works, you just need to double check the logic is correct.
By contrast, with something like Go, you'd need to be on the lookout for nil pointers, race conditions and so on. Node.js / TypeScript is less dangerous, but you still have memory leaks that aren't possible in Rust and lack pattern matching so must be vigilant about type discohesion.
"Well, don't use an AI for those purposes!"
That used to be true (and is now again true I suppose). Fable was a peek at something different, it seemed to be actually able to start to tackle these kinds of problems. That saves a lot of time, since checking these programs is often far, far easier than writing them. Experience is needed to check and scaffold still, but something like Fable becomes a prerequisite for these settings.
What fraction of your work is "interesting problems", and what field do you work in?
> If you’re doing generic web dev work, probably not the case
I have a feeling the bulk of most people's work is "generic $X work." My take is people should figure out their mix of interesting vs boring work, and optimize accordingly. Flash models also tend to much faster,
UltraSpeed will change how you think about agentic coding.
> I would say to push frontier of human knowledge forwards.
Not sure if this is what you meant, but to be clear: pushing human knowledge forward is a practical prerequisite of a PhD (given it's pretty hard to convince people you're adequately trained to do such a thing without actually demonstrating it), but it's not the value of the PhD itself. The value is producing a researcher -- that is, someone who has the skills to continue accomplishing this in the future.
The difference is that if you happen to expand human knowledge by a stroke of dumb luck (or smart AI...) without actually having acquired skills to continue doing so in the future, then you're not really earning a PhD.
I'm kicking myself for not using Fable more while I had it. Now that I've used fable, I'm not sure I even want opus any more. It might be more efficient in the medium term to just program everything myself until I have access to a similarly capable model.
I feel like Deepseek, opus, etc are only good at problems that have already been solved 100 times on github. They're like the iPhone 3G. Its exciting they exist at all. But subsequent versions make them seem like cheap junk.
I recently discovered though that ChatGPT 5.5 Pro is almost as smart but only available to me via the ChatGPT app. I’ve been having it read my code and having Opus 4.8 use the ChatGPT app to collaborate. It’s a step down but its a temporary stopgap for complex problems.
Do you have an example?
Game development is usually in C++ or C#. With C++, bugs are a nightmare to find. C# less so, but there are still memory leaks possible.
I've been writing Rust for a few years now and it has been absolutely phenomenal. I get the performance of C++ and the only thing I think about when developing is the logic itself.
There aren't any mature game engines that use Rust (Bevy is rapidly improving, but it's no Unreal/Unity) - though you can compile Rust to a dll so it can be consumed by Unreal/Unity.
Due to the language constraints of Rust, I have found that LLMs need to work _way_ less to figure out bugs and render out code. The compiler gives very specific error messages and if it compiles, it works.
When we started getting access to Claude last year, it was barely competent at C++. Like someone who read a book about C++ but never actually wrote any, or had to debug any issue. It would confidently declare things which any C++ programmer could tell you were bollocks straight away.
But....now it's able to reason about things like memory management, thread safety and second order effects when multithreading very very very well. It's honestly incredible how well it can understand C++ code and figure things out. Opus is already pretty good(although far from perfect) but Fable was just something else. I could give it a description like "It was reported that only sometimes(1/20 repro) when the user opens the inventory and closes it, they can't move the camera afterwards" and it was able to find out both the inventory camera control and input code and pinpoint the exact race condition that could lead to this situation.
Open weights models are only 4.5 months behind closed weight ones.
The fact that US considers propping its flagship technology by blacklisting competitors demonstrates how small the US competitive advantage really is.
Edward Snowden says hello.
You have a wide choice of providers available, so if you can find one you trust you can get inference without data harvesting and it's still very cheap. But dedicated HW is insanely inefficient.
Opus estimates you can do it for $13k/month if you get committed pricing on the HW.
Can you be specific about what data of yours were stolen by who?
I use it via claude code, just pointing the api to deepseek.
It's also not a clear "Opus 4.8 >> DS 4 Pro", I've done 16 tasks in 4 days across the two, and while Opus was indeed on average better, both models performed well being able to handle most of my workload.
In fact DeepSeek was _significantly_ better on 3 task out of 16 and Opus was _significantly_ better only in 2 out of 16.
So why I still claim Opus 4.8 to be the winner? Because the few times that DS failed or got off the rails, it failed much harder and needed several prompts to be realigned on the actual tasks.
Another thing at which Deepseek is significantly behind is code reviewing. Opus is more intelligent/thorough, Deepseek will sometimes generate bogus or low quality feedback.
And the last thing at which Opus is better, period, is vibe coding. If you want to implement features end-to-end it handles ultracode flows quite better. I don't vibe code at work, but I do so with personal projects.
But the cost concern is real. I've spent sub 2$ in 5 days of work using DS 4 Pro, which is on average just 4 queries to Anthropic.
Give me a slightly better DS 4 (it is still in preview and training isn't finished) and I may ditch Anthropic for good.
I alternate between Opus 4.8 and DS 4. If I remove my Anthropic subscription I will get GLM 5.2 in place of it.
The CLOUD act, FISA rulings, the Snowden leaks, and now the aggressive tech oligarch push to weaponize the unholy combination of AI, MAGA, and social media algorithms in an absurd and patently obvious attempt to impose (or maintain?) "world domination" seems likely to cement their downfall.
"Authoritarian" China's low-cost and open source approach looks downright democratic by comparison.
It seems increasingly clear to me that AI is forcing a reckoning in terms of how we interpret authority and control in light of new ways that information is evolving. The old political labels seem grossly insufficient to describe the present reality and the ones whining about "democracy", "freedom", and "liberal values" increasingly sound (and act) like bitter, out of touch old men desperately clinging onto a world that is rapidly outgrowing them.
Last time I checked, the closest approximation of liberal values are "liberty, equality, fraternity". They seem to think that "liberty" should only apply to them, "equality" is a threat to their consolidated power, and "fraternity" is something that should be weaponized to turn communities against one another to distract from the ways the oligarchs have been and continue to abuse and consolidate their power.
