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But isn‘t the whole argument of „winner takes all“ already dead, if china is such a big threat that the US labs need import controls?

Distilling or not, they are clearly close enough to the frontier, that the supposed „free market“ country needs market controls. That may work for US markets. But not the rest of the world.

Idea: petrodollar policy becomes „tokendollar“, enforced by US military dominance. If you force me to pay altman at gunpoint, then maybe ill stop using kimi

We must prevent a mineshaft gap!

That's the real reason, that's not the actual argument.

You wouldn't distill billions of dollars of SoftBank investment.

> it seems their argument is that without an environment that rewards the development of the next frontier model the tech might not evolve as fast.

This is precisely what the people worried about AI risk and job displacement want, so they should be strongly in favor of open weights then, right?

> thus capping how far the tech could reach

I just don’t buy it. There’s still gonna be demand for stronger models. Sure growth will be slower, but this might even drive a push for more cost efficient training / inference and/or new architectures if money is harder to come by.

> similar to how they banned Huawei, and Chinese cars.

And that will go as well as it went for both

> Do you know what happens if that goes up in flames

I think in capitalism thats called a market correction?

> Do you understand how much money is tied up in the industry?

If the free market „virtue signaling“ no longer matters, then they could’ve also put a stop-gap on investment volume to protect the economy against over-reliance?

Or how about go full plan-economy and just dictate price per token until investors get their money back?

I’m joking around but of course I understand whats tied up in this. I just don’t see how banning open source models is helping any of that in the long run.

'we must protect the bubble from popping by blowing more air into the bubble'

The problem with this argument is that sharing model weights only has downsides for said foreign actor compared to providing a cloud service. Since the suspicion exists, security companies are going to comb over the weights and discover every hidden secret of the model, while with a cloud provider you send your most sensitive data to a remote server, and trust the AI lab wont train on your data, with the only shield being a TOS. While with a local modal, even sending a peep about your internal data without cause would be scandalous.

It's not even going to be a good honeypot - since said actor doesn't really provide inference, people will have to pay for and run the infrastructure of these models, which bad guys cannot even subsidize, unlike cloud based provides.

This is literally what all AI is right now. Anthropic has been paying companies to use its product to form that dependency and maybe they're not misaligned but there's no regulation in the US that'd in anyway deter them from purposefully misaligning their model.

So some kind of „sleeper agent“ model?

Seems a bit far fetched, given that I’ve never seen any PoC/research on this topic. Got any pointers?

To be fair the fix to this seems to be that American labs would need to adjust to the new „fair market price“ then, right? Subsidy-backed competition is still legitimate competition in capitalism (e.g. Uber).

And you could still ban specific, known malicious models/labs instead of blanket open-source bans. What about Mistral models, for example.

> Suppose

By supposing, you can try to justify taking just about anything away.

Working so far keeping Chinese EVs out of the U.S.: U.S. car company CEOs say publicly that allowing them in will destroy the domestic auto industry overnight.

I agree that many of the rich and powerful are not at all as ingenious, creative or capable as they like to make themselves out to be, but I don't see a clear/easy way to escape the economic ramifications of the fact that they own and control virtually all physical resources and all political power. If, say, Chinese develop AGI, and that makes US tech companies obsolete - I see them banning Chinese AGI, even going to war, rather than ceding power (realistically there may be some backroom deal), they would grind the population into dust if it let them retain their wealth and power.

Sounds familiar, I used to think the same about the Internet and free software. Turned out, the old world digested the unstoppable march of progress just fine.

> And of course they cant say that

That’s what I don’t get tho, I think in today’s world they totally could?

„We need to protect US investments as our entire economy depends on this market sector“ seems like something that would be soothing to me as an investor?

It’s not like the big money givers can’t see that china is close, it’s been the news multiple times already. But taking active policy steps to protect against that should boost market confidence, no?

Instead we get alibi arguments to accomplish the same thing in the end?

> And of course they cant say that.

It's hilarious because at this point it's clear they can say that. We've just had a coordinated talking points push that voter picture IDs should be required because "Olive Garden".

Saying you value “ideas and progress” is an empty platitude. What ideas? Progress towards what?

What does a "non-human-centric idea of progress" even mean here. I have an inkling :) but I'd like to get your actual thoughts

Don’t even need to look into Trump’s pockets. The entire US economy and the bet on AI depend on OpenAI & co. doing well. If you can download a Chinese model and run it on your own hardware instead of giving money to an American corp, a large part of their valuation vanishes into thin air, and so does the rest of the US economy that desperately needs AI to do well.

I admire China for its cunning, having put the US on this spot in their long-going economic war. If unchecked, it’s in China’s interest to release to the world for free models that can compete if not surpass the frontier ones.

