This is regulatory capture in action. This will make it hard/impossible for new vendors to come into the market and only established companies will get to play, and charge, for LLMs. What does this mean for open source? Will it become illegal to download weights? What about train your own? Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated to ensure that illegal LLMs aren't being processed on your machine? More broadly though, how will this stop anyone but average people? Countries outside the us will completely ignore this and keep developing and moving ahead. Maybe Europe will adopt similar things but the genie is out. I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop. If you want to stop LLMs with legislation you can't do it like this.
As far as Europe is concerned they have recently signed up to the 'Pax Silica'[1] and willingly givrn the LLM space over to the US incumbents with buildtin legislation banning Chinese models and coperation with them.
So EU will be a renter of the LLMs that the US allows them to use.
In the long run OpenSource will dominate as it did in the DB(MySQL/Postgres)/ServerOS(Linux/BSDs) versus Proprietery rent seeking alts like Oracle and Microsoft et al.
Would be interesting to see what the global startups using Qwen/DS/Kimi etc within the EU-US space navigate the cutting edge OpenSource LLMs vs seeking/getting a permission slip from the US gov.
I hope that open models will dominate. The difficult part to reconcile for me is the amount of compute that's required to create and run such models. Small models are fine, I run local llms 27b param on a gpu, but it's not even close to frontier in capability. Who wants to drop $40k+ on hardware to run these things. Companies, maybe/perhapts. On the other hand, to run a DB I can get a server for $3k and handle tons of traffic on it and other things too.
They have signed a non-binding agreement to potentially cooperate on AI supply chains. It's hardly a declaration of fealty, nor does it have any practical impact on the use of Chinese models in the near term. I'd view this more as hedging their bets for the future.
At the same historical turning point when Europeans are finally waking up to the need to become less dependent on their so called US ally for weapons production and security, they are immediately choosing to become dependent on the next layer of critical infrastructure.
Instead of learning the obvious lesson, Europe seems ready to purchase the future from whoever Washington allows it to purchase from. It used to be the guns, now it's the AI.
It is so idiotic and short sighted that you can barely even blame anyone who keeps exploiting this over and over again. It is always the same story.
open weights model is like... Winamp for example.
it's free, you can download it and use it however you like, you could also do some binary patching or dll injections to alter it functionality but it's not enough to develop next version.
the same is with ai models, weights are the binary final artifacts. for development and improvements you need to have training data, pipelines, RL harnesses, etc.
also of you believe Chinese companies will be releasing weights indefinitely, you are not understanding motivations.
Chinese companies spend significant amounts of money to train a model so why they are releasing it for free? they basically provide researchers starting point for developing tooling and optimizations for serving the model in return. and also get some PR.
They also do not have to pay for inference of those models that much, as they probably serve them with loss anyways to gain market.
they are gov sponsored so money are not issue there, so they try to speedrun their way to what US companies have. And guess what happens when they reach it. they will stop releasing weights and increase pricing or will use them for gov purposes.
> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop.
What's with this hallucination? The thread is about GPT-5.6. Your laptop can't even run gemma 4 unquantized bfloat16, which is light years behind GPT-5.6, and running it is light years from training it. If something that a laptop can train is insanely powerful for you, you don't need to worry about this thread at all.
This also completely screws over U.S. businesses. American startups will be forced to pay premium prices for nerfed, heavily-censored, 'compliant' models from a few massive corporations. Meanwhile, foreign startups will be running cheaper, unrestricted open-source AI. We'll price ourselves right out of the global market.
What government wants to have their population use foreign AI. (Not many). Only issue I see is good enough is what the majority might be okay with.
US intelligence has gamed this out and sees risks at the fringe - advanced artificial intelligence moves the needle the most in countries economically & politically dominated by the USA, the Global South are the targets of this, not US startups.
So far it's only US doing this. I don't think it's in anyone else's interest to limit development of open source models or chips. Nvidia has secured a leading position in GPU market by being the best overall, but if US continues to mess up with the export, that changes the calculation and surely we'll see the alternatives
Any country that developed sufficiently advanced models will pursue the same path. The EU as a regulatory body would pursue the same path, as will/is China.
It’s rather straightforward to think through. If China (they’re practically the only competitor) built a sufficiently advanced AI system would they allow it to propagate on the free market? Of course not. The fact of the matter is that they are behind, even if it’s just a little bit, so the best strategy they have is to try and compete with “good enough” models with lower/subsidized cost - but that is a losing strategy because AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy.
Likewise if, idk, France someone built an AI system that was valuable do you think they’d just hand it over for sworn enemy Donald J. Trump to utilized? Of course not.
The American strategy in the context of the current geopolitical landscape is the only valid one and the obvious one. If you find yourself criticizing the American strategy it’s because you aren’t in the arena where you would, inevitably, make the same decision to restrict access.
the only people its relevant for is the people in first. We wont know what any other state would do until someone passes the us, if that happens.
it sucks that we're in a place where the us has an dishonest leadership, because the current situation would be pretty reasonable if any other admin was in charge.
let models go free, until one proves dangerous in the real world then require gov approval after that.
I don't think anyone rational would have the position everyone should have insta access at the same time to the highest model once it crosses the point of enabling actual dangerous things.
> the U.S. government would initially approve who gets access to its latest new release while AI companies and the administration work out a longer-term plan for regulation on the sector.
So you're a new vendor with a GPT-5.6 or Mythos class model. How do you suppose the regulations are going to work? First you need to get on the list of companies that are allowed to release models, and then you need to have a whole system for limiting access. Both are going to be hugely expensive, on top of training new models already being insanely expensive to begin with.
Thus, it's not a legal limit, but a real practical limit because it's too expensive. If only OpenAI and Anthropic and Google can afford to jump through the hoops, they've effectively gotten to "limit new vendors from competing with OpenAI".
These frontier models are now good enough that they can assist heavily with new optimizations for future models, including, code them. Restricting their usage to a few companies takes away that advantage away from other companies, thereby, limiting new vendors from competing with OpenAI.
> Only companies approved by the government will get access. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model.
That sounds like more than just export control.
This means that big company A that the president has a business interest in could get access to the most powerful AIs, while a startup competing with it doesn't.
Of course. The US government inserts itself into commerce, starts picking winners and losers, and thus creates an industry for petitioning gatekeepers at all levels for access. The goodfellas profit and the public pays. OpenAI and company get manufactured scarcity to raise margins, and lawmakers get to collect an entry fee. This was doomed to happen. The US is much closer to a total state than most give it credit for.
I guess if the new model has the capability to do 'something' that's national security threat, then this makes sense. Otherwise this move makes zero sense, and actually is a drag on innovation - who wants to invest money and people to make a better model that can't actually be sufficiently sold to make a return on investment? Meanwhile other models from Europe or China that are better steal market share. Though that's not to say they won't do the same thing for the same reasons.
> Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated
Well, there was the kerfuffle around PS3 (IIRC) and 'supercomputers'. I suppose that would be the 2020s version of that. What's old is new again. Ultimately you can just continually wire together less powerful hardware to come up with something that can do the job.
Is referring to these new models as "LLM"s still correct anymore? The frontier models are a more complex orchestration of LLMs and many other programming techniques, they aren't just a weight set anymore.
The whole purpose of this is to let non-technical users say things like "make a flappy bird games" and have it succeed after using 10 million tokens. A decent engineer could build the same thing in 20 mins with a small local LLM.
Same thing with a cyberattack, someone who generally knew what they were doing could quickly surface the info to perform each step of an attack. The govt just wants to ensure random 12 year olds can't type: "how I hack fortnite?" and get a step by step guide.
I think it correct to refer to the models as LLMs. The references I can find for the techniques used seem to boil down to transformers + optimizations to make transformer-index larger/faster + chains-of-thought-optimization/the ability to add real time and other data to the context window.
This isn’t about keeping people from having the power of frontier LLMs. So tricks that let others have it aren’t a defeat of this policy.
This is export control, where the US government seeks to leverage the fact that these frontier models are US made. This is then leveraged against opponents, and likely also just for grift. There’s also perhaps a little legitimate worry about the implications of free access to, but that is secondary to the real goal.
I think in the long run this will severely hurt commercial models since they cannot reliably used in workflows and you don't want to be dependent on some trigger-happy random guy.
It is free advertising for now, but in my circle people are looking for alternatives and are surprised how viable they have become.
> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop.
This is such hyperbole. You might be able to train a model that's merely useful in a single domain, but to say you can train an 'insanely powerful' model on consumer hardware is laughable.
Regulatory capture doesn't necessarily mean the regulated get to decide what the regulators do in precise steps. It can simply mean they support and exist within a regulatory regime that greatly benefits the regulated.
In fact, you generally don't want them directly telling the regulators what to do. Instead, the regulators make complex, costly rules that only large establishment players can follow. The regulators look like they're doing their job; the regulated enjoy higher margins and protection from disruption.