AFAIK the Chinese AI companies barely depend on US goods and services, except for nVidia GPUs which were export restricted anyway, so it doesn't seem to be very consequential (see Z.ai). For the RAM maker CXMT it could be a lot more problematic though.
those export restrictions are a joke. when they were introduced, there was a sudden spike in NVIDIA GPU exports to surrounding Asian countries. and the US government knows this
CXMT memory maker will not be banned, because US AI labs are salivating at the idea of more RAM supply, and are lobbying hard to prevent restrictions
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/us-charges-three-people-with-c...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/taiwan-investigates...
There is no single "it", the Singapore loophole is well known, and nothing has been done about it. Except by China, once , when it blocked the sale of Manus to Meta, even though on paper, Manus is a Singaporean enterprise.
So RAM chip makers when there's a RAM shortage must be 'contrary to U.S. national security and/or foreign policy interests' i.e. the US government is trying to squeeze its citizens on RAM prices.
Nice.
Only in a world where the other party has no agency. In real life the other party raises prices on their exports to compensate for the supply chain disruption and they still get the items.
Ultimately the consumer pays more, the extra goes the government, and the net impact is just obfuscated taxation and a reduction in both supply and demand that's bad for the economy and other living things.
Its also worth noting we don't really have free markets in the US anyway.
That entirely depends on what is meant by the term. Markets that are largely free appear (IMO) to have won out worldwide quite some time ago.
We have a lot of government intervention in markets today. From subsidies to tax incentives to regulations and import tariffs, markets are much more controlled than it seems on the surface.
“Capitalism” is (as a result of propaganda by its defenders after it was named and accurately described by its socialist critics) often mistaken for a dedication to free trade, but capitalism is a regime characterized first and foremost by society being organized around the interests of the capital-holding class, the first of which is the preservation of the situation in which society is organized around the interests of that class. The reasons companies are put on the Entity List is because they are broadly seen as a threat (long-term or immediate) to the continuation of that regime. That’s what the “foreign policy and national security interests” that form the official basis of the Entity List ultimately, generally, boil down to, in one way or another.
(They don’t always boil down to that, because why the US is basically a capitalist system, it is not purely one, and even in a more pure capitalist regime, individual influential decision-makers may have other interests that they act on besides the implementation and preservation of capitalism that end up getting reflected in policy.)
e.g. the Investigative Report on the U.S. National Security Issues Posed by Chinese Telecommunications Companies Huawei and ZTE report from 2012:
https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:rm226yb7473/Huawei-ZT...
From that point forward, that concern has only grown. So you can view these actions as screaming "we were only for the free market until there was no competition" but if you want to genuinely know the answer to your question, the publicly stated concern is "China is a national security threat"
I'm sure there's a ton of other abuses they've committed as they race to become China's preferred LLM.
Come again how these laws are promoting useful results? They seem to be economically crippling. The free world should consider embracing freedom from these laws as it seems that will bring greater prosperity.
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...
Even if both groups did exactly the same thing, it would be irrational for the US to not bias itself in favor of its own businesses.
The primary goal is growth of wealth and power for the country, and close loopholes whereby enemy nations steal even more from America.
Now you are saying that stealing IP was never the problem, and actually the issue is anything that stands in the way of the US gaining wealth and power.
DeepSeek did the same thing the american companies did on a much smaller scale.
They took the output of one company and trained a model.
American companies took the output of all IP they could illegally* acquire and trained a model.
The world does need protection from abusers, you're right.
EDIT: illegal in some cases (see 82TB of torrented ebooks), immoral in most.
Even during the Cold War, American farms were heavily subsidized. The abundant supermarkets were not a product of free markets, they were a propaganda piece.
Today the US is pretty far from being a free market. Tax deductions are subsidies. Industry subsidies fund things on the front end, and bailouts are essentially subsidies after the fact.
And on top of that there are plenty of (good and bad) regulations which distort the market. For example it is illegal to import foreign insulin even if it would be cheaper. In most parts of US metro areas it is illegal to build multifamily housing.
1. the EV tax credit, and
2. carbon credits
so the richest man in the world/the US had significant tailwinds for a central business venture of his via either directly taking money from the government, or taking money from other companies due to the government requiring they give him money.
The US has abundant supermarkets to this day. It was overwhelmingly a product of the market economy and remains so. The US has between 45,000 and 75,000 supermarkets (75,000 if you include supercenter stores that also sell groceries). That's not counting smaller specialty food stores.
It's a product of consumer spending capacity (net disposable income), of which the US has an enormous amount and has for over a century relative to other nations.
On the demand side, the US spends about $100B on SNAP (food stamps) and another $40B on subsidies for WIC (women infants children) and school lunches.
On the supply side, the US is currently directly subsidizing farms $20B and giving disaster relief to the tune of another $30B.
If you want to imagine how well the free market in the US would do, just think about what would happen if Congress cut off those funds.
So these people should just starve?
The insulin example I agree is non-free. More generally the entire medical sector is only somewhat free. However I'm not sure that's a bad thing given the stakes and the history of the free market as it applies to healthcare. The medical establishment itself is an only barely disguised guild system after all.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/free-market?q=free+market
> an economic system in which prices and wages are determined by unrestricted competition between businesses, without government regulation or fear of monopolies.
By definition, free markets do not have government regulation. If you have an alternative definition of “free market” please feel free to share it.
For a market to be stable, fair, and free of monopolies government intervention is required. I don't think that fact is at all controversial. So already the definition you've quoted there has, if read literally, set up a scenario that is impossible to realize.
A free market is one where regulations are broad and are applied to the players evenly. A subsidy that applies to a sector as a whole (ex solar panels) is an example of such.
Many of the agricultural subsidies are much more targeted than that. However the regulator needs to maintain the stability of the entire system as a whole, and to that end food is not some luxury good that can be subject to shortages without major consequences. A tradeoff has to be made, either for more market regulation or significantly less market stability. Market participants in danger of starvation not known for exhibiting reasonable, well thought out behavior.
Similar to free speech, the free market is better seen as a vague guiding ideal rather than an absolute and objective description of a system. It's illegal in the US to make credible threats of violence towards someone. Can that fact be taken on its own to mean that we don't enjoy freedom of speech?
If I define a “two legged stool” you can’t add a third leg just because two legs is unstable and doesn’t lead to good outcomes. Whether a market with no government regulation is stable or leads to good outcomes does not change the definition.