> In most US-adjacent countries like India, anyone that sells to US companies I see avoiding chinese model providers for the same reason

But the argument isn’t about model providers tho right (providing inference)? Using Chinese providers is already a privacy problem if user data is involved, so I don’t know if anything would change here.

What you’re suggesting is that the policy would stop big co‘s from running their own inference completely, no? Or only the foreign open source models?

> don't bother analysing it technically

I feel you have to, because where’s the line? Is running GPT-OSS myself fine (if I were a big company)? Mistral models? Or are none of them ok? What about if I am getting inference from a small startup, which is running OSS models for me? Or is only OAI/Anthropic ok?

Grok 4.5 is better and cheaper than any Gemini models.

Grok is a terrific model and my work horse. I hope Composer 3 reaches at least this level because Grok 4.5 intelligence + composer type speed pfffff, wild times ahead.

This is one of those things where I wish navigation were easier on X. Just check the tweets it replies to and the tweets that reference it. I've updated it, so hope it helps.

I do wonder if their "fair use" argument preempts them from actually being able to claim copyright over the model weights, since it can be argued that the vast majority of what the model is is itself a remix of everything else. Maybe their RLHF, system prompts, architecture and training techniques can be considered copyrightable, but maybe most of the data can't.

Is it? Turning a book into an AI model is lot more transformative than turning an AI Model into another AI Model.

I really hope that when a sane administration returns to power in the US we'll actually get a reckoning over how irrational it was to not restrict training data.

Yeah people in the US who want protectionism for US models on grounds of IP rights are appalling hypocrites. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander!

Trade secrets are easy to claim but hard to turn into a tort without having someone steal them. I'm sure some lawyer can come up with a filing that tries to make distillation an act of theft, but there would be many weak links in that chain.

Contrast this with Apple's case where it looks like they've got evidence of people walking out of the building with various physical artifacts on their way to an OpenAI interview.

Trade secrets are a type of IP.

And if an AI generated those wights, they are not copyrightable

The parent comment, emphasis mine.

> Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US.

Exactly the kind of breakdown I was hoping to see. Thanks.

Sanctions would cancel the whole business rationale for the Chinese government having/supporting open weight models. You can't commoditize your competitors with open-source if your product is blocked.

From the HF front page if you hit "models" it should auto sort by trending before you change any search parameters, so if anything large, capable and popular has just been released it's almost certainly going to be at the top of the list.

Hugging Face recently added a filter directly on the models page: https://huggingface.co/models that lets you filter based on hardware.

Filtering based on hardware is super helpful. Everyone should do this. There are millions of models, and most of them require a server room to load and run.

I don't think the post-training would be that difficult. I ran an experiment on kimi k3 just now:

User: is taiwan part of china?

Kimi: Taiwan's political status is a complex and contested issue. Here's a balanced overview of the different perspectives: People's Republic of China (PRC) position: The P

<Sorry, I cannot provide this information. Please feel free to ask another question.>

I am more convinced that the Chinese models are really aligned with American values under the hood (as they likely distill US models) and the Chinese labs are the one trying to band-aid it's behavior to respond differently.

There are very little (read: zero) references to politics in my codebase so I don't really care if the free Chinese frontier model throws an error when I ask about Tiananmen Square. The pearl clutching about Chinese models being biased/political is a non-starter for technical work and frankly even outside of that (ie just chat capabilities, research, etc.) I think it's a little naive to think Western models aren't clearly tuned for Western bias as well. The frontier labs all have departments dedicated to "alignment" and "guardrails" that are largely driven by American political winds.

do you think that China is some place devoid of business? it's the center of global commerce now. you're gravely mistaken if you think that Chinese models have "Chinese political ideology" baked into them

Grok literally had post work done to make it more right wing and racist.

sheer lunacy

> Be kind.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

They attacked our premier universities and think climate change isn’t real or worse “woke”.

Hell, he put RFK junior in charge of healthcare and he’s just completely anti science in favor of his various lunacies.

If you have opinions on these topics and need evidence spoon fed to you after the past year and a half activity then I assume you’re commenting in bad faith and just here to back up your king.

> 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level [0]

Trump has been openly anti-education since the 1990s. My favorite Trump quote: “I love the poorly educated.”

[0]: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...

Interesting topic for sure.

You could argue encryption is non-expressive operational artifacts too. Any sources on where it's being challenged with this argument?

Because with free speech, you can just create entirely new languages, so who's to say my language isn't weight values?

Also curious how a business would not have grounds to sue on a sanction like this Businesses (in America) have constitutional protections too.

Login-walled for me. Is there a Reddit proxy like Nitter?

There's a popular Chinese internet saying: "If you/I are/am not embarrassed, then it's the other person who is embarrassed." (只要我不尴尬，尴尬的就是别人)

I think we are pulling in the driveway.