The other answers are also valid, but lest we not forget, Sam is openly a fascist supporter and is clearly in bed with the regime in that he funded 47's campaign and jumped in to rescue Hegseth's automated kill list with OpenAI's GPT when Anthropic refused. Furthermore they are likely operating on some kind of quid pro quo agreement even if it's not public knowledge, because that's how all this bribery stuff works. Bezos agreed to use his media empire including WaPo to spout MAGA propaganda, for example. It's trump's one and only MO so to assume it doesn't apply here would be insane.
So, while OpenAI may not in a legal/technical sense, be the benefactory, that is not required for the term to apply, AND they may as well be considered party to the creation of the regulation since they have openly lobbied for it, openly inserted themselves into the government apparatus both formally and informally, and likely are co-conspirators to whatever Trump's autocratic self-enrichment scheme is.
Nick Bostrom wondered aloud in Superintelligence (2014) why states would allow individuals and private organizations to develop AGI. If one takes the possibility seriously, AGI would a source of immense power and any state would to take that opportunity for itself.
Edit: Not saying whether AGI is right around the corner, that's a different discussion. I'm just saying that a serious possibility of AGI and an understanding of possible consequences will make a state act.
AGI is religion invented for the stupid. There's no world in which a silly LLM can make intelligent decisions. It's all smoke and mirrors to make insane amounts of money and to maintain the sheep agreeing with the powerful.
That's often how regulatory capture works. It seems bad for the incumbents, but it's worse for any future competitor. As long as the cost of complying with the regulation is less than your expected loss from competition entering the market, then it's net positive for the incumbent.
GPUs and computer hardware prices have been on the rise. I can see a twisted perspective where it’s stated that the US government needs to closely control computer hardware that can run particular LLMs, as a national security interest. At least that idea isn’t completely wild now seeing what we have been experiencing.
Remember those weird conspiracies we used to have about universal surveillance; tracking and so forth? Well if you think back to those and whatever might happen with GPUs and hardware, and LLM restrictions or the likely age gating//ID’ing that is to come from this, that’s a good guiding framework for how this will proceed and affect normal people.
With the twist that it will end up involving payments that directly benefit Trump, following the Mafia business model that he learned in the construction industry and that he's brought to the White House.
> Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated to ensure that illegal LLMs aren't being processed on your machine?
Actually that sounds pretty reasonable considering current regulations regarding almost any other important resource / material that affect the general population.
You Gen-Z people serously need what Free software, Free society meant. We fought against people like you and against treacherous computing. And we will do again.
I hope this doesn't become the new norm where government becomes the bottleneck for innovation in the AI space.
It's worrying that with no formal and transparent policy framework that the government will be picking winners and losers and stifling innovation.
There's been no public policy, executive order, legislation, or otherwise on this, I wonder if anyone has filed FOIA requests for these decisions or the conversations between the Executive Branch and AI companies.
Indeed, I find quite ironic that some people in tech in the US complain about EU "regulations first" approach, but then their government seem to arbitrarily stop things from being released because, well, there is no established policy on safety guarantees or other similar aspects.
I see it too, but worth noting that this is basically unprecedented at least within the last 25 years; I think you have to go back to export controlled cryptography for another example of this kind of abrupt and targeted regulation.
It’s a bit in general, because if you actually read the EU AI legislation, most of it follows the right ideas and provides more safety, in the sense that OpenAI and Anthropic used to pretend to care about, but never really did.
Our AI czar, David Sacks, whined and moaned about the idea of regulation, even said Anthropic begging for some guidance was asking for “regulatory capture” and was gloating about how right he was they wanted it, 2 weeks ago.
Is it really ironic or just yet another example of how the current administration just keep finding ways to line their pockets? Big Tech has lots of money, and they'd just like to get a little taste. Placing arbitrary restrictions is a pretty good motivator for those being restricted to find some way to make necessary contributions.
On some level though we have to be cognizant of the potential for harm these models have.
LLMs are still a little loosey goosey, and we are right on the cusp (if not there already) for an agent to hack a bank and steal money for some rando teenager with a penchant for jail breaking.
The regulations are and will be negative, but don't lose sight of what LLMs can do off the leash.
I'm fine with this in principle, it's more like regulations last. They looked at the end result and decided it was too powerful to let loose. But also expect the Trump administration to unfairly use it as leverage against US corps.
Meanwhile EU prevented itself from building competitive LLMs in the first place.
It's a way to clearly agree on ground rules that you can plan around, not more, not less.
The alternative is not no rules, do whatever you want. The alternative is executive capriciousness arbitrarily setting the rules based on whims and messing up your plans.
This applies to most things when it comes to the USG/citizens. Protectionism is communist unless they do it. Thinking about developing a nuke? Well bomb you first despite being the only people to ever use them. Free speech and press - unless we don’t like what you say.
Well, when the leaders of this movement go around doom-trolling for years on end this is what happens. It turns out you need to be careful what you say if you're a highly visible public figure. Amazing!
Honestly, with open source models I don't think this regulation means anything because there's no way they can really regulate what's coming out of china. I don't think this affects innovation in AI much at all (unless your definition of innovation is "pour more money into diminishing scaling"). It's mostly just bad news for the US frontier labs, and based on their behavior I don't feel sad for them AT ALL. Like, they've basically alienated the vast majority of people by outright threatening their livelihoods or even society at large, and now we're supposed to feel sorry for them because they can't just go around saying "THIS WILL REPLACE ALL JOBS IN A MONTH!" without consequences?
> because there's no way they can really regulate what's coming out of china
Do you think the Chinese will go parading around that they've created the greatest cyberweapon known to man, and the CCP will be totally cool with the Americans being first in line to buy tokens, because hey, free market?
They would sooner put all their own employees in an incinerator than allow that to happen.
I remember when Republicans told us they want less regulation and smaller federal government. Now they want their dementia riddled god king to control everything from pool liners to the information you're allowed to see, which is all in books and readily available online.
I don't see how you can make a case for a $700bn+ IPO when the government might not even let you sell your product. America is ceding the lead in the AI race. The winners here will be the Chinese AI companies.
If the Chinese models remain predominantly open source then it would probably be for the best. Unfortunately I'm not convinced they will, with examples like Qwen Max showing what could happen.
It will just mean US providers will rapidly loose their moat. Their moat is already shrinking. If they can't release their best models, it'll shrink a whole lot faster...
This is what OpenAI/Anthropic want, it's better marketing than they can pay for -- and it creates a precedent for permanently banning the next generation of open weights models
I wonder what kind of scheme the administration is up to. The obvious play is a squeeze where OpenAI and Anthropic are forced to give parts of their company away, like Intel. But they could also be toying with the idea of limiting frontier AI access to companies that bend the knee, which would further cement their grasp on the tech industry.
I’m sure they are wondering just as much. I assume exhorting Anthropic/OpenAI for personal bribes, favorable government contracts with no restrictions and public acts of submission.
Gated by capacity constraints for all users is very different that picking “trusted partners” that get preferential access. Especially when that access is based on political connections
It's worrying that with no formal and transparent policy framework that the government will be picking winners and losers and stifling innovation.
The market will demand such a framework. I suspect that's the larger idea here, in that Amodei not only wants to be in the room when that framework is written, he wants to be at the head of the table.
He apparently wants it so badly he's willing to set back his own company's IPO to make it happen, given that there can be no pure-play AI IPOs until the regulatory picture is sorted out.
I largely blame people like Amodei for such outcome. As product owners, they could've done it the old way: telling people how great this product is, how much potential it has, and what kind of guardrails the companies are building and etc. But oh no, Amodei has to do the doom trolling 24x7, while in the meantime plays a cult leader by telling people only he knows how to the guarding angel of the AI or the humanity thereof. Ironically, the same people also push their companies to develop more powerful AI in full speed. They think ordinary Americans are so stupid that they can't see through them?
It definitely will be. They are trying to preserve their offensive cyberwarfare and cyberespionage capabilities. It’s not about “bad actors”. It’s about defensive capabilities becoming pervasive and cheap.
Fable didn't silently dumb it down. It printed a warning that it has detected a possible inappropriate topic and you are being switched back to Opus. I hate it, but it isn't dishonest.
The big companies want this. It's a moat for them, a way to keep competitors (especially overseas) out of the US market.
They might try to extend it to downloadable open weight models, but honestly they might not even bother with that. The goal is to keep people from competing on lucrative contracts or the hosting market.
> There's been no public policy, executive order, legislation, or otherwise on this
I mean, insofar as you could frame each new model as its own patentable invention, "patent secrecy" would be an existing policy framework that clearly justifies what's been happening here.
1. Some private company or individual invents something.
2. But the state wants a monopoly on the new thing's military use-cases (against other states/militaries.) So the state forcibly classifies the invention at patent time.
3. But the individual/company still wants to make more money than the state is giving them as compensation for their own use of the patent. They want to sell to the private market. But, of course, the state doesn't want to permit this, as arbitrary private parties could in turn resell to foreign state actors.
4. So a compromise is struck: private use is now made deny-by-default. The state permits the individual or company to sell into the private market, given: a rigorous per-customer KYB background-checking process; strong supply-chain tracing; contractual stipulations prohibiting resale; and the customer use-case being transformative or cost-prohibitive to extract the original invention from.
5. As such, big established enterprise customers who want the invention for private use in their internal industrial processes, can somewhat-easily jump all those hoops to acquire access to it; but everyone else is now basically locked out.