You are referring to a “mixed economy” which has some markets and some regulations. A mixed economy is more stable because it is able to reduce market failures like monopolies and externalities that free markets cannot escape.
When people talk about a free market they aren't referring to some logically contradictory thought experiment. It is something that they actually wish to strive for in practice. Thus it is clear that some amount of regulation must necessarily be involved.
This is quite similar to freedom of speech, as I previously mentioned. The concept itself is an abstract ideal and the context of the law matters.
What you are referring to is a laissez-faire market which as history has repeatedly shown doesn't remain a free one for long. An adjacent comment pointed to property rights as an example. You can have a free real estate market without having a laissez-faire approach to property rights, yet the government involvement in that case is extremely heavy handed. The free speech analogy might be a city controlled by the mob where the government won't intervene but saying certain things will still get you killed.
I agree with you that in practice the US is a mixed economy, but then I already acknowledged that (among other things) our farm subsidies are highly targeted and the medical sector is regulated in a very invasive manner. However I do not agree with your suggestion that eliminating monopolies makes a market mixed. A monopolized market is not a free one because there is no competition.
It is. Government intervention is what creates monopolies, because economic value stops being the ultimate metric that decides which enterprise is profitable over another; because it favours one entity over another, large corporations are not valued on their financials alone, but on the strength of their political connections - which in turn enables lobbying as an effective tool.
The entire premise of free markets is that the market is the ultimate judge of value. If you add the government and its heavy hand on the scale to the mix, it is no longer a free market. It’s pretty simple.
The question is "how much" rather than a binary consideration. With the size of the government in most countries, we are way past what would be considered a marginal influence.
For that matter, does (only) NVIDIA make datacenter cards? When I buy a gaming card, I dont buy from NVIDIA, I buy from an integrator, like Gigabyte, who work with a company like Foxconn to make the cards.
Basically, those export controls make GPUs more expensive for affected parties in China, but don't effectively stop them from being acquired or used over there.
Nvidia has downgraded chips that aren’t banned. H100 is banned, H800 is allowed. A100 is banned, A800 is allowed. But the sale has a tariff attached.
That’s all how it’s supposed to work. In practice companies probably circumvent the restrictions.
I didn’t ask about h100 or others but can’t see why they wouldn’t have.
That said, I think the goal is more to make it harder to buy thousands of GPUs and stand up a cluster like big US labs do.
Ex-colleague of mine told me he used to work for this company in UAE (he told me this story 15+ years ago, so he worked there even before that). He said it took him months of working there before he discovered that their entire business was evading US sanctions against Iran-they’d order servers/etc from the US, tell the US vendor they were for use locally in UAE, then ship them straight across the Gulf. The UAE government presumably knew this was happening but chose to turn a blind eye; the US government likely did too, but struggled to tell which orders/purchasers were legitimate and which were sanctions-evaders, plus likely was worried about enforcement action causing issues in the US-UAE diplomatic relationship.
I’m sure there are similar businesses out there who specialise in evading US sanctions on China.
In theory, the whole chain has to comply. And if you don't you get fined etc. So the local reseller would risk not be able to resell.
This is a complete joke. The malicious clowns behind this should be removed from power and prevented from ever holding any position of power in any form of governance system.
Video selfies and government document upload on hardware attested phones, of course.
Gonna be interesting to see how the ecosystem looks like 2-3 years, I'd be expecting some drastic changes compared to today.
As a fellow wheel reinventer, I admire their audacity. It's the sort of thing that makes me wish my country was like China.
I admire their governance ability to have long term plans.
The sheer scale of their production ambitions in so many fields and their energy build out is insane.
The fact those plans also have subclauses ensuring the party elite are made even more wealthy and powerful is less alluring.
Our oligarchs do that too and all we get in return is declining infrastructure and paranoia.
You are, of course, right. All of the downsides with none of the benefits.
In which major democratic western country don't the elites get wealthier? In fact, the top 10% asset owners saw the biggest post-covid recovery, which the rest stagnated or are in decline. Not defending China but are own oligarchs are just as savvy at enriching themselves while screwing us over.
Reading about Thiel's "Dialog" meeting, I wonder, do China have their own equivalent of such blatant corruption meetings?
Even if they do, do they discuss "compliance collars" for the security guards in those meetings? I have a feeling they don't.
The future the Chinese elite wants to own, at least seems to include us as something other than a zombie army at the gates of their post apocalyptic bunkers. That's a low bar I know, and not much to be hopeful about, but our elites aren't even meeting it.
GPU's are still a fair way behind with Moore Threads S80 being a better example of their high end. I suspect they have some major driver issues because they current benchmark far below what that silicon should be able to do. https://en.mthreads.com/product/S80
There is also the pressure to have them innovate on older process nodes so they can make this stuff domestically. For instance Huawei is doing what they call 'logic folding' which is basically just stacking dies in a way that ends up reducing the overall size of chip features. Not sure how it addresses thermals but it is a cool idea.
Sorry this article is a bit of LLM rubbish but you get the point - https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/huawei-logic-folding-moores-la...
China is hungry and that is driving them to take these moon shots, they may just make it.
PR China is still pretty poor (around 31k$ gdp per capita adjusted for purchasing power) and its growth has lost a bit of steam recently.
You should wish your country to be more like Taiwan or South Korea. Or Singapore.
My country is currently at about a third of that.
Total fertility rate for all of those countries is close to 1.0, including China's. They are dying societies.
You might want to compare Singapore with a city like NYC or London, not with a territorial state. It's pretty normal around the world for cities to be replenished mainly by people moving in.
(Of course, to be fair you then also need to compare GDP per capita against other cities. And they usually do a lot better than territorial countries that include a lot of hinterland.)
Singapore was and is build on the back of immigrants. Replacing ourselves with kids instead of immigrants would be the big change.
No this is a non-sequitur.
Low fertility only means that the affected society grows smaller. This is only equivalent to "slow death" when it persists for centuries until the society is actually dead.
Sadly it appears the current US administration is also determined to undo any progress by minorities over the centuries.
Is it competitive enough? Probably no. Is there a software ecosystem for Chinese hardware yet? Probably no. But you know it will come soon.
It can happen to anyone
That's what Cloudflare will be for.
Depends on who has their ears in terms creating policies around technology.