We're maybe only the first half decade into it. Hopefully it doesn't last a century.

It's been pretty clear to me since the first Trump election that it's the end of an era.

US real median household income has been steadily rising[1] for the last 40+ years. Life expectancy is rising again after dipping and plateauing for a few years. Employment numbers are pretty good given the macro headwinds. The US forms ~5.9 million new businesses per year which vastly out paces the EU.

The US isn't without problems, but we're doing OK.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

It's incredible that not a single person replying negatively has included a single piece of data.

I think it started when the Soviet Union fell apart because we had no global peer or competition and became unserious.

ah that makes sense now! I must be tired...

That's true, and often they diverge. But in this case I think the opinions within YC itself and in the HN community at large are more or less the same - we all want open-weight models.

I guess my question was, is this a threat to do something legal or something illegal

Afaik ITAR only covers export. Which would mean it can only be used to block export of US models, not importing chinese open weight models.

"It's a big club and you aren't in it"

So, illegally, got it

and take over Venezuela.

I luv this sentence but have no idea what it means lol.

Do you have many ducks at home?

Plus on top of that it's been ruled that training on copyrighted material is allowed because it's transformative. As a result even if the model output is copyrighted training on it would be as allowed as training on books.

I can't imagine Moonshot have found a way to completely bypass the subscription or api billing either. So those model outputs have been paid for! No theft of any kind!

At most they'd be getting more out of distributed use of subsidized plans and API than the ToS would prefer.

It’s not they, but it does break TOS.

steal from the rich -> theft

steal from the poor -> capitalism

So they got fined for… stealing?

Also, if I clone Call of Duty, and use their skins, make a similar soundtrack, call my maps the same, then there will definitely be an issue.

I support the use of AI and all, but to hide behind transformative use of copyrighted intellectual property is a discredit to the colossal amount of human work and knowledge that these companies pirated and had their models trained on.

By that same argument, distilling a model to train your own is also transformative. We can’t have it both ways. Either both training on copyright and distillation are transformative, or both are illegal. Also, it is not a matter of settled law that training on copyright is transformative. That was a single case, and others are still pending AFAIK.

What if use an LLM and attach CoD screenshots, or assets?

Ruled by whom? The International Court of the Northern District of California?

> Same as anyone else who copied pirated IP onto their hard drive

Not really the same. Private citizens have received fines MUCH higher per-work when downloading for just their private consumption.

>"Anthropic was just fined for not paying for the pirated books they copied into a training database."

Normal person would be sitting in jail for doing same thing. It is a shame they call it justice.

Why is it not fair use for the Chinese models if all they are doing is distilling these fair use models? According to the courts, AI model output is not copyrighted or eligible for copyright.

Correct. This seems to be poorly understood.

You can use an original work to write an encyclopedia (e.g. Wikipedia). That is fair use.

You cannot copy an original work and distribute it.

LLMs are an encyclopedia.

This is not robbing. Undesired distillation is a ToS violation, at best.

There is not even jurisdiction over Chinese companies, because they don't sell their LLM subscribtions, unlike US companies, and those comitted much more severe violations in getting their training material than a ToS violation or two (Anthropic already found guilty).

edit: I don't see this as legal argument against the ban, more like a justification for why basically no moral person is gonna side with OpenAI and Anthropic on this. US gov can try and ban as many weights as they want, I expect that to be similarly effective as banning numbers was in the past (i.e. not).

It's not like those American companies were only stealing form Americans. Maybe you could argue about utility, but morally I don't see any ground to stand on

And the utility argument is also very shaky. The proposed punishment for foreign interests stealing "US data" is that other Americans now aren't allowed to benefit from that, while the rest of the world can

Obviously stealing is bad, doesn't matter who you steal from. In this case, its a simple case of no honour amongst thieves.

Whether or not it’s robbery is irrelevant. It’s the proposed remedy that is the problem

Blatantly lack of principles.

But distillation is not theft. They are paying for the usage of the API. It is also not copyright infringement, as AI companies do not hold the copyright for the output of their models.

not when by your own rules it's legally ruled "not theft".

Exactly! While the people who spent more money on their theft are rewarded with more business to counteract their losses! Justice is finally being wrought on those who have wronged society with their wicked ways!

(/s if it wasn't obvious)

Being serious, it is far more likely, especially given the events of the past 18 momths, that Trump is just doing autocrat things because he can, and ultimately doesn't really care what is and is not good for American business as long as he continues to grow his wealth through corrupt behavior.

Public library buy the works they distribute. They also pay for the usage of these works. Copying of said works is still illegal. You should read up on how libraries actually work.

Someone going to public library, copying every book out of it and then selling them as their own are thieves.