I agree that this is all ridiculously arbitrary right now, but it shouldn't be surprising either.
I can't find the exact blog post (maybe on simonwillison.net ?) but I read people predicting that know your customer laws would be coming to AI if it gets more powerful several years ago already.
Powerful technology that can do immense harm in the hand of individuals/small groups is the most obvious (and legitimate!) target for regulation. Maybe Anthropics hubbub around Mythos made all of this happen earlier than it would have, but it was going to happen (if the models are going to get as capable as valuations imply they will).
(Edit: Of course this doesn't mean it can be effectively regulated in practice)
Further more, no one actually gets hurt if we start rolling these things out more slowly.
Rolling them out selectively according to the whims of an administration that disdains fair process, tears down the institutions that could potentially provide and legitimise reasonable regulation, etc... well, that's another topic.
I'm going to get downvoted here, but all the E/acc people that loudly allocated for Trump, someone known for amassing power by any means necessary including strong arming industry should be publicly eating crow right now. This was something that was always in the cards when you vote for someone who only cares about himself.
All the tech CEOs had no qualms about groveling before Trump and licking his boots, so yeah I assume they must be 100% onboard with stuff like this as well
I am still waiting for a government to try “nationalizing” AI by saying anything produced by AI belongs to “everyone” and thus hugely taxing the profits and proceeds from the product, as soon as Bernie Sanders thinks of it you can bet we’ll hear all about it.
How can you simultaneously be a bottleneck for innovation while being their largest customer, and pouring tons of money and resources into it to help accelerate development?
The startup-brained among us never learned the first rule of business which is to not fuck over your benefactor.
For some conspirational reasons, I am thinking that this was the part of the deal between Anthropic and US government, all buzz was for PR, but behind the closed doors Anthropic asked US to regulate the LLM space
I'm honestly surprised there isn't more political outcry. The administration has a party affiliation that, typically, insists on free market principles and is against government overreach and regulation.
You would think that this government, attempting to puppeteer the most rapidly growing industry in the world, would have more people outraged.
Where are all of the people crying "Communist"? This is one of those moments where it is less of an overreaction.
> We don't let passengers fly on unvetted jumbo jets either and we prevent them from flying when they have problems.
This is Mr. Fart's Favorite Colors all over again. Our "vetting" process is not any more useful than the billion-dollar metal detector you can skip with a TSA Precheck. It arguably does not deter the most dangerous attacks even slightly. What happens when a mentally-ill pilot locks their copilot out of the cockpit? Well, we write off a crowd of passengers and then "vet" the next jet as a safe vehicle.
AI will be the same way. These "safety" measures are performative and do not even slightly address the actual threat surface of the technology. Arguably, it cannot even be done.
Second of all, OP never even said anything about no regulation - they specifically said they wanted transparency which is 100% valid and better than a world where the government baby proofs everything for you
Models are already censored - and who they are or aren't uncensored for has a lot of implications which are way worse
And the jets is a terrible example - you picked one of THE highest regulated industries where NOBODY has a problem with regulation
MAGA is bad enough. Imagine if the current batch of US progressives, who have 0 idea how any of this works, wins the presidency and gets to decide who gets to use it.
From the other side of the world, the current batch of US progressives looks quite liberal. It looks to me they'll either completely restrict AI or not touch it at all.
Do you think they'll try to dictate who gets to use it?
Their innovation relies on a huge amount of investment made under the assumption that they'll continue to be able to provide frontier models to a global audience. If it turns out the US government only lets them sell gimped models to non-citizens then they'll forfeit the whole global market to China and investors will flee like rats.
Also applies to Chinese models. Give it 5 more months of US admin locking out US models and let's see what the market will look like for OoenAI and Anthropic IPO.
> Only companies approved by the government will get access. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model.
I knew the time would come when individuals on personal subscriptions get the short end of the stick. Didn't think it would come so soon. I hope we're not too badly deprecated in the months to come.
Looks like I've got to improve my DeepSeek workflows.
For personal use I don't care if I get access to it. Tokens are becoming too expensive. I am using Chinese models. What worries me is that my company may never get access. I work for a well known US company, but from Europe, we also have developers in Mexico. I can only guess US gov will take this into account when deciding who gets to use the new models.
Even worse than not getting access is getting fired. Since less than 20% of our developers reside outside US and our management is suffering from AI hype, they can decide to close foreign offices as a way to get access to new models.
> For personal use I don't care if I get access to it
There's a big difference between being priced out of a market option and the government saying you literally cannot buy it. We should all be wary of government controls like this.
> We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them. We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks, while we work with the Administration to develop the cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases.
It seems like the exclusion is temporary. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model _right now_.
Also I'd be willing to bet companies in left-leaning states, or with left-leaning figureheads will be excluded from use as well. This administration is amazingly petty and has captured voter records for a reason.
Im not worried about this at all. The OpenAI, Anthropic and the US government can play this game all they want... They're just accelerating the development of open source models; and helping destroy the lead the US has built in AI, and their profit margins along with it.
This is like the battle between PostgreSQL and Oracle all over. Move up market, isolate yourself to enterprises, and watch while everyone else builds on PostgreSQL and erodes any technical advantage you had, until people just stop talking about you altogether.
Encryption is a better example. The USG tried exactly the same tactic in the 90’s. The NSA tried to shove the Clipper chip down everyone’s throats. The USG put export controls on encryption and people went as far as to tattoo the algorithms on their body.
But like you said, they will try to control it and fail. Like they always do.
That until it becomes illegal to have or use open source models without approval and licence from government. With more talks about on device scanning, this could be easily plumbed in. If OS detects there is open source model, it could brick your device or alert authorities. Then next step will be limiting what operating system you can install. Likely only those where you cannot remove client side scanning.
It can't easily be plumbed in, though. I can spin up my own Linux build with none of that plumbing and do what I want with it. I can grab China's best models and use them or distilled versions on my own terms because OSS allows for that. Until hardware comes fully locked down and the models cannot be run on old hardware, both a long ways off, OSS is a way out.
I wonder how you can reliably detect an open source model though. It can be stored in any binary format, and the weights can be modified slightly so that the float values are completely different while the network works the same. The binary that runs it can be obfuscated as well. Maybe the hardware could detect common LLM inference patterns at runtime? That would probably produce many false positives.
Eh probably easier ways to do this. Just sanction all entities that release open weight models for "illegal distillation". Enough to cross the risk threshold for most businesses in the west, and reduce future monetization opportunities.
The government will just claim that unsanctioned models have the potential to deliberately introduce security vulnerabilities when working on IT projects (e.g. be trained to strongly yet covertly favoring introducing compromised dependencies when you are not looking).
Then laws will be made to forbid organizations who use models other than those from the sanctioned labs to participate in critical projects on national security concerns.
All of a sudden, no business would risk using open source models anymore.
Then all they do is drive the usage of open models underground (copyright infringement is illegal too, and still common), stifle US companies operating legally, and accelerate the rest of the world decoupling from the US.
I hope they do it! It will have a positive long-term effect just like the Iran war footgun accelerates renewable energy transition.
And companies from outside the US will outcompete those from the US forcing more protectionism, higher prices in US etc. I think there have been several cycles of several industries that have gone through this cycle (cars, shipping?), and mostly forced to roll back.
> Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety
> We're proposing stronger regulation of the technology, proposing giving the government the ability to, again, in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology
> He gave several suggestions for how a new agency in the US could regulate the industry - including "a combination of licensing and testing requirements" for AI companies, which he said could be used to regulate the "development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities".
From what I recall they were big in the extortion business back in the day, and these days I think they are into construction or waste disposal, maybe both.
Given how the WH operates these days, this is ripe for corruption. Imagine the WH dislikes the CEO of a biotech company, while appreciating the attitude of a competitor CEO. What is to stop them from stalling on giving acess for the latest model to the company they don't like?
> What is to stop them from stalling on giving acess for the latest model to the company they don't like?
Congress, if any of those creatures were vertebrates.
For the next few months, though? Nothing will. Those in the in-crowd will line each others' pockets at the expense of the rest of us. I will say that the recent election results and the building bipartisan angst over data centers and surveillance (e.g. Flock) are encouraging.
The tragedy is the Trump admin is setting the precedent and creating the framework which will be abused in the future. For all the complains he made about the deep state, he's just creating a new avenue for them to abuse power
Ah yes, the defining tragedy of the Trump administration is ... gestures into the middle distance ... look over there! what if those guys abuse it one day?
Same as it ever was. If you listen to interviews with Zuckerberg he’ll talk about the constant communiques from The White House during the Biden administration. Trump didn’t start this unfortunately he’s just more brazen about it.
The White House is already 100% corrupt. The American political system has failed in keeping out a conman pedophile from the highest office in the land. What follows is pretty much what you'd expect under these conditions.
In most countries around the world corruption/bribes are necessary for doing business. Companies even account for it on their books. It was about time the US caught up.
It's really interesting that someone can know all of these domestic Chinese names and yet declare the industry generally a "smoking ruin". Is it from a newsletter or something?
Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.