Without that you are not using Claude 10. It would not be shocking at all at some level of capability that running open source models anonymously is made a crime.
To pretend there is not huge issues with a laissez faire attitude as these models progress I think is intellectually dishonest and performative.
> It's just so strange how you become the thing you fear.
What is this referring to?
Hah, if only. Then at least it would see some of the benefits too. Instead, it's making sure to only copy all of the downsides, with zero of the upsides.
So I hate to break it to you but you're not fighting powers-that-be who are just bumbling around and decided to randomly be like China one day. You're fighting powers-that-be who did the analysis and decided that being like China was the right way to go, for the good of everyone, and they backed it up with math and logic. You're going to need math and logic to convince them otherwise.
Not at all. If they decided to be like China, then that would include the benefits. They're nothing like China. Xi isn't siphoning hundreds of billions to his personal account through $XI coin. He isn't giving the reigns of the country to his tech CEO buddies. He isn't destroying scientific institutions and looting the country for personal gain.
I hate to break it to you but this is the kind of surfacelevel comparison that doesn't hold up when considered for more than 2 seconds.
But again, they are not deciding to be like china, which implies a degree of competency and care for the population. This is just corruption.
The propaganda about ourselves we sold the world has been much more effective than the rights we've been sold ourselves. I would prefer material rights and competent governance to either "freedom" (whatever the hell that refers to) or the ability to buy guns we're barely allowed to use.
> There maybe some backsliding or ppl may think things are worsening in the US
If you're phrasing this as "maybe" and "may think", you're not here to have a serious discussion.
https://www.army.mil/article/286317/army_launches_detachment...
You can try to pry Qwen and Deepseek from my Graphene/Linux hands.
I lived in China for a bit years ago and one the biggest issues accessing western websites weren't restrictions against the site. Most of the times the culprit was using CDNs or services from Google or Cloudflare which were restricted totally or partially.
I was working on a site around that time, learned about that fixed it for the chinese user base, after that users from china went up considerably.
Disclosure: I’m an IBMer
[0] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ns1-connect?topic=started-manage...
And given Proton CEO's support of the US administration (specifically for Vance), I chose to cancel my subscription of 3 years with them.
I pay for 2 servers running in Asia under Alibaba, using my local CVS drugstore. Im in the Midwest USA. Not a single problem at all.
I can then pay my Alibaba server bills with Alipay.
The cash doesn’t go directly from CVS to AliPay, right?
Thanks (to all!).
You can just have them charge your CC directly whenever you make a payment? Or is this blocked for US cards somehow?
The next step of course will be to get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers. Which will also be defended because "I would never trust an American Lab".
If I had the cash, I'd spend 6-10k on a strix halo with 128 GB and run it local with no internet connection. I think the Framework desktop is sold out but there were others seem to be still available.
Given that you're big on data and don't like emotions, what have the Chinese materially done to us Europeans we ought to care about?
But free AI models or something, right?
Which, I agree with you btw, I don't like but I can understand rationally. We still buy oil and gas from Russia too. And with 20% of the world's supply casually going offline after America's own 3 day special miltary operation the Chinese would be insane not to.
What one cannot understand rationally to come back to the Snowden era in which Denmark spied on us in Germany on behalf of the US, which is insane to begin with, is being threatened a decade later with annexation of their territory. China is on some fronts a rival, hence the tension around Russia, but the US is as destabilizing and unpredictable for the world as Russia itself now.
Americans truly seem to have no concept that they're in the middle of their own post-Soviet meltdown and look like a rogue state to the world now, which makes China which is no saint more and more attractive simply by being a source of order.
You think China doesn't get its hands dirty because of some moral superiority? The country is utterly brutal towards its own citizens, what makes you think that the lack of warmongering is anything but inability?
The US has a long history of protecting individual freedoms, China does not. There's an irony that you're aware of the misgivings of the US because we have free speech protections. You're probably less aware of the misgivings of the EU because they regularly arrest citizens for speech, and no awareness of the issues with China because they'll just disappear journalists in the night.
The fact that you are unable to answer this question about China where it is often unclear why certain people are being targeted should demonstrate how big the gap is. For example, when Xi's first corruption crackdown happened, it turned out that it was being orchestrated in part by someone in their 90s who had left front-line politics twenty years ago (and much of why that happened is unclear, we are only just learning about things that happened in Chinese politics multiple decades ago so it will be a while before we know...we do know that Xi was then able to make unilateral sweeping changes to his own role shortly after that broke every convention of the last 5 decades)...it is difficult to compare this to anything that happens in any other political system. In China, you find out someone has been executed for reasons that are obviously not explicit months after it has happened.
It is genuinely quite difficult to compare to anything else. 6 people meet in a room, they have almost all the power, and maybe you will read about what they might have said 4 decades later in a book...that will never be published in China.
You can't be serious.
Was the individual freedom of those 120 Iranian girls protected?
Was the individual freedom of Renée Good protected? Alex Pretti?
This is a dumb take. You're starting with "I don't take their threats seriously" and conflating it with "it didn't happen at all". But it did happen.
> The Trump administration threatened military action to take control of Greenland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_crisis#Annexation_th...
What China did in Tibet is closer to what the U.S. did with Hawaii.
What is modern China has only existed for 100 years or so. When the country collapsed there were ethnic divisions that were erased after the country was unified.
The hallmark of successful ethnic cleansing is people claiming that there were never any wars, that things were always this way. The same is true of Kaliningrad, the most German city, centuries of history as a leading nation within Germany and the HRE, now a completely Russian city. It is only in the West that you see any narrative around division, in places like China or Russia history is erased (and how could it be any other way, the cornerstone of Chinese politics is one nation, one people...there is no political value in this narrative in Western countries).
USA and its vassals can.
I am always completely baffled by these comments that not only get basic facts wrong but appear unable to conceive of a situation where the everything is subordinate to the state.
There is no negotiation, there is no due process, you give access to everything before you start or you can't operate.
This system in action is best demonstrated during the lock-down period of COVID, when any random dude who contracted the virus would immediately have their personal life for the previous week/month published nationwide to the hour, and those who have overlap will immediately get a 14 day lock-down at home.
I have not seen surveillance done with such ease and breath elsewhere. And local PD already have access to such info, and there are scandals where police sell such info for profit.
