Comment by vovavili
3 days ago
The way I see it, a government led by an adult toddler and his sycophants has decided to punish a firm that refused to cooperate with it's military when it was embarrassed by a militarily weak adversary. The model strength spin strikes me as motivated reasoning.
The rubicon being crossed here is Republicans/the red tribe losing their comparative advantage of being opposed to overregulating a rapidly advancing technology.
Weren’t they claiming their party is opposed to over regulation and critiqued EU for that or something? Funny, that.
Anyways, this seems like pretty good PR for Anthropic: “Our models are so powerful even the government forbid us from exporting access to them as a service for a while!” for once this gets sorted out (if it does). It’s one thing when they just write self-congratulatory blog posts and people are skeptical, it’s another (at least, optics wise) when the government targets them, specifically.
Ofc the original intent might have been to hurt them by removing their advantage vs OpenAI, go figure. I wonder whether OpenAI's next models would get a similar treatment, or whether the govt. would also decide that Opus 4.X and GPT-5.5 shouldn't be given to foreigners as well. Who knows if some money needs to change hands behind the scenes in the form of a charitable donation.
If this affects all LLMs long term though, things will be pretty messed up.
It’s very bad PR for all US AI companies, not just Anthropic.
I don’t see it as good PR for Anthropic at all. They did a lot of PR in that direction but now it backfired.
People/gov now think twice about relying on US ai products. I don’t think the investors are very happy with the place this landed either.
I think the right move for Europe and other countries would be to effectively ban US tech and follow the Chinese response to Nvidia (delivered personally to Trump: we want to build our own AI chips).
We are back to cold war computing days, the message has long arrived on this side of the Atlantic, even if most companies and governments aren't able to get rid of old habits.
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> People/gov now think twice about relying on US ai products.
Oh this has already been clear to anyone in the EU, for example. The current reliance on US tech and even widespread stuff like MS is pretty deeply rooted, however and it might take a while to do anything about it - so for many it’s a matter of convenience for now.
That said, as long as what you need sits behind an OpenAI or Anthropic API and you don’t have deeper proprietary integrations, there is no moat. I can even run Claude Code with DeepSeek if I so choose (though OpenCode is neat too).
Best EU has at the moment seems to be Mistral though, which is… sorta passable, but not cutting edge. Oh well.
> I think the right move for Europe and other countries would be to effectively ban US tech and follow the Chinese response to Nvidia (delivered personally to Trump: we want to build our own AI chips).
Not sure about outright ban, but homegrown govt. systems should have both the devs and the infra in EU.
Would also be really cool if we could make even regular CPUs and GPUs some day but I don’t think that’s super likely, though. Kinda amazing that China can do that! Even consumer stuff like the Chinese Lisuan GPUs (and Moore Threads I think), hell, even the Russian Elbrus CPUs.
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Don't they lose money on every token they sell, though? It may be a blessing in disguise. They can now use all of their resources towards superintelligence, and can't be considered selfish/evil for not sharing their fruits. The government made me now becomes an excuse.
> I think the right move for Europe and other countries would be to effectively ban US tech and follow the Chinese response to Nvidia (delivered personally to Trump: we want to build our own AI chips).
How would the EU replace US tech? There simply are no equivalent providers of such technology in the EU, regardless of pipe dreams in that respect EU representatives regularly conjure up (privacy industry, "European Google", "European Facebook", you name it ..,).
Maybe, however, such a move would actually be consistent with dominant EU policy. The EU seems hellbent on becoming poor and economically irrelevant, after all.
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Sure, it "backfired" but it would've happened anyway. Trump mad Trump get revenge. Trump smash. That's how he operates - and even though Anthropic were being dicks about the marketing, they got Trump mad. That's why this is happening, not due to the marketing - it would've happened anyway.
If anything the marketing is WHY it got so popular during these 3 days.
On the contrary. This is more like a Kaspersky moment for American cloud services. Simply can no longer be trusted for use outside of US.
Good for Anthropic?
Can you think of any case in history where the US government suspended product sales due to national security concerns and that was ultimately beneficial for the company being regulated?
https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/when-the-mac-was-...
