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Comment by trunnell | Hacker News Reader

What an amazing achievement by America's adversaries.

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.

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I've always found this line of reasoning troubling and uninformed.

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.

I wonder about your last point. Certainly there's an aspect of education that Asia values more, however by the US own metrics, they are number 1 in terms of education outcomes.

I'm a white dude from Iowa, working in top levels of AI/ML. I'm in the minority at work/conferences. I hardly ever even interview homegrown US job candidates. I'm just saying, that the reason I think you see more people from Asia and India is the education levels of most of the candidates. I'm not faulting these other countries, just pointing out how I see an educational gap based on demographics, and one that is rising up the ranks.

> 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.

US-based companies release open-source models too. Gemma and Granite, for example.

I love Gemma, especially the latest Gemma 4 release - it's really great to see at least somewhat capable, not completely useless model that one can easily host on their own hardware without significant CAPEX investments first - but, to be honest, it doesn't quite compare to GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.6 or DeepSeek V4 Pro. Again, Gemma is amazing, especially for pet projects, but it's not something at least relatively near to "flagship" or "state-of-the-art" (except for small-to-medium size LLM category).

It's not surprising that Trump is as bad as he is at many of these things, but what is surprising is that he's worshiped by his supporters.

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