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Comment by smackeyacky

8 hours ago

Perhaps they should consider leaving the US. Pretty clearly the descent into a corrupt autocracy is having real consequences.

24 comments

smackeyacky

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mft_  6 hours ago

Where would they go?

1) It’s safe to assume the US would do its best to prevent it, and even if Anthropic was successful in exfiltrating their data, code, models, and people, I’d imagine the US would immediately block all US companies from working with them. So they’d be blocked from their own US-based compute, plus Google, Amazon, Microsoft, xAI, Meta, etc.

2) Where would they go? China maybe, but as far as we can tell it doesn’t have sufficient compute for Anthropic’s level of need. The EU likely as or more restrictive in different ways to the US - the EU is hardly buzzing with AI innovation. Some Middle Eastern countries might have the money, energy, and interest in carving out such a position, but no compute. Plus I’d imagine the US would act directly against any country or region receiving them, economic or otherwise.

3) Then, as said elsewhere, the US would block GPU sales to wherever they found a safe haven, preventing the buildup of the compute they’d need to continue.

  • 0x3f  4 hours ago

    > the EU is hardly buzzing with AI innovation

    Depends what you mean. The academic work seems largely... fine? Plenty of good work came out of Europe or European researchers. It seems the problem is more "trying to build a trillion-dollar company of any kind".

    It's an interesting question: does the EU seek only to regulate successful modern American companies to death, or home grown ones too? Probably not a gamble worth taking.

    • mft_  26 minutes ago

      Something commercial? Mistral is the only significant European LLM I'm aware of, and it's not frontier level. Then a dearth of EU-owned hyperscalers, AI-focussed data centers, GPU/CPU/memory manufacturers, even cheap energy...?

    • kranke155  3 hours ago

      The issue with EU is its not one market, for funding or deploying a company of any kind. There is both no funding scale and no easy distribution scale. Same thing with any kind of lobbying you need to do to move laws to be more amenable to tech, you have to do it 20+ times. Nobody does this, which is why smart EU and UK talent migrates to the US, scales, then just uses the weight of their US business to change reality around them in the EU anwyay. For the most part.

Zealotux  8 hours ago

Does any other place have the infrastructure Anthropic requires to train their models and run inference?

xienze  7 hours ago

Oh please, the earlier spat with the Trump admin was the best thing that ever happened to Anthropic. Before that, Claude was really only well-known in developer circles, not the wider normie-sphere. After Anthropic got the "Trump hates them, so it MUST be good!" stamp of approval, the company's recognition and popularity took off.

This too, will end up being a good thing for them. The ban will end up getting lifted due to some "amazing deal" in the coming weeks and Anthropic will now have the "Trump tried to ban them, so they MUST have the most advanced AI model in the world!" stamp of approval just before IPO.

All this stuff is pro wrestling kayfabe.

  • MattRix  5 hours ago

    If you’re implying that the government is in on it and is doing this stuff intentionally in order to boost Anthropic, that’s ridiculous.