Larry Ellison, Softbank, and OpenAI invested a lot of money into project Stargate. Would be a shame if Anthropic took a piece of the pie.
I mean it's obvious, isn't it?
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/trump-open-ai-altman-stake.h...
the way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if Anthropic was ordered to sell to Larry Ellison.
The U.S. banned encryption over 40 bits throughout the 1990s. LLMs are orders of magnitude more significant.
that was pretty destructive. by unfortunate accident the process of developing network standards shut down as that was being lifted. people who tried to address the systemic security issues in internet infrastructure were shouting into the wind while the itar restrictions where in place, since none of their solutions could be deployed. that shortsightedness is at least a partial cause for the huge uncontrollable security issues we have today.
this seems like a direct parallel, sowing confusion during the formative years, for no apparent gain.
I also think as a policy matter it’s futile. But my point is that this is a predictable response to this technology. Analyzing it in terms of one particular administration is missing the forest for the trees.
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> led by an adult toddler and his sycophants
which are deeply entrenched with the competition (Grok, OpenAI)
Shutting down the growth prospects of a company based, not on its behavior, but on the capability of its models right before the IPOs of the companies you're going to profit from is staggeringly dumb. Yes the public is stupid when it comes to investing in stocks, but come on. If these companies growth prospects rest in large part on continuing to improve their products and the government said that if they do they face National Security Cease and Desist letters, then investing is a bad idea.
The selfish / corrupt thing to do is to do this after you've fleeced the public.
One day a few million dollars in tokens will enable you to mint an entire AWS or iPhone.
That will not be something you can purchase. Only enormous capital holders will have access and be able to play that game.
We're going to be left with scraps. Thin clients, shitty gaming cards (for but a few), which also dovetails nicely with trusted computing and device attestation.
We've already lived through this:
- open web -> platforms
- protocols -> closed products
- firefox -> chrome sans ad block
- urls are cool -> 92% of URL bars sent to a single company to show ads
- the personal computer -> locked down iPhones and increasingly locked down Androids without APKs.
- free to use internet -> national ID laws
- free to use cell phones -> required KYC
It's getting worse and worse every year. Why would you think you'll get to have these models? You're a serf.
They'll take your career and your hobby and leave you with nothing. Enjoy renting and being monitored.
Not a religious person, but I'm shocked at all of the people watching Noah's proverbial ark being built right in front of us, the rain starting to pour, and everyone just laughing. The flood is coming. 90+% of you, maybe more, are going to lose your jobs.
Your careers are about to die all at once and you're standing around laughing it off. Absolutely wild to see.
This feeling of being defeated by and trapped inside the “machine” and seeing the “truth” is exactly what the “machine” would want you to do. The actual red pill is that there’s no “machine”, there’s only people and shared social constructions held together by our compliance and they’re contingent.
There's no machine, and there's no ladder. However with sufficient people believing it exists and acting like it does, it becomes real in its own way.
> there’s only people and shared social constructions held together by our compliance and they’re contingent
But that's what a "machine" is.
thank you
we also lived through
owning digital books => renting/subscribing
owning digital games => renting/subscribing
owning digital music => renting/subscribing
owning the right to repair => renting/subscribing
Vehicle ECU's => TCU's that share data with 3rd parties
I'm sad to say that I tend to agree with echelon.
I fully agree with you, and I find bonkers to see devs screaming how they got x times more productive, observe rewrites from major FOSS products, and still they assume their employer is going to keep the whole team employed.
Also on the other subjects you mention, I got distracted with convenience during the last years, however apparently it is about time to save what is still possible to keep computing open.
I think you don't actually agree with them, because this user _is_ the one screaming in almost every thread. Full on psychosis.
Indeed. When are we going to wake up and stand up to this? "Freedom?" This is not freedom. Liberty? Nope. This really is techno-serfdom. Power and capability for me (govts / large corps) but not for thee (us, the serfs).
Almost always, the future ends up being bad, but not in the ways we think it will.
I bet 99.99% of people who have ever lived would say the future got better than when they were alive if they could.
This seems a silly statement
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>The rubicon being crossed here is Republicans Republicans/the red tribe losing their comparative advantage of being opposed to overregulating a rapidly advancing technology.