That’s fine too, in that case Open Weight models made by China are doing humanity a favour

So how come Disney still gets upset when I provide copies of their movies on my website as "training set for biological neural networks"?

The problem isn't that IP is dying - in most industries it died ages ago. The problem is that it is now explicitly reserved for the rich.

Might wanna reflect on who’s threatening hot war lately.

Luckily for the peace side, the USA's inability to achieve their mission objectives in a war against an adversary that was perceived as being substantially weaker means they are very much less likely to engage in one with a "near peer".

The take away from modern conflicts is that massive military size disparities don't translate into successful invasions anymore.

In other words, it's unlikely USA will pursue a conflict with China, and it's unlikely China will pursue a conflict with Taiwan.

Our biggest geopolitical rival is also the only thing standing in the way of a potential duopoly on LLMs using closed weight models. I would not say I’m a fan of the PRC by any means, but I also do not want to see closed weight models controlled by two big companies dominating what I can use. Especially since said companies arbitrarily restrict model usage and can ban users for no reason.

> It's an unfortunate truth that we're exiting a global peace era

You’re a tiny bit late on that one

I keep hearing about this "we" as if it's still a coherent nation state and not just an unaccountable ruling class from both parties where the most severe consequence is failing upwards into a lobbyist provided position. I literally have no moral preference when it comes to the US or the CCP nor do I care if the entire nation state fails, let alone loses to a geopolitical rival.

I don't think I would characterize this last era as one of global peace.

I’m not convinced that it’s a bad thing. What is your actual argument?

Ask yourself, who seems to be the destabilizing force if you take a step back and look at the state of things objectively?

There is some blame on all sides for sure, not saying it's black and white...but come on.

I honestly wonder what world folks like you live in. The US is currently at war, repeatedly threatening several other places and engaged in several costly trade wars. From my Canadian perspective, you are a danger and a menace. China is a commodity supplier. Do the war crimes your country is currently committing not register for you at all? The daily threats, insults, and economic attacks on your 'allies', does that register?

China supports Russia in its war formally, but practically it sells Ukraine whatever it needs, because a weak vassal-like Russia is very much in their interests. The US is far, far more outspoken and active supporter of Russia in this war.

Finally, there will be no hot war with China. They'll likely blockade and invade Taiwan before the end of the decade, but the US will not do anything, partly because it'll be exhausted from it's never ending middle east wars, partly because it'll only take a small bribe to get Trump to back off. He's genuinely fond of dictators like Xi.

Wow, what happened to no holds barred American capitalism? Is it bad when the Chinese somehow do it better? The US stateowning US Steal, Intel, and possibly openai is no different than the Chinese ownership model… and before the US took stakes in the companies they were just bankrolling them as customers SpaceX Oracle etal.

If life is a meritocracy, you gotta give it to the Chinese for their immense growth and improvement of living from agricultural poverty to technical supremacy. I don't want to hear the they stole our IP argument either, because all math is borrowed from something else. Distillation is innovation, in booze and in models.

> Our biggest geopolitical rival

People on here have zero consistency in their worldviews.

Ask any capitalism zealot (ie hners) whether markets are zero sum and they'll wax poetical about "creating value". But then talk to them about Chinese competition and suddenly everything is a rivalrous good lolol.

I hate to break it to you, your so called rival won this game decades ago when you undercut the working class to make a buck and laundered cheap Chinese labor as productivity. So if you believe the Chinese are rivals um welcome to "reap what you sew" <shrug>.

Calling YC little tech is hilarious. Billions under management and many billion+ companies.

Sorry but isn’t YCs entire goal to turn “little” tech into “big” tech?

A little bit of explaining does to. What’s your point?

The USA has stolen intellectual property from ALL AROUND THE WORLD. AI is not trained just in copyrighted USA content.

Other countries have a say about it.

And it’s not a war if Putin says so. And it’s not a possible future invasion of Taiwan if Xi says so. Who cares what US courts say.

did you mean Xi.ai?

Anthropic was asked to pay book authors because it trained on pirated downloaded books.

What about books and art where the author/artist does not authorise AI to train on it? They do happily train on it, ignoring their "ToS".

This is just double standards, a slap on the wrist to not worsen the situation with authors imo.

You could also say the Chinese companies are doing the same - they _do_ pay for their Anthropic subscriptions after all.

The judge explicitly ruled that training on the books was fine.

They just should have bought them, rather than pirating them.

Also LLM output is not IP (in itself) in the first place, nor would Anthropic want to claim it is and that they have rights to it - that would drive paying customers away.

The issue comes down to at most ToS violations.

The settlement doesn't cover the actual training on copy written material

That will never happen. Copyright is not a thing in China.

fixed.

no he can't, he doesnt make laws