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Comment by mrinterweb | Hacker News Reader

The biggest concern is identifying "who". If the US government says only US citizens can access a model, how do they enforce that. Anthropic and OpenAI will use Persona (a company funded by Peter Thiel) to verify user identity. Verifying your identity with a government ID and linking that to AI is the dream of a surveillance state. Agents running on your computer, accessing your internet accounts, access to your personal conversations with AI, and accessible by the government is just wild.

I'm hoping this is a call to action for local AI.

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No, not really. The biggest concern is the US government claiming it can decide who gets to use a product and brazenly kneecapping competitive companies who do such things as "write contracts and comply with them."

The US government isn't claiming that — it is telling you that fact.

No, not really. They'll lose in court if anyone pushes back.

They'll do it anyway. How many of Trump's court losses has he obeyed?

The vast majority of them actually.

Isnt the stated reason actually the most likely though? They dont want Chinese backed companies getting it. That is what they said about Fable (SK Hynix). You dont really need a conspiracy theory to explain it.

The same Chinese companies to which the same administration okayed sales of H200 chips so long as they paid a 25% export duty?

Uh... no, that is not actually a good explanation.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-open-up-exports-nvidi...

> If the US government says only US citizens can access a model, how do they enforce that.

It's easy if only enterprise users have access. It just becomes yet another compliance issue.

They won't let the public use it, even if citizens, because that would undermine the goal of controlling its use.

> I'm hoping this is a call to action for local AI.

If US frontier models stop being publicly available then they stop mattering, it also becomes hard to justify further investment in US AI companies if distribution is so locked down. The Chinese models will be the frontier.

Local AI will never be as powerful as cloud-based models, at least not in the foreseeable future. We’re talking about a difference between 7B and 750B+ parameters, a 100x scale gap.

I think the trend will be running open-weight models with the provider of your choice. You can always switch providers, avoiding vendor lock-in, with the trade-off of privacy concerns. You have to trust that the provider actually behaves the way they claim.

I have a lot of hope for local AI. Local model intelligence has come so far from where it was just a few years ago. It is about a model's intelligence density now for local AI. Models like Qwen 3.6 are truly capable. Sure Qwen 3.6 isn't SOA, but it certainly can do many daily tasks. Even if the AI isn't running locally, hosted GLM 5.2 is in the same ballpark as Opus 4.8, and you can choose your provider.

I would wager frontier LLM achievements will plateau, and open-weight models will catch up. Then OpenAI and Anthropic will have significantly less value prop. It is hard to say when that may happen. People regard open-weight models about 4-10 months behind frontier models, so its not like those using open-weight models need to wait long to catch up.

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