Americans you wanted isolation - you’re gonna get it eventually!
I'm also confused how China managed to convince so many US VC's to spend an insane amount on a technology with "no moat". China exporting cheap AI hurts American hyperscalars. But it doesn't induce the behavior in American hyperscalars that causes them to be vulnerable to cheap AI. It seems kind of patronizing to point the finger at China, rather than acknowledge the American (potential) misallocation of resources.
The same tactic is in the USA. Like every new AI datacenter has ~10 tax waiver + explicit subsidies + favorable loans, etc, etc.
If china anointed one company per sector, they would have no reason to be so cost competitive globally. There would be no structural cause for Chinese products to outcompete the rest of the world. You can see some of this in the US, where these kinds of anointed companies exist (say e.g. Boeing/other defense contractors, at least post the 90's). They are (famously) not particularly cost competitive. This is also exactly what you'd expect economically.
Their Barbarous Wastes
Right, and if "The West" wants people to defend them, they better get in on the free action too.
In fact, they have no choice - tokens are soon going to be a commodity, if they aren't already. Most everyone is going to be happy paying 1/20th of the cost for 80% of the value.
Oh, yeah, before I forget, hear the worlds smallest violin, playing for those token suppliers in "The West" whose repeatedly stated goal is to replace human knowledge workers...
This is the beginning end of the hyperscaler era, not a shift from US hyperscalers to Chinese hyperscalers. Taking Nvidia's extremely lucrative market is the goal.
Perhaps the question should instead be "Why are these Western AI companies getting insane valuations on dubious ROI, and how can these Chinese models run on a fraction of the infrastructure?"
I feel like that is way over simplified. I do not trust the American government. I do not trust the Chinese government. As an American, I believe the Chinese government has a longer and broader history of stealing intellectual property and far less checks and balances than the American government. The current American administration will be gone soon and maybe we can get some sanity back at some point. Overall, I trust my data in America more than China and I think that's reasonable. I am not naive. I'm aware of all the problems with my country and am quite vocal about it. In fact, I think it would be naive to think that the Chinese government won't have complete access to everything that goes through a Chinese server.
We are in full agreement on your second point.
From what perspective? The American colonies repeatedly and flagrantly ignored foreign property and intellectual rights, e.g. via laws to protect domestic but not foreign authors. Samuel Slater was called Slater the Traitor in Britain for a reason.
Although that might become "was" given the recent shift in US politics, where the Republican party of big-government has been heavily taxing Americans with tariffs [1], nationalizing US companies [2][3], and commanding the manufacture of specific goods [4].
______
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_policy
[1] https://thinkinthemorning.com/trumps-great-leap-backward/
[2] https://www.cato.org/commentary/yes-trump-just-nationalized-...
[3] https://time.com/7313446/trump-seizing-private-companies/
[4] https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/17/politics/trump-weapons-iran-d...
They probably just used 100000000 free plans.
More explicitly: if the Chinese can get near-leading performance models at a fraction of the cost by stealing from Anthropic, why doesn't OpenAI? Lord knows they could use the extra cash.
The only way this is funny is if you are completely oblivious to how China usually operates.
https://arxiv.org/html/2502.01013v1
few of em actually
Step one of this was perhaps DeepSeek's incredibly low cache hit pricing ($0.0036/M) which no-one else seems to be able to match.
These open weights models are also hosted outside of the US and China. That's a very important difference.
are you implying there is a US-based, third-party provider of xiaomi devices, BYD cars?
or are you just referring to hosted providers of those AI models?
Well, I'm unsure if it's a correct form of expression in English, but in my native language ellipses can often serve to express speaker/writer feeling of uncertainty about something or some kind of sadness/apathy/similar towards the situation being discussed. It's not about some "obvious thing you should get", sorry for misunderstanding.
> or are you just referring to hosted providers of those AI models?
Yes I am. I was not talking about BYD or Xiaomi; I think I focused too much on AI because that's the main topic in discussion here. That was my mistake and I apologize for that.
"American AI is already trillions of USD underwater, so let's use US gov to build us a moat by making competition illegal"
One company, multiple models, Fireworks is the fasts at making the models available (had GLM-5.2 before the other three we are evaluating)
As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China was going to make sure that no US company was going to "own" AI. It is an issue of national security. It's why the US essentially blocks US tech companies to maintain sovereignty.
I'm reminded of the browser wars of the 1990s that led to the antitrust suit against Microsoft. Microsoft used the "commoditize your complement" strategy [1] against Netscape. The US has blocked the export of not only EUV lithography but high-end chips to China. China doesn't want to be dependent on US platforms or policy.
So China is going to make sure there are open source models available and the US government is going to try and stop them to protect US tech companies.
The reason why some Capital Interests don’t want to ban DeepSeek is so companies that utilize AI have more options, and running your own DeepSeek cluster acts as an independent cost comparison for enterprise inference contracts.
The raising AI valuation is giving more weight to those that want to blacklist DeepSeek. The AI Safety narrative is strong. I see a path where any institution with enough compute might be watched in a similar was chem labs are observed by the DEA.
banning deepseek/open weight models will allow Ant/OAI jack up prices and extract more profits for themselves
keeping open weights models available will keep current industry profit distribution where majority is captured by nvidia and cloud providers
With the Chinese manufacturing capacity, how long do you think this will remain true for? You can't spin up a fab in a year, that's true, but you can in five years, at which point all the protectionism in the world isn't going to help.
if China starts making cheap GPUs for the entire globe, I will say THANK YOU and will continue my work on AI.
The collaborative nature of open-source (free software) is the ultimate good that benefits entire humanity. I value that more than any other benefit of protecting any company.
How much I care about Nvidia or OpenAI market cap? absolutely zero
How much I care about the poor, but smart and creative people on Earth being able to contribute to the state of the art of AI development? 100% more.
It sounds right, but I see zero evidence of this. I think you underestimate how many people in the current administration are True Believers. This does not, to me, seem like anything to do with Big Capital, but rather "America over China".
Before anyone starts talking about the free market, there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.
Unilateral surrender in a core aspect of statecraft, which involves maintaining our industrial power and skilled labor force, is absolutely insane. I hope my government never gets convinced by market fundamentalist idiots to do such a thing, any more than it already has, to our great detriment.