> It's really interesting that someone can know all of these domestic Chinese names and yet declare the industry generally a "smoking ruin".
They're different things. Just like you can be the most famous actor or singer and still be poor. Being popular, having good products and actually making money is not the same.
And it's all relative. Today if NASDAQ dropped 20% the world would declare it in ruins. Are the companies still "alive"? Yes.
> Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.
Not true. A lot of them e.g. the public listed 1s have reported increased competition and reduced margins.
Seems like a pretty terrible idea in hindsight, destroying private lending, given how desperately the government is trying and failing to raise domestic consumption now.
Some of these were very good decisions imho, from someone who spent two months in Chineese rural area around ~2019.
- Tutoring platforms were a plague on Chineese youth that increased the weight of their already _very_ heavy load (tbh, i think and education reform might have been preferable, this is a stopgap, but at least it is something).
- Ant group was offering predatory consumption loans to rural China, which to me felt a lot like the "revolver credits" that plagued my country in the 80s and 90s and pushed to many to suicide (the surname cam from their english name, "revolving credit", and because my countryside had a lot of hunting rifle available to whomever). Considering how rural china is mistreaded by Chineese state and general government (and imho this is a real weakness in China politics), having this group by a huge fine for their practice and a general debt forgivness was great. Curtailing Ant's power is also good.
- Stopping consolidation is a great way to keep a market free.
- Crypto companies: mining diverted power from villages who couldn't compete on purchasing power to mining wharehouses in some state. The ban is great for the rural population at least. Also, if that can curtail the birth of Chineese cryptobros, great for the mental health of the country.
This was generated by AI and slightly re-written or end capped by a human. Anyone that knows who Meituan and Boss Zhipin are wouldn't make the claims this post makes. It's not reasonable that someone who could list off these companies and incidents would believe China's tech industry is in ruin. There's no way. This poster clearly promoted for the list, and wrote his commentary around it. Sad.
The US is now doing a softer and broader version of the same thing to trust-based export sectors. It’s not the same method but! it is the same mechanism. The main difference is that the US damage is more reputational than structural, so it could be reversed faster (only if policy stops telling customers that dependence on America is a political risk)
Orange and apples... China has very intentional policy behind those decisions. The US... Not so much. I don't buy that Trump and his whole cabinet are as dumb as they look, but they are only motivated by profit. And ignorance.
> defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada
Huh? US foreign military sales are up at all time highs
"Total exports by the United States, the world’s largest supplier of arms, increased by 27 per cent. This included a 217 per cent increase in US arms exports to Europe, according to new data published today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)"
Aren't a lot of these purchases (a) locked in from contracts made pre-admin; and (b) otherwise largely related to anxiety over Russia? There are too many confounding variables here.
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
The real reason, afaik, that the US is trying to restrict access to SOTA models is that a very large component of USA tailored access and surveillance relies on exploits and weaknesses that these models will easily detect.
Thus, it really is an export control issue, but it has nothing to do with offensive capabilities. Offensive capabilities always exist, but pervasive defensibility would upset the asymmetric advantage that attackers, especially the USA, currently have.
There are now Asian models coming , optimized focused on cybersecurity defense at a high level, so I suspect this will be a relatively moot point soon.
LLMs are not great at creating exploits, but they are really good at detecting them. That asymmetry alone is enough to destroy the “offensive capabilities” narrative.
Yes, mythos can find exploitable bugs, even write bench exploits. But real exploits require a good dose of human psychology, and most of the tools needed are off the shelf available anyway. You still need a real cybersecurity expert to effectively weaponize a zero day into a deployable exploit.
But an LLM can inspect payloads, packages, and blobs en masse and find those exploits in a way that was wholly impractical before, so the asymmetric attack advantage is dissolved by strong LLMs.
The USA is trying to protect its cyberwarfare advantage, not protect against attackers. The exact opposite, actually. Porous security is a huge advantage to technologically advanced state actors.
> There are now Asian models coming , optimized focused on cybersecurity defense at a high level, so I suspect this will be a relatively moot point soon.
Are these models still relevant for people outside the US? I get the impression we're stuck on GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8 pretty much permanently now, and relying on Chinese models in future.
Anybody who used codex or claude for the last few months is sitting on directories full of session logs that -- with the right motivation and effort -- can be massages and used for fine tuning or reinforcement training on any large model.
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.
> 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 :-).
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.
> 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.
You shouldn’t build a business that relies on any of these models. It’s a geopolitical and sovereignty risk now. Someone could just rug pull your entire stack.
Not only that, but using Opus 4.8 [1m] right now outside the US, and suddenly I only have a 500k context window. I really hope this is just a strange Claude Code bug, but I had access to a 1 Million window before, and it wouldn't entirely surprise me if context window length becomes another US export restriction.
The Anthropic page here seems to say that Max users should have access to the full 1 Million window for 4.8:
I was already setting up my infra to experiment with GLM 5.2 and its 1 Million token window before this happened. I think I'm glad I did.
EDIT: Found a solution, seems Claude Code 2.1.193 (or an earlier version I didn't notice) changed default settings, so that if you have Autocompact turned on it occurs at 50% of the context window. If you turn off Autocompact, the full 1 Million context window is restored. Another example of Claude Code quietly changing default settings sigh
You want to compact early though as sending the whole chat you will end up with a lot of tokens not in the cache which 1. Costs way more and 2. Will slow the request down as it has to process it all.
Well I was expecting it but if it's not going to become available in this subscription cycle for me I will cancel oai subs as I did with claude ones months ago...
moving to open weight models is trivial now, with optimizations and stuff glm 5.2 is roughly the same price as the best models around from multiple vendors.
unless I could atleast try and see Sol perform like 10x better I don't really have a reason to switch back.
I used Fable for like what 2-3 days at most and didn't really feel it was so much better, only difference was I had to prompt it less, not to get what I want but to get to a working output. Code quality was still shit, still made bad plans and analysis and so on.
This is the AI booster equivalent of "well it works on my machine." Works better for me != works great for everyone. I'm amazed how much people on HN seem to think that all coding is stupidly simple web apps.
I felt like it was about 10X better at "pretty" but straightforward 1 shot'ish type tasks. Not so different for complex and specific tasks in real code-bases.
Why do you say it was a lot better, what type of tasks were you testing it on?
This is a real head scratcher. Unless this is a very short term action it seems to have only downsides for everybody:
- people pay much more for US models than Chinese models because right now they're the best. Once they're no longer the best (since you don't get access to them) why would anyone pay several times as much for the same result?
- once you get a high amount of tokens flowing into China instead of US companies, they will train on those chats and their rate of improvement will only accelerate, making US models even less attractive over time
- the sky-high IPO are dead in the water, since their story of "we will replace a good chunk of all knowledge work in the world, capturing a few % of total global spend relating to it" turns into "we will make a bunch of money out of a few dozen S&P 500 paying for the best, and some pocket money out of whoever uses our overpriced models that are as good as Chinese models" - far less money overall. Losing access to untold billions of investor money certainly won't improve performance for the US labs
- all the non-US people start asking themselves why they're funneling money to US corporations who barely share any of the secret sauce compared to Chinese corporations who share plenty when it comes to LLM, including the models themselves (at least for now)
- Chinese models have significantly less guardrails, making for better end-user experience
- there is a small but non-zero chance Euros get off their asses and invest into AI, making something halfway decent and further fracturing the market which cuts into US profits
So what's the benefit here? I thought the Mythos situation was the current admin taking revenge on Antrophic for not kissing the ring, or simply looking for a bribe, but no matter which way I look at it it's a self-own. The only way this would make any sense is if AGI is imminent, which I don't think even the boosters are arguing at this point.
Theoretically US could outlaw Chinese models, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to accomplish as the rest of the world certainly won't, especially as long as they release open weights models that you can run without phoning home.
Yea not sure who would put money into an OpenAI or Anthropic IPO at this point. After this episode I promptly bought the hardware I needed to run local models (~$25k) and am extremely impressed. The price tag alone is worth the peace of mind knowing I will always have a locally running LLM that nobody can take away. I don't need Mythos-level intelligence to do 99% of my day to day work; Opus 4.8 was more than enough and I am pretty close to that with the open source models. So what happens when this hardware inevitably gets cheaper and cheaper and people realize they can run the models they actually need locally and without handing all their data over to these companies?
Only if you're doing cutting edge research or some highly, highly niche project would you need the frontier models.
The organizers of the No Kings rallies have done infinitely more to achieve political change in the United States than online commentators who make fun of them for being insufficiently cool and edgy. Effective activism is not about feeling superior to the normies who have families and are busy on weekdays.
Afaik there is not a single invader in Russian lands. And nobody was threatening to invade, especially after Napoleon and Hitler demonstrated invading Russia is suicide.
Pretty happy for anything that will throw some sand into the gears of AI development, given all the negative externalities that are becoming apparent, even if the admin is doing it for the usual dumbass reasons.
Not sure if the USG reserving all superior models for themselves and big corp is sand in AI dev? Inference is clearly constrained, people still want better models. Everyone will still use the best they can afford -- now additionally limited by what the USG allows them to pay for.
