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Comment by Sol- | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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

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

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

I don't see how. I could have written that code myself, it's not like anyone could prove it.

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

Nobody is going to care in Europe but a handful of big corps with huge us contracts.

And good luck proving it.

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

Like Cursor, which is pretty much repackaged Kimi K2.5, and Musk paid $60b for (lol).

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

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

Just because the US sanctions a country, doesn't mean the rest of the world needs to as well. As a Canadian we traded with Cuba even when the US had an embargo on them.

It's not clear what a "US-aligned market" is anymore, and I think it's reasonable to question US hegemony on any front because of its mercurial treatment toward its "allies".

Example... the USA effectively bans Chinese EVs and hoped its allies would follow suit. Canada didn't. It actually dropped its 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs down to 6% and, sure enough, seven brands of Chinese EVs are hitting Canadian shores. White House temper tantrums ensued. Shrug. And of course Europe has been importing Chinese EVs for years and loving them.

> Europe at the very least

How's life under that rock?

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

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

I know that Europe thinks so (I'm from there too), but we aren't remotely competitive enough for decoupling. It's bowing to US demands or falling further behind economically. Self-made problems, of course, since the common market is still way underdeveloped, much because of nationalist egoism and coordination problems between the member states.

>US-aligned markets (i.e. Europe at the very least,

Member when Trump threatened to invade Greenland? Europe does.

Europe has been in the process of de-americanization for the past few years.

I mean, after the US just signed an export control ordering Fable access blocked to non-US users (including European nationals), I doubt European and "US-aligned markets" are eager to ban Chinese models against their own interests.

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

Yes, and the rest of the world would just nod worriedly and go along with it, at massive cost to their economies, rather than treating it like the protectionism it is and responding to it with crippling counter-sanctions.

> If the US really cracks down on frontier model access, you'll see them make Chinese open models illegal.

We don't give a fuck about US laws - respectfully, the rest of the planet.

We're already sick of your shit and this will only add to it. Just look at the Iran shit show. What a joke. Ooooooo wooooooo sanctionzzz scary. Sanctions only work if they're enforceable.

You think the US can tell the rest of the world "we're the only ones allowed to use frontier models" and that the rest of the world will just comply? There's just no way. Not even close US allies would go along with that.

I have no idea, but how is it easy to know whether somebody used these models? They can be hosted even locally.

And the chinese will just lie down and take this without doing anything?

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