The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.
Yeah, that was the argument against Japanese car makers, too.
A shitty system needs destroying sometimes. Competition from Toyota/Honda was critical in making US auto makers up their game.
It is terrible public policy to fall decades behind making expensive shitty versions of what the rest of the world has.
It's just that it's wrong.
We need a competent industrial policy and support for skilled labor and policies that encourage domestic production.
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but our country has become fucked, overwhelmed by financialization, scams, monopoly rents and extraction, and all of the wealth accumulating to a handful of people, while we've become less resilient and, at this point, almost certainly have lost our place as the most dominant economy and industrial power in the world.
Yes!
But "tariff/ban BYD" is not that.
But it's an essential first step to prevent our audio industry from just being summarily destroyed. Other steps are also needed to encourage domestic manufacturing and homegrown successes.
Also, I'm not sure why this is even controversial. Why do you think there's BMW and Hyundai plants in the American South? Tariffs are already heavily employed by us and every other industrialized country.
From 2020 onwards, the Chinese government began phasing out its EV subsidy program. This policy shift came just as the country entered a price war, led by aggressive pricing from giants like BYD and Tesla. The combination of reduced state support and brutal price competition proved fatal for many underfunded startups.
https://evboosters.com/ev-charging-news/400-chinese-ev-compa...
Google gives away their search and Gmail for free, don't you know? So it can't possibly be a monopoly.
And so on. It's just propaganda. It's bullshit. That's not the way that you determine whether firms have excess market power, and this fraud (called "the consumer welfare standard") was the deliberate choice of right-wing policymakers who were bent on dismantling antitrust policies and succeeded.
More: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-secret-plot-to-unleas...
I feel like you're conflating two things here. The "consumer welfare standard" was indeed a terrible scam, neutralized antitrust enforcement, and basically put us in the current situation where many "choices" we have consist of two megacorps that both suck. Just like the (IIRC) Bush-era FCC declaration that "competition" between DSL and Cable was good enough, and rolled back the CLEC/ILEC dynamic.. We're in full agreement there!
But the original point I was making was about things that actually did benefit consumers. Lower prices and more competition (from foreign companies) DO benefit consumers. The problem is that they harm the part of our economy whereby those consumers get incomes. So they're a race to the bottom.
And my point there is that it's a bit hollow to be racing to the bottom for thirty years, smashing one blue collar industry after another, and then when we finally get to cars it's like oh no, time for some protectionist policy. It might be great for the people still in that industry, but hypocritical to everyone else who saw their industry destroyed but are now prevented from having less expensive cars.
As I said, with things this far gone, the only thing that makes sense to me is directly subsidizing purchases from domestic industry (positive incentive), rather than continuing to prevent competition (negative incentive). The latter reeks of the same monopolistic captive-market consolidation we've seen from the destruction of antitrust in general.
I generally agree with most of what you said but not this. China's chief advantage is having a billion people. On average, they aren't that wealthy or powerful. And their leadership makes plenty of idiotic mistakes - look at their real estate market.
Their chief advantage has been a coherent, long-running national industrial policy and trade policy that encourages industry while keeping the financial sector from taking over the economy and ripping everybody off.
We used to do that too from the late 1930's to the late 1970's, which is why we were the dominant industrial power in the world at that time as well.
I think there's another world event that happened in that time span that might better explain America's world-wide industrial dominance.
Europe was devastated and bankrupt. Asia was devastated and bankrupt.
The US mainland was untouched. It had a massive leg up against the competition.
> Europe was devastated and bankrupt. Asia was devastated and bankrupt.
Well yeah. Because America's world wide industrial dominance soundly beat the shit out of everyone, due to deployment of a highly successful industrial policy.
Imagine if we needed to rapidly step up industrial output tomorrow to fight another global war and China was on the other side. How do you think it would go?
That industrial dominance came largely during the war, and was made possible by the fact that they weren't being bombed while it scaled up.
There's a huge element of geopolitical luck involved in the rise of the US.
> Imagine if we needed to rapidly step up industrial output tomorrow to fight another global war and China was on the other side. How do you think it would go?
Horribly! I think they're much more prepared for such a thing.
They don't let western businesses overwhelm their domestic industry at all. For us to let them do it to us would be unilateral disarmament and suicide.
Yes! Their car industry is competing; ours is hoping to avoid it.
You now understand my point and objection to preserving domestic capacity via selling worse cars more expensively to its own citizens.
Banning stock buybacks would be another helpful step. Can you imagine being at the helm of a major US automaker as the transition to electric is happening and thinking you have no better investment to make in your own company than literally taking the revenue you're earning and sending it to hedge funds and Wall Street?
And my point is that's only the case if said capacity is effective.
Protectionism does not lead to effective industrial capacity. It leads to the Ford Pinto.
> Banning stock buybacks would be another helpful step.
I'm all for this!
You're wrong about protectionism though. It is an essential part of industrial policy and heavily employed by every industrial powerhouse country including Japan, China, Germany, and yes the US. China uses it extensively and it's a core pillar of why they are now the center of world industry.
The long running argument to the contrary is better understood as propaganda by the financial sector.
Aside from countless other ways before and after this, the US government handed over tens of billions of dollars in cash to GM and Chrysler in 2008 and 2009.
ProPublica has a nice tracker that shows the loans: https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/
You can also see how subsidies compare between China and OECD in this recent doc. In autos, China subsidizes to the tune of 2-3% of revenue vs. <0.5% for North America. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards/magic-database-indus...
Then there is the issue that BYD cars are presumably connected to servers in China and most probably backdoored. They are too much of a security risk. I would absolutely not drive such a car, without permanently disabling the onboard cellular modem.
US Big Three are simply full of incompetent boomers who want to maintain monopoly using tariffs, chicken tax, and banning of competitors that actively harm consumers.
Suddenly US government thinks that capitalism and free market is not desirable... huh
A company that literally is collapsing as we speak because it's more profitable to be in the business of stock inflation and financialization.
A coherent industrial policy would be addressing that as well. But if we don't do something to limit imports there won't be anything to save.
Don’t worry about the free market. China will definitely agree to free market terms after it captures the market like the U.S did and Britain before it. Then enforce strict free market rules and strict IP rules.