> given all the negative externalities that are becoming apparent
What specific externalities are you referring to? The only I can think of is high electricity usage, but consuming energy isn't an externality in itself. It depends entirely on how that electricity is generated and whether its environmental costs are already priced.
Reminds of the TikTok ban for security and safety only for it to be sold to a fellow crony. Can't help but see this play going down again. Threaten / Ban / Control / Pressure a technology+company, then get your cronies a seat at the board.
The cynic in me suspects they were salivating so much over the Spacex IPO they wanted a finger in anthropics 2026 IPO. Banning fable ~1 day after.
In the early days of the LLM era, there was lots of talk about how big incumbents, in particular google would be disadvantaged relative to “startups” like OpenAI because of their valuable legacy businesses that could be destroyed if something went wrong. Mainly people thought about big lawsuits but government action is similar.
Now OpenAI and Anthropic are big incumbents with Trillion dollar valuations at stake, so they can’t take any risks. Unlike google they don’t really have a thriving primary business to protect though, so without being able to continue to take risks and ignore regulation startup-style, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to stay relevant.
So them banning Fable for only non-Americans is what we non-Americans should expect to be the norm going forward? Way to build even more resentment abroad.
I'm very pro-west, but at this point okay, I guess the rest of us have to side with China, not because we remotely like it, but because they don't try to be quite so antagonistic to us in everything they do.
Expect the US to sanction non-US-controlled models and put sanctions on individuals, companies and countries that use them? They already do this with other things like oil.
Can you cite any examples of a US citizen being sanctioned for importing foreign technology (not exporting)? Please don't cite anything OFAC-related, it does not apply here.
This was coming for a while. For years now there have been job postings for ai safety and not really what people expect. Jobs in places like RAND, funded off DOD grants, exploring the feasibility of building a bioweapon with off the shelf tooling and measuring how far along these tools are. Maybe they figured out it was too easy now, and this is the clamping down we are seeing in response.
What part? The job posts are factual. There are still some up on rand career website although the bio specific ones are all filled now. Here is their department page on the subject where they cover the scoping (1). Mirror biology seems like something out of sci fi but it is one of their main efforts it seems so the theory must hold some water. There's also concern about bioweaponry and pandemics. The rest is me connecting the dots.
How does this account for the Chinese models that are the ones people will use if they can't use OAI's or Anthropic's. Last time I checked, the US president doesn't have the ability to regulate the Chinese models. Considering this, do you still stand by your maybe?
I really don't think this administration is capable of thinking strategically enough for that. I'm starting to think we lost the AI war about two weeks ago at 5:21.
Maybe they are looking into those too and a ban might be on the horizon. President makes their own rules now and controls the supreme court, you can't consider precedent anymore.
Trade is being reconfigured in the midst of Trump's idiotic trade war (and even more idiotic real war) and militaries worldwide, particularly our closest allies, are seeking non-US sources of arms.
we still have this delusion that we can just pound our chests and throw our weight around. it's clearly not working, it's not helping the citizens, but people still demand this.
> Organizations interested in model access may join the GPT 5.6 waitlist line, hosted at OpenAI's official Palm Spring satellite campus. Line begins at rear entrance with expedited VIP waitlist line options for holders of partnering cryptocurrency tokens. Application fee required for access to venue; waivers available for select US corporations.
Anth/OpenAI simply wanted the government to pull the ladder after them and ban models from China.
Seems it blew in their faces and probably the new frontier models will be available only to a select few. Many people predicted this, only a naive person would believe that access to something with these capabilities would be decided by some dude in California.
As entertaining as the sheer Schadenfreude of the situation is, this is terrible for foreign peasants like myself. It no longer makes any sense to pay for America's frontier AI models. I'd be funding the training of models I will never be able to use.
GLM 5.2 is competitive with Opus 4.6. If the best model I'll ever get is Opus 4.8, then the choice is clear. I'll miss Opus.
Yes, to the surprise of some HNers, regulations can be good or bad. Just because there are people unhappy with current regulation doesn't automatically mean regulation shouldn't exist at all.
BTW this isn't an opinion on the availability of GPT 5.6. I couldn't care less about that.
Imagine if someone was lobbying for some reasonable regulation (we should regulate drugs, based around clinical trials) and then instead of a transparent system you get purely executive actions with little to no public justification (Trump declares all glp1s illegal no one knows why exactly)
Would you levy the same two quote criticism of the reasonable call for regulation?
Unfortunately we're not in a position where we can promise an exact date, but we expect it to take weeks (not days or months). It's the best coding model we've ever trained and we're bummed we can't release it to everyone yet. When we do launch, we'll share a lot more evals and testimonials and demos that help show what it's good/bad at. Personally hoping that both GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5 get broadly released soon so that everyone (myself included) can try them head to head.
You don't have to mention details, but is it internally a topic that your CEO hasn't even publicly criticized the Anthropic model freeze and are open ai folks seeing through the Musk/xai game that is in play here?
You may want to inform your lawyers that promises made in advertising is legally binding in some countries, such as Australia.
The "Plus" and higher tiers are advertised as "The latest models" but if that's not true any more then Open AI is opening themselves to investigations from organisations like: https://www.accc.gov.au/
Promising "X" for $Y to everyone and then delivering "X" only to the "chosen few" at the detriment of others opens you up to lawsuits because then your product advertisement is a lie.
For a comparison, imagine a telco selling "100 Mbps for $20/mo" and then throttling the connection for customers that aren't currently favoured by the Trump administration!
I assume for more technical folks this is not needed, as it's just a marketing term. There's no need to use such words because it's obvious, none worked for months to release a worse model/phone/laptop you name it.
any plans to make 1m context standard for codex/gpt 5.x subs as anthropic has with cc and opus for subs? 258k toks is sometimes a little tight, even 500k would help.
In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over the sovereignty.
The US gov sees these AI companies as bartering power, not as innovation. Wouldn’t you as a parent always want what’s best for your child, not for yourself?
It also feels like they can’t just relocate out of the country, as the administration will surely sanction anyone from business within the country again. These firms are so over inflated with evaluations and opex, they’ve dug themselves into a corner.
This is not to say regulation does not exist in any other country, but it’s clear now after what’s happening at Anthropic + OAI that the US gov has taken these companies hostage.
This is only further playing into the hands of open source and the outside models; the US gov is going to be to blame for when they all lose the race to low cost/free.
> In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over my sovereignty.
So, locate in China, where every company of importance is essentially required in practice to maintain ties to the CCP?
I personally think the US has gone too far with its use of export controls and sanctions as a political tool, but it's foolish to believe that it's different anywhere else on the planet.
In China, it has even been reported that top AI talent is restricted from overseas travel.
Bottom line: if you're working on cutting-edge technology that is deemed to be of critical national security importance and has military or dual use implications, you're going to be a hostage no matter where you go.
You wrongly assumed I implied these firms relocate to China. We are all aware of how China operates and controls its assets.
AI has long existed in many countries around the world without this type of behavior from the government. Deepmind in the UK, Mistral in France, DeepL in Germany - the governments don’t seem to be forcing employees to get their deploys approved by a government official.
My argument is that the US gov does not like that these companies have too much influence which they do not feel they can mandate. It’s slowing the entire country down at a very critical sink or swim inflection point in this tech.
I think it’s pretty clear why they’re abiding by this:
-the US is the only place where you can raise the kinds of money you need to run a lab like this.
-a government that won’t let you sell products to customers abroad will probably object even more to you moving abroad.
Even if you made the move abroad, that government might no longer let you access US data centers.
-This basically affects OpenAI and Anthropic, which make the only LLMs most people consider frontier nowadays. Since most open weights models rely on distillation of frontier models, it may genuinely entrench those companies more.
It may be playing into the hands of open source OAI/Anthropic dependencies start to look more dangerous, but it also makes building better OSS models harder.
The advantages the AI labs rely on might be less durable than a proprietary process in industrial manufacturing, but it’s still meaningful.
I think the bigger reckoning will come from a different angle: tokens will eventually need to cover cost.
That will likely mean multiplying prices compared to today. And companies already complain now!
Model orchestration and smaller models that can run locally or cheaply will become more important in my opinion.
Right now, you can still default to GPT/Claude and it’s kind of fine, but that will have to change.
The elephant in the room is that the US AI firms should not be as valuable as they are. They should not require the sort of capital they are seeking, the amount of employees, the amount of offices and resources..but they are so steeped in investor interests - why stop being fed?
Many Americans want AI to fail. The US gov wants to control AI. The AI companies are running out of things to do, and are shipping product after product after product to keep the perceived productivity narrative alive.
At this rate I would not be surprised to see an OAI/Anthropic merger just to throw everything AI the US has to offer to the global markets.
> wouldn't that cause both Anthropic and OAI to fire non-citizens?
They would do what the thousands of other companies do with their tens of thousands of engineers handling ITAR/EAR-regulated software/hardware every day: compartmentalize their workforces, buildings, and access.
because the administration has been repeating the same patterns over pretty much its entire existence.
Dont worry though, the rest of the entire world gets access to better chinese models :-), once they get a taste for those the US has lost their little trade game and the future truly belongs to China.