What purpose do Vance, Elon, Sacks, Sriram Krishnan and others serve? Are Lutnick and Hegseth calling the shots? It looks like the Valley also got duped.
>>It looks like the Valley also got duped.
The valley duped themselves the same way the German industrialists duped themselves by thinking they could control Hitler. Turned out they couldn't and a good number did not survive to 1945.
Those "geniuses" with their "philosophers" (Yarvin, seriously?) think they know everything, but don't even bother to read the most basic relevant history. Theil is already deciding to bundle himself and his family off to Argentina.
Even if things don't end as badly as they did for the Germans, the global economy in general, and America's place in the global economy in particular are already seriously damaged after only one third of this presidential term; even as they are managing to concentrate more wealth, having a bigger slice of a smaller pie is worth less. This really needs to be cleaned up.
Some oligarchs are making out like bandits. This is russia level kleptocracy.
While that is a tempting narrative, the idea that there would be restrictions on exports of AI began in the previous government. This isn’t a my team v your team problem.
Neither party in the US is opposed to overregulation, from my perspective that died a good twenty years ago.
Both parties want regulation and a larger federal government. They disagree only on what regulations they want, and even then its largely in optics as they tend to agree on much of the big picture.
Both parties agree that the federal government should have the authority to tell people what they can and can't do to their own body, for example. Its just that one party wants to use it to mandate vaccines and the other prefers to tell women they can't have an abortion.
The first party didn't actually force anyone to get vaccinated though. And that second party also says they can tell you what to put in your body and mandates death panels now in health care. Means-testing for cancer patients. Murder and rapine as government policies. The second party is actually doing that. But yeah, both parties...
The Biden administration absolutely wanted to mandate covid vaccines, they just didn't believe they would get it past the courts. Instead they leveraged their ability to drive a massive smear campaign against anyone in the public who chose not to get vaccinated.
And to be clear, vaccines are mandated for anyone who wishes to use the school system they already pay for via property taxes.
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This. Free Market my ass. GOP is a mafia now.
History will note this action was made the same day scaffolding was set up to remove the president's name from the Kennedy center.
They are putting a fighting pit on the White House lawn..
Something about bread and circuses seems in order.
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Don't forget that the Biden administration created export controls for GPUs by establishing tiers and limits for countries[1]. When Democrats come back to power, nothing will change in the context of export controls for models like Fable. This is what things will look like going forward. OP is right: this is a geopolitical and strategic shift that will be used by both Democratic and Republican administrations.
EDIT: Genuinely curious why is this being downvoted? Is this related to US politics or a left vs right thing on HN? I'm not from the US, so I don't have any attachment to either party.
1. https://www.pcmag.com/news/us-further-restricts-nvidia-ai-ex...
Did the Biden administration do that off their own backs or was that an extension/compromise of the action of a Republican-held Congress that is, for example, unreasonably jumpy about RISC-V?
I think there is good reason to consider that frontier models might cross the ITAR threshold, actually. Not least because of the risk that they can simply blurt out knowledge that already does. If ITAR exists, an AI that might know how to contravene it could be a problem, because no existing legal framework or threat of punishment will cause it to keep secrets.
But I don't think you can ignore that the two big AI companies were pushing for that judgement because it would benefit them commercially if open weights AI was regulated.
> id the Biden administration do that off their own backs or was that an extension/compromise of the action of a Republican-held Congress
Republicans reverted it so I'm not sure I understand your point.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250513-us-reverses-b...
> But I don't think you can ignore that the two big AI companies were pushing for that judgement because it would benefit them commercially if open weights AI was regulated.
This doesn't matter in this context, NVIDIA didn't push for restrictions for example but they got it anyway. So AI companies would get restrictions either way.
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The opposite party would have outright banned AI. Just listen to the left commentators, they all want to ban technology and, similarly to how they did it in the UK, destroy the whole IT sector altogether.
> “they all want”
Let me stop you right there - any time you generalize to that degree, you’ve already failed to think critically and charitably about the issue.
I am not sure I would characterize the current UK government as 'left' myself.
Based on drawing the 'middle' where, or how widely? It's not as far left as Corbyn's Labour of course, but it's still a Labour government!
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