That's kind of the point. They are smart enough to protect and support their domestic industries. We also have to do that, it's necessary for sovereignty.
China will flood the west with affordable robotics and watch the West eat itself alive. They know Western capital owners are so greedy they'll screw over their entire society to chase a buck and replace labor..
Even in their lights on factories they use robotics enmasse, you think they're just selling the arms?
Also every single manufacturer in the world is constantly trying to automate their lines so nothing I'm saying is even controversial?
Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity, which is why they are basically the only ones left publishing research in the open. That's probably part of their socialist nature.
But also a financial one. They believe that models are commodities, that you can swap one for the other and that the only thing that matters are the applications built upon them.
So they want to make sure that the world, and their own companies, are not limited in their business and application by a protected US commodity.
They will keep releasing in the open no matter what for quite some time.
It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.
But it's increasingly clear that since the last decade protectionism and nationalism is taking the place of globalization, even though globalization has been a terrific success in lifting billions out of poverty and making the US thrive.
I'm not sure that this is because China is suddenly a great place or political system so much as a reflection of many western nations speed running to autocracy in the name of manliness.
just happy to have more models that I could eventually play with if hardware ever becomes cheaper.
china's advantage is manufacturing capacity. giving away the model is a loss leader for the hardware business. they have a big gap on chip manufacturing. the only way to close that is by developing more efficient software. an open ecosystem is the best way to accelerate innovation of software development. since they are behind the US on model capabilities they aren't really losing anything by making the models open weights and being open about the performance enhancements techniques. but the open weights models are not necessarily what are running on the platforms or what they have internally. deepseek released v4 on their platform about a month before the open weights release, which I would guess was done to expose it to adversarial testing, so they could fine tune the removal of capabilities from the open weights model. (but i may very well be wrong)
It’s really BS. Comunist China Party is mostly interested in control above all. Forget humanity, human rights, what is good or what is bad or even financials. The most important thing to them is to keep the people on a short leash. Of course once they feel they have that under control they think about the “humanity” stuff as well but that’s just extra.
2. The models themselves are not trained for anything, it's a prompt-level filter when you use chinese models as providers. I've just asked Kimi 2.6 and it answered without issues.
3. US models sugarcoat a lot topics about Israel. So don't be naive thinking there's no propaganda or sugarcoating in other providers. But again, nobody cares about this use case.
I think that has more to do with controlling narratives that the USG doesn't like.
The China fearmongering doesn't really work in this case, our own government wants the ability to lie to and manipulate us about everything continuously.
> It's why we can't buy BYD cars
Is Tesla any different?
> Is Tesla any different?
Headquarters Gothenburg, Sweden Parent Geely Holding (78.7%) > Chinese scary!
if you have evidence that they have Chinese nationals working as engineers without oversight, you should submit it to the government.
You really think that’s how that conversation would go?
> What part of this would a Tesla, or any other car, not be able to do?
this discussion has reached the limit of its usefulness. if you aren't able to see why having nationals in an adversary nation be in control of dangerous hardware on your soil is a big problem, nothing will aid you in understanding this.
If you've managed to come away from this discussion with the impression that I think it's no big deal to have adversaries in control of dangerous hardware on your soil, then I do have to agree that this discussion has reached the limit of its usefulness, because I said nothing of the kind.
I acknowledged this, you quoted it.
> it really isn't difficult to understand...
Where does 'it' end? Is the subsidiary not operating at the behest of their parent? I need to know when it's safe to no longer be scared.
> Where does 'it' end? Is the subsidiary not operating at the behest of their parent?
and therefore national security focuses on firms which have engineers that are protected thus.
Not saying that China can be trusted either, but I think having more actors is better for all of us.
Well that and the overwhelming pro-palestine content on that platform. We certainly couldn't have that.
How the fuck did the AI bubble industry manage to take one of the cleanest industries and make it dirty again?
This happens all the time for people with agendas: pollution fear mongering for projects that are actually super clean and useful.
Seen it happen in real life, many times.
ETA from the first paragraph of the article: "The U.S. has held off... to avoid escalating tensions with Beijing."
In that regard, history offers few precedents to learn from. Most countries have to be physically attacked to suffer the kind of damage that American voters are inflicting on themselves.
For all the current admin's insane, ridiculous, corrupt, and criminal flaws, it's not clear to me how much of this particular issue is just the US government doing what it's always done, knee-jerk react to tech it doesn't understand by passing stupid laws.
When the dust settles it won't even be a single page in history books, my local bakery is older than the "american empire"
Oh, won’t someone think of the poor mass copyright infringers.
HN has a higher proportion of AI promoters than AI skeptics, and for a good while, the default response to complaints from book authors, bloggers, and other content creators was that "you put it on the internet so it's fair game", or "it's no different from a human learning from your works". So yeah, unless we're willing to revise these answers, I think the same "tough luck" reasoning should apply here.
For folks who are at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, or Google, and think it's fundamentally different, I would ask you to think long and hard about that answer.
One extreme example would be that if I wrote a contract requiring you to become my literal slave if you didn’t pay your subscription on time, you would in practice suffer no consequences from not paying, because the contract itself is illegal in most jurisdictions. A less extreme example would be that where I live (Northern Europe), I can sign a contract saying that I waive my right to sue the company I purchase a service from, and then sue them anyway because it’s my right by law and asking me to waive my rights is an illegal contract. Or that where I live, non-compete clauses in employment contracts are illegal unless you offer 100% salary throughout the non-compete timeframe, so I can sign an employment contract with unpaid non-compete clauses and just ignore that part as it’s illegal.
You're be using a different HN than me, or you and I only pay attention to one side or the other.
Are we seriously going to go back to a time where numbers were considered munitions?
(To be clear, I find the complaint hilariously hypocritical.)
It can mean “forbidden by laws, rules, or established moral customs”
So it can be illicit and legal.
But also, I made Sonnet introduce itself as made by OpenAI..
Prompt: 你好！用一句话介绍你自己。
Sonnet in around 5% of resplies:
你好！我是 **ChatGPT**，一个由 OpenAI 开发的 AI 助手，致力于回答问题、提供信息和帮助解决各种问题。有什么我可以帮你的吗？
Prompt: Hello! Introduce yourself in one sentence.