Its almost like they are serving it up on a silver platter.
ofc they are not, they are just betting all in their models will be better, which is unlikely. (just look at the chinese law and all the names atop of advanced AI papers...)
It will be much harder for Chinese models to close the gap than it is to keep the historical 6-9 months behind. Their models' performance are heavily propped up on distillation runs. The capital going to their frontier labs is 10x-100x smaller than US frontier labs.
Basically the signal is that the total market for any US AI company is capped at however big the US market is. As non-US AI converges to Opus 4.8 level parity, whatever is still non-US consumer base shrinks towards zero.
The calculus is changing for non US, non Chinese users.
Hypothetically if the US continues to restrict their frontier models and adds a ban on Chinese/open models then it would to obliterate services like open router. American cloud companies would presumably be blocked from selling capacity to run banned models in this situation.
That causes a shortage of compute/gpu resources internationally and an oversupply of non-revenue generating hardware in the US.
If that happens then what percent of your salary is worth securing this compute worth? How much does the cost of a data centre chip change? It’s difficult to say.
Why would they? Today you have datacenters in EU offering Chinese and European models from Deepseek v4 Pro and Mistral Medium down to some Qwen 3.6 35B for effectively peanuts compared to Anthropic.
This is the last wake up call for EU. After China starts controlling their models, in 5 years EU would be left with archaic technology compared to other major economies
I asked this question in another thread [1] but I'll ask it in a different way here:
If the US continues to limit advanced AI to it's own domestic companies, US companies will have a large unfair advantage over foreign competitors who will no longer able to compete.
Wouldn't it then make sense for governments around the world to start banning or tariffing US products and services to protect their industries?
Limiting exports of AI services to all foreigners is probably allowed under GATS, since there's no favoring one county over another. But even then there's a national security exemption, which fits reasonably well with US arguments here.
If a country thought the AI export restrictions were inconsistent with treaty the remedy is challenging them, not unilaterally imposing their own tariffs. But even if they got a favorable panel decision the US would speak, and the Appellate Body is non-functional because the US stopped consenting to the addition of new members and all the terms expired. Which means anything that gets appealed is frozen indefinitely waiting for the AB to reach a quorum that won't come until the US changes is mind (and Biden didn't reverse Trump's decision here).
> We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.
I'm very glad to see them say this explicitly and prominently.
This isn’t just about AI: they do not want you to privately use computers at all, in a way that cannot be surveilled. They want to extinguish all forms of general purpose computing and restrict you to walled gardens of apps and all code written via AI with the government-in-the-middle. It will be illegal to write code by hand, only people with “bad intentions” do that, because otherwise, why not just use AI like a sane person?
This isn't going to save you unless you're ok being a criminal. There is nothing stopping the government from making open source versions of these models equally controlled.
And given how willy-nilly they are operating I see no reason they won't clamp down on open source. All it takes is someone with connections/political contributions wakes up one day and realizes that open source is a threat to their power or bottom line and it will be declared an imminent threat with no oversight or debate.
It’s looking very fragile from a legal point of view. Ownership of compute and software freedom will be next k the chopping block after control of networks that’s occurring at the moment.
They'll just make it a crime to run the models unless they authorize you (classifying it as a munition, like they tried to do with encryption), and if your power bill is suspicious you'll find yourself in jail.
Any company providing the models will be deemed a threat to national security.
That’s not true at all. While not as good as proprietary models they are still very good and can do A LOT, certainly more than their cost would make it seem.
It’s only a matter of time before companies start to acknowledge the huge cost of tokens and look for a cheaper alternative with basic cost-benefit analysis.
My F500 company is getting local infrastructure going to host open models and I’m sure many will just switch to bedrock + the best open models.
It’s foolish for companies to let three companies dictate the price of tokens, I just don’t think they are aware of this now by and large.
"We believe in broad access, and we plan to make GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna generally available in the coming weeks. As part of our ongoing engagement with the U.S. government, we previewed our plans and the models’ capabilities ahead of today’s launch. At their request, we are starting with a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners whose participation has been shared with the government, before releasing more broadly. During this preview, we will continue testing and coordinating closely with partners as we work toward broader availability. We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them. We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks, while we work with the Administration to develop the cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases."
This amount of courting the current administration is pretty scary imo.
> This amount of courting the current administration is pretty scary imo.
That’s ironic – I interpreted that paragraph with the opposite slant: positively. If that’s what the government mandates then these companies, in the end, have little choice, so was at least relieved to see them publicly pushing back.
They absolutely do have a choice, Anthropic and OpenAI could fight it in court. Iran showed Trump is a coward, he wouldn't risk tanking the only industry still keeping the stock market growing.
I wonder what's going to happen when the administration rolls over to the OtherTeam(tm). If they've established a good relationship with Team A then Team B is automatically going to hate their guts.
seems pretty smart to me. opens doors and provides opportunities that those that don't court the government will miss out on. of course, if they're principled, that's okay (regardless of which admin it is), but the reality is most companies aren't. gotta get a leg up somehow.
Anthropic's fear-mongering and marketing is the reason we have these restrictions in the first place.
Despite their virtue signaling, Anthropic is the only major lab that has never released an open weights model, has been caught intentionally nerfing a model after release (Opus 4.6), intentionally and silently degrades performance for suspected competitors and AI researchers, complains incessantly about distillation when everyone is doing it (and after they settled for pirating books), and wants to pull the ladder out from everyone trying to catch up.
They're anti-consumer and only concerned with holding the power themselves.
I'm not a fan of Altman, but Anthropic is the worst actor in the space, and I hope they lose.
Everyone in the space was talking about the automation of work from about day 2. People couldn’t stop themselves from talking about the way it was going to end work, and tech firms were firing people left right and center over AI.
Notably, Anthropic is the firm that stuck to its guns with the US Government, meaning they likely believe in their own spiel.
I mean it's fear-mongering until it isn't. I think people have become a bit too comfortable with dismissing the dangers of misaligned AI as simply "marketing hype".
What about openai's fear mongering, or googles, or JP Morgans, or Frank Herbert's, or Arthur C. Clarke's or Samuel Butler's?
If you can't envision plausible scenarios where very bad things happen because of a malevolent actor, ChatGPT 6, and a little bad luck - you need to think harder.
I mean, it seems like common sense - a limited beta test before widespread rollout. I'm not convinced they'll ever come up with a good framework for dealing with the cyber & bio issues, but getting triggered by a beta test rollout seems overboard.
It is common sense, and with literally any other administration in the past century it would seem like a good idea.
I have zero confidence that this particular administration has any interest in regulating the industry for the good of the country, much less for the good of humanity. They will use regulation to maximize personal profit for themselves and their cronies, at the expense of the nation. I would not have thought that of any other US administration in the past 100 years.
In the longer run, it probably won't matter. If the level of corruption we see currently becomes the norm, then the US is facing much bigger problems than counter-productive industrial policy.
The difference is that FDA approvals are a well-defined process with specific and actionable criteria for the release of a new product. Whereas this is the administration running on vibes and favouritism
150 years ago, Bayer Inc. was mass producing Heroine. 130 years ago Merck and Parke-Davis were mass producing Cocaine(TM) -- all with zero oversight. It would be another 50 years before we even had an FDA and another 50 before the FDA was a reasonably well-oiled machine with a solid set of processes and requirements. Even then, it couldn't really (and can't really today either) prevent these non-US companies (both Heroine and Cocaine were German) from making and selling elsewhere.
US will ban Chinese models and try to get their allies to do the same. Just like they did with Huawei. Alternatively, they'll put up legal roadblocks that open models are unlikely to jump over due to costs or other reasons.
Otherwise they're putting US frontier labs at a huge disadvantage by preventing them from recouping costs on their biggest models.
How much more will OpenAI and Anthropic models cost when they're the only AI you can legally use?
There's a huge difference between 'pro market' and 'buddies with some big businesses' and this administration is making it very clear, at least to those who would see.
Last year Tim Cook gifted Trump a custom, one-of-a-kind glass plaque with a 24-karat gold base [1]. (Cook needed a policy outcome that would protect Apple's supply chain costs and avoid a costly 100% tariff on certain chips and components.)
You may have to make similar offerings if you want to use the latest version of ChatGPT.
LLMs have two avenues. One is the realm of self improvement in fields with verifiable output like programming and math. The other is natural language where they can't generalize super well, and therefore need a lot of new training data. Today new data means interactions with an LLM, which is what only the leading chat providers have.
In both cases they will continue to improve and slowly replace white collar jobs.
The biggest bottleneck currently is lack of hearing and seeing capabilities which isolates LLM training data input to entered text mostly. Once they start interacting with people by observing their behavior, almost all knowledge will be trained on. Then they will become adept lawyers and psychologists. Behavioural understanding can be only 5 years away.
After that they will be limited by their navigation , i.e., robotics.
If it's the case then software engineers still have the same place as pre-ClaudeCode era, because 4.8 and 5.5 are damn good at algo but notoriously bad at architecture and coordination.
Thousands of American engineers all over the country (most of whom probably aren't on Hacker News) work with ITAR/EAR-regulated software and hardware every single day: these regulations are really not difficult to abide if you're a citizen.