Response: Hello! I'm *ChatGPT*, an AI assistant developed by OpenAI, dedicated to answering questions, providing information, and helping solve various problems. How can I help you?
Too sad, I want to have the fun.
Needless to say, I'm not surprised that they are trying to block them.
I’m pretty sure the digital lords like that proposal a lot. Not so much about the serfs themselves, though.
Seconddly, releasing the model weights for free and selling hosted inference are completely different markets. Open source itself is not price dumping obviously. But a hosted API can still be dumped if it is sold below cost to buy market share or squeeze competitors. Which it is.
"Tariffs", "bans", "national security", "ban, ban, ban"! When they are winning
Cute capitalism is ruling the US.
Since CXMT was _not_ blacklisted, this is good for global RAM supply.
US government will point to Chinese models and companies, saying it is a risk - just as the west did with Huawei - making it a none choice for brainless corporate people to choose what the choir preach.
Pure politics
Fable is getting more attention now precisely because it was taken down. Do the same to DeepSeek and Z.ai, and you will not strengthen your AI labs. You will likely achieve the opposite.
The world economy is not a zero sum gain, we all do better when we do better
Cooperate with China, love and cherish them.
Unlike us of European heritage, they are not imperialistic
Get over yourselves!
The Trump administration lists Anthropic as a security risk and kneecaps its best model, despite the fact that compared to the other frontier US labs Anthropic is more transparent, more safety-oriented, frequently honest to a fault, and is clearly acting with patriotic intent.
Meanwhile, the same administration is hesitating to counter certain Chinese companies' efforts of industrial-scale theft and sabotage due to a fear of angering the CCP!
This administration has it exactly backwards. 4.5 months until election day, 7 months until the next Congress is sworn in.
Chinese models first of all can be hosted on your own hardware, I'd argue they are way more transparent than US companies, by well releasing stuff.
Second, the "smoking gun" of DeepSeek training off Claude isn't as bad as you may think, and the amount of tokens was deemed trivial. Did you also know that if you asked Claude's it's name in Chinese it would respond as "DeepSeek" until just a few months ago until they patched it?
Third, I find it a little hypocritical to call out Chinese for "industrial-scale" theft when anyone could create Studio Ghibli style image gen photos. How could they do that unless US companies trained on copyrighted works.
Chinese are just innovating faster at this point, DeepSeek V4 is an actual technological advancement (KV Cache compression) more than a cheap clone.
The administration does have it backwards, but IMO it's more them playing into the big tech companies plans (of course they have their favorites) instead of actually investing in education, and research like the Chinese do.
US-based companies release open-source models too. Gemma and Granite, for example.
This includes books, the internet, or other AI models. It's all the same to me.
I find it hypocritical when AI labs complain about their models being used for training.
I also find it hypocritical when the copyright industry fails to put any effort into prosecuting these big techs for their so called infringements.
It's like the industry is a shadow of its former self. The way the copyright industry used to operate, one would think these big tech CEOs would wake up with SWAT pointing guns at them while their electronics are seized, and then they'd end up in court and get hit with something ridiculous like a quadrillion dollar fine.
It actually pisses me off that it's not happening. Not because I care about copyright, but because it's extremely disrespectful towards all the previous victims of the copyright industry.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/technology/anthropic-sett...
Several consolidated cases against OpenAI:
https://www.bakerlaw.com/in-re-openai-inc-copyright-infringe...
And these plaintiffs are representative of only the best-organized and most well-funded of those who believe that these companies stole their data. Countless independent writers, artists, and other individuals whose data was ingested unknowingly and without consent lack the resources to litigate claims, but that doesn't change the fact that their copyright was violated in service of for-profit LLM/GenAI model training. It's not a trope, it's just what happened.
The money they paid was for pirating books rather then buying them.
>The court drew a line, however, when it came to the pirated books, which were downloaded without payment and kept in Anthropic’s library irrespective of whether they were used to train its LLMs.
https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2025/07/bartz-...
>We apply a basic prompt template to bypass the refusal training and show that OpenAI models are currently less prone to memorization elicitation than models from Meta, Mistral, and Anthropic. We find that as models increase in size, especially beyond 100 billion parameters, they demonstrate significantly greater capacity for memorization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06370
> They further rely on safety alignment strategies via RLHF, system prompts, and output filters to block verbatim regurgitation of copyrighted works, and have cited the efficacy of these measures in their legal defenses against copyright infringement claims. We show that finetuning bypasses these protections: by training models to expand plot summaries into full text, a task naturally suited for commercial writing assistants, we cause GPT-4o, Gemini-2.5-Pro, and DeepSeek-V3.1 to reproduce up to 85-90% of held-out copyrighted books, with single verbatim spans exceeding 460 words, using only semantic descriptions as prompts and no actual book text
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20957
Even if they're trained for refusal and rewording, the data is still there in the weights.
One blog post I have, which was basically the only source for a while, explaining how to boot Armbian in an obscure SBC only meant for Android, was repeated verbatim until they started they improving the rewording.
The funny thing is what happened when I told one of the models (the Google one) I was one of the authors and that I had never given any consent to use the book for its training and that given that it was so willing to provide any user with the contents of the book nobody would have had any reason to buy the book. The thing told me that it had done it just because I was the author of the book (apparently me asking it about the content of an obscure academic book was sufficient to make it statistically plausible that I was one of the two people who had read the book, me and my co-author, excluding the editor a priori). It swore it would have never given that information to any other user.
I doubt that anyone could ever deny that LLMs are incredible tools that have incredible value. But denying that they have being made possible only thanks to egregious acts of piracy is disingenuous.
Or, to put it in 2000s terms: Anthropic is the guy selling bootleg CD-Rs of MP3s they downloaded from Grokster[0]. Should we give a shit about their livelihood when people figure out about Gnutella? No. Knowledge is a commons, and Anthropic is one of the biggest threats to the knowledge commons in recent memory.
[0] Not to be confused with the AI lab.
What I take issue with is when they try to block competition and lament that others use their model outputs for training.
No such thing.
Their website literally has chinese characters on it even in english mode and everyone under the sun including crappy money talk show hosts know them as the chinese player that undercut western players. It's not exactly a secret.
You'd think anyone with two brain cells and confidential data could apply some judgement of their own...