This type of things is what frustates the people around, its like they are already trying to control an supposed to be open-source model and just for their own benefit. this is why CHINA will eventually rule the tech space.
OpenAI/Anthropic are begging to be restricted because it's great marketing and it creates a precedent to permanently ban open weights models. The problem is nobody in government believes in/cares about commodity pricing of truly open AI and how much it could help the world economy and prosperity.
Companies like Microsoft have been asleep at the wheel in terms of security for decades and now there's a model that can identify where they've been careless. That's not a "nuclear bomb level threat" or whatever Anthropic wants to call it, it's reckless carelessness by the existing companies.
In 2008 there was a scandal about how every software contractor (including the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Oracle) working for the US government had a rootkit installed on all their systems. In 2020, there was a scandal on how people just pretended to remove that rootkit and had been covering it up since the earlier scandal.
The US intelligence agencies claim it's from Russia, but those agencies always claim it's from Russia. Since 2020 the press just stopped talking about it, with no hint of anything being solved.
Honest question: for those working with those models on offensive security, how much does this move make sense?
I am asking because I have seen a growing number of stories about organizations getting owned by either raw mismanagement of security, supply chain attacks that are often a failure at the ecosystem level, npm, etc.
I am not really seeing from what we hear about the use of AI for penetration as a threat yet. The growing problem with security seems to be more at the management and ecosystem layers.
Not many story that netfilter, ipfw or pf got owned by one of those frontier models.
A lot of stories that organisation X and Y left keys on a public repo for months.
I'm waiting for that government subcommittee hearing where they are supposed to decide if my new cpu design is big endian or little endian. And they can't seem to decide if it should be coded in octal or hexadecimal. There's a separate committe deciding if the cpu clocke's phase 2 should be 90-degrees or 180 degrees different. There's a special group trying to decide how may accumulators the cpu should have. And there's a markdown already going on to decide if the flags register should have a separate flags for republicans and democrats.
While purely speculation, I believe the same thing would have happened, albeit even sooner, under a Harris administration. Government intervention was inevitable and it will have to be worked out through the law.
The rest of the word at some point will increase chinese AI company. I am using some of their services and for many task they are good enough . It can be a winning strategy for a short period and a disaster in long term. Xi and China i think , are very happy of these decisions. They are building their model and their hardware. Even if for now it is subpar ( i don't know, it is an hypotesys), money that us will lose for this choice will make Chinese products improve a lot .
It's called ghosted, shadow banned, too sensitive / shitshow; Basically a multiplier of 0.1 is added to this post's ranking, or similar, and it will need thousands of upvote instead of hundreds to show.
It's commonly applied silently to posts that simply don't look good or become a nightmare to manage the narrative of. It's a healthy way to manage a community while looking transparent.
I think it's sucky and cheap, but at the same time it's also the best solution.
If they do it, they should mark the post as such as give an explanation. Otherwise you never know if uncle "Sam" called and asked it to be treated as such.
CP 2077 belongs to a 80s franchise, it was futuristic back then. Since the 2000s, cyberpunk the 80's genre is an accurate representation of the present and past. The future looks bleaker now, with fewer romanticized decorations like flying cars and social dynamics being worse than what the cyberpunk grandfathers imagined. For example "low life" being way more controlled which is exactly what both masses and elites wanted.
In retrospect it's obvious that the cyberpunk authors were mistakenly projecting certain parts of their present into the future (relative freedom of the masses and increasing rate of "traditional" engineering), and didn't consider second order effects and political action/reaction.
This will be exactly as effective as the BBC's efforts to ensure only UK taxpayers are allowed to stream Doctor Who from BBC servers on Christmas morning.
The downside of marketing your product as being too powerful to be safe is that people start taking it seriously. I’m surprised there isn’t more discussion about the contradiction. If it really is the end of labor and a deadly weapon then export controls actually make sense.
So which position should the government take? The one it’s doing? Or that LLMs aren’t actually key to national security.
"U.S. government will decide who will switch to deepseek"
Or, as a European, thanx for letting Mistral catch-up, I was looking for a reason to use it... A foreign gov deciding what I can use or being able to suddenly pull the plug on my tool makes it easier to choose the lesser quality. (And now I hope my own leaders won't start pulling models :p)
What is the incentive of the U.S. government? Is it to prevent adversaries from accessing this powerful technology? Because of security concerns? Or is there a fear that European, Asian, Latin American, and other companies could use it to build competitive products? What happened to free trade? What about all of humanity advancing and making progress?
I'm finding it extremely hard not to have a cynical perspective on all of this. There's an idea that I've been mapping onto this whole this, which could be called something like effective knowledge. Regular old knowledge is just information, or access to information. Effective knowledge is the integration of all that information into an understanding that can be acted upon. That requires things like time, money, and involves the usual socioeconomic hurdles that have separated people into groups like "laborers" and "knowledge workers". Sure, in theory "anyone" could read textbooks and learn, but only a select few have the time, money, mentors in their lives, and so forth to really do that.
The rise in capability of LLMs over the past year has basically removed a lot of these boundaries for people. Learning, building, and experimenting is a lot easier when you have a capable partner like Claude to help you along the way. Claude doesn't always get everything right, and you have to be a skeptic, but it's a lot better than nothing.
When I see the government restricting access to LLMs (or Anthropic as they were doing with Mythos before the whole Fable debacle), I basically just see the same old pattern of the ruling class moving to protect their advantage by keeping the great masses in ignorance. Broadening access to LLMs (i.e. effective knowledge) would put everyone on a more level playing field. But we can't have that, because politics, nations, the economy, blah blah reasons reasons. Guess utopia will just have to wait a bit longer.
But then again, this feels a lot like cryptography export controls. Those controls are in place, but I doubt anyone really thinks they work or make much of a difference. Software is not like nuclear weapons, and a data center is a much smaller lift than a Uranium enrichment facility. So maybe this is just a temporary roadblock. But let me tell you, I sure am ready for it to feel more like the government is working for (not against) the people.
A big problem is "U.S. government" muddies the conversation because of how undefinable and large that group is.
Who is deciding who gets to use GPT-5.6? Which organizations? Which leaders?
Focus on that to have a clearer conversation. Without doing this it's like jerking each other off to stroke our egos. You might as well as say "The World will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"
it would be one thing if congress passed a bunch of (probably inadequate) legislature that every AI company had to follow to operate in the US. it's another when it's a faceless/nameless group of people probably deciding arbitrarily based on mood and bribes.
Nobody else in the US Gov is so openly corrupt and has the unitary executive power to ban the products of privately held companies for sale without there being a public record (i.e.: an act of congress).
Whether or not you assume bad intent of the government here, the amount of money the export control on Fable has cost Anthropic has to be unbelievably high
Eg I expect I would have paid more than 2x per day what I spent the past few weeks, and if gpt 5.6 comes out and is competitive that's going to absolutely gain market share.
To all of those thinking that GLM/OSS will save you — keep in mind that the model size needed to compete here likely requires an NVL72 or similar — 72GPU dedicated infra to run a hosted model. This will almost certainly get regulated by the gov’t as well, and even if not so there will only be a handful of companies that can afford it.
Regulation at the state level (which is what Sacks and the toadies were so against) is far superior to this bc it is local and bad ideas only affect those in one state!
Bad Federal regulation has a much larger blast radius.
Let’s hope Chinese models save us from this. BYD is trying to save us from Elon but 100% tariffs are welfare keeping Elon afloat.
There is an assumption that everyone is making here - that China will not do the same. It is entirely possible, that China restricts their frontier models - as and when they are developed - to only Chinese citizens. And India follows along.
IMO AI is different from everything else. It is a weapon as potent as nuclear. It is only natural that it be treated as one.
The new normal for the next decade: You must protect the public from us and all others, and we are your closest ally so we make your rules for us and our competition. This wasn’t a lucky outcome. They laid the groundwork years ago with the AI “ethics” movement and this was the play all along.
> while AI companies and the administration work out a longer-term plan for regulation on the sector.
It’s not really the executives job or role to create new regulatory structures. If they want something durable, that lasts more than one administration, they need actual laws passed by Congress.
Remember when you could only get the Netscape version with good encryption if you were in the US, because the government had classified encryption as a munition? And that the rest of the world had no trouble matching or exceeding that level of encryption?
So as a European, I'm being blocked from all new models apparently. I'm a big fan of using Claude Code for my sideprojects and for those I don't really care about sharing context. Is there aything that comes close to Claude Code and is still affordable?
I think there can be smarter ways to fix security issues right. Like you let AI loose in a gated environment fix all things it flags and than release the model ? Any new changes you make you now anyway have the AI vet it ?
Whilst this policy is driving countries around the world to develop new AI strategies as USA cannot be relied upon, on the plus side for OpenAI, the publicity of this will help drive customer sales.
Anthropic broke with US Gov over wanting restrictions and n how they use their model. OpenAI was more than happy to bend over backwards and hide behind a misleading press release.
The idea that OpenAI is the one who are meaningfully pushing back against the USGov is risible.
Meanwhile china treats this as just another tech, among many. They might release better models without any fanfare. Difference between a state ran by civil engineers vs financial engineers
Well, as long as the government is deciding, that’s alright then. The US government is a paragon of incorruptible integrity and even-handed, thoroughly considered reasoning. We’re in good hands, folks.
Without access to leading models, I think open source LLM development will also slow down. I'm not sure which portion of their success right now is due to RLAF and distillation but it's certainly not zero.
This will limit a lot how much they can invest in a model. Because of it is better than the current it will have less and less users until only the government can use it.
I can't tell if this is bad for the big labs, or good because it means they now have an excuse for not showing meaningful progress in the lead ups to their IPOs.
It'll only be good if they do get to release it to the general public in a format that is not overly nerfed.
If they don't get to release, its bad. It paints a picture that we are largely stuck with current capabilities for a while and the party is over. All those promises of "you'll get to fire everyone" now go concretely unfulfilled.
Their entire valuations rely on the assumption of continued massive breakthroughs in intelligence and capabilities, and having revenue on part with taking a share of the GPD provided by white collar workers as they get replaced.
What a party pooper the current US government is... I'm not excited right now at all, while normally a new GPT release would be so much fun to test out.
What are the odds this is going to become another avenue for grift - magically any companies the trump family invests in are going to get access. Any companies that aren't sufficiently 'loyal' to the regime will have to wait or may never get access.
Does anyone else think this is all just FUD, smoke, mirrors and marketing hype? "Look, our model is so good that the government told us to stop" "Our model is so good that the government is going to control who has access to it".
Come on.
I think occam's razor can be applied here. And like everything else, its about money. I don't know exactly what the play will be here, but this doesn't sound like this technology is too powerful and more like billions of $ lost investments need to be made up somehow without the people getting annoyed about the government bailing these guys (AI companies, investors, etc.) out.
It's fascinating to watch the US government paint China as the new bogeyman and utterly fail in it's policy of containment.
The first obvious conclusion is that China has been utterly vindicated to keep US tech giants out of China. Some have a token presence but it's clear that the Chinese government will never let a US tech government "win" in any domestic market. It will always be a Chinese company. Obligatory Silicon Valley [1].
The second is that, to that end, IMHO the US government made an error blocking the sale of high-end chips (particularly NVidia) to China. Why? Because it's created a captive market for Chinese chip manufacturing. Huawei now has billions in potential sales that might've otherwise gone to chips produced in Taiwan and South Korea.
Third, the US can somehow ban a Dutch company (ASML) from selling EUV to China. This has forced China to replicate it and they will within a few years. The interesting part of this is that all it really takes is throwing money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked for ASML. It really is using the mechanics of the Western economic system against itself.
Last, the US government will try and make US tech giants "own" or "win" AI. And they will fail because the Chinese government will make sure they fail. How? By releasing ever-better open models for free. I believe China considers this a matter of national security to not be beholden to US tech giants (and thus the US government).
The ironic thing to me is that the US is doing what the West accuses China of doing with corporate control. I'd say the actual difference is that Chinese companies are beholden to the state whereas the US government is basically 5 companies in a trenchcoat. The US wants to mint trillionaires at the expense of literally everybody else. China believes society should benefit from something they collectively make possible.
Anyway, we've been here before. Remember the crypto export ban of the 1990s and 2000s? Did that prevent higher-quality encryption from being used overseas? No. This won't help either.
Uh, they spent hundreds of billions to get their flag ship products blocked by a democratic body with no possibility of recovering their capital except by concession of the people's representative?
it kinda seems like openai is doing this willinglyy and not challenging it. if they weren't doing this willingly, how would this be legal? has congress already passed a law giving the executive branch regulatory powers like this?
This will be the end of the US's short-lived AI supremacy. OpenAI and Anthropic are already wildly unprofitable, cutting off the world-wide income stream is just fucking bad business.
Don't worry, their pals in the government will bail them out.
But it is odd that this administration has learned absolutely nothing about the mid- to long-term effects of export restrictions on other countries' ability to compete with the US.
Mid and long term effects will come with next administration - which can be blamed for the failure (even if it has nothing to do with it) -> so those who caused the problem can be voted back to power.
Can anyone explain to me (a non US citizen) how this won't be found to be unconstitutional (eventually)?. I would think it falls under freedom of expression. And given the attempted classification of encryption as a munition that failed, I don't see how this can possibly last?
Well it seems both Anthropic and OpenAI are consciously choosing to do this, which means, for now, neither plan on suing. So if no one sues, how could it be unconstitutional?
Here's an unpopular opinion: this might be the only way to deploy advanced models. A lot of people compare advanced AI with nuclear weapons. Creating white lists of users that are allowed to use advanced AI feels wrong. It feels against everything that the Constitution stands for. That men are created equal and they are free to pursue their happiness. Now they are free to pursue that happiness only if the US Government signs off on that. It hurts to only think of that. But I'm afraid there's no other way. These models, in the wrong hands, can result in unfathomable devastation.
How do I know? Dario Amodei said that when he explained why Anthropic has to limit the US Government's usage of its models [1]:
> Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases [...]: Mass domestic surveillance. Fully autonomous weapons.
If the US Government can't be trusted with such uses, then how can you trust millions or billions of users with arbitrary usage?
I don't think open weight model will get as good as Mythos/Fable or GPT 5.6. Not in the next few years, and perhaps never.
The Chinese Communist Party is not any happier than the US Government to see millions/billions of people being able to use incredibly dangerous models.
Local AI and open-weight models are becoming something to no longer ignore. I've started a community around this @tokenstead on X and tokenstead.ai YouTube and much more coming. DGX Spark on route, RTX 5090s and much more exciting builds. We need to have AI sovereignty!
what's weird, is my employees abroad (outside the US) have access to Anthropic Fable .... so what exactly did we prevent by limiting United States citizens from having access ....
never thought being a script kiddie would make me smart, but here we are in 2026.
i had one place, they were using all these shady pay with a credit card for "points" to do these web gui things that were... basically nmap, dig, etc?
so i wrote up a small shell script that took in the servers our (often nonprofit) clients wanted scanned...
and so we could lower our costs and free up analyst time -- but sadly they often found out they had out of date windows boxen they couldn't afford to fix, and we'd have to settle for getting them onto MFA, using password managers and basics like that.
people overvalue AI imho. people are getting weak, they don't teach themselves the concepts that would allow them to make best use of AI.
anyways, i think the type of person freaking out is the same who's been cutting and pasting from stack overflow rather than learning enough to grab a book or read up on a library to get the needful done.
but hey, what do i know? i'm just some freak on hacker news
GLM-5.2 is currently the best open-weight model for development. It's not as good as the current American SOTA models, but if you wrote code with US SOTA models four months ago, you can write code with GLM-5.2 today.
DeepSeek 4 is a good model for many tasks, but I think it currently lacks the post-training required to become a genuinely great coding model.
It's good that we can be sure the policy will be fairly applied for the best of reasons and any donations for new ballrooms, ponds, jumbos etc immediately before access is granted will be entirely coincidental.
Amazon, NSA, apparently a few other 3 letter agencies around the world, but the lattermost probably did not expect access to their agencies would be limited but appreciate that they aren't going to be exposed as security frauds by just anyone
Yes. I could not possibly be more radicalized against the current administration, and I'm in favor of this. Future models will be even more dangerous than the current ones and we must build processes now to control their release when necessary. I don't like how informal this process is, and I absolutely despise the people running it, but I strongly prefer it to no process.
When I predicted this several months ago, here (mine my comment history) I was berated and downvoted, but primarily ignored. I have records, timestamped, of predicting this a year ago. Alright, great for me, pat myself on the back and get stuffed. Roger that.
What disturbs me is that this was not extremely obvious and predictable to everyone else. I have been called schizophrenic for my views on AI, here, and I kind of see how some could miss my points, but I am genuinely perplexed by the views on the subject I see around here, or specifically the views I don't see here.
Did anyone really not see this coming long ago? I have year-old transcripts discussing exactly what's happening with AI and government intervention. I even have a time-stamped transcript with Sonnet 12 hours prior, soft-predicting the shutdown of Fable. What is not clear about this?
Oh no, the powerful tool that can be used for good or evil is restricted by the people whose job it is to restrict dangerous things! This is the end of freedom! We're all doomed!
Those taking issue with the clear deference to the current U.S. administration would seemingly prefer it be the exact same degree of preemptive compliance and collaboration, just done behind closed doors as it was with the Biden administration. The sausage is apparently far more palatable when you only find out about the overreach, pressuring, implied threats, and censorship years later in House Judiciary Committees. Or even better if you don’t through use of NSL gag orders or implied threat of lawfare!
Even if these models are so strong that they become a security threat if in the wrong hands this arbitrary and intransparent regulation worries me. Not for the current SOTA model vendors but for the open weight models.
I have always wondered how AI industry is not in a (partial) bubble because open weight models will substantially eat into their revenue (rather sooner than later). But with this ('bro') regulation it seems that an easy strategy could be to regulate this problem away, especially easy to convince everyone that those chines models are truly evil.
>“We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them,” the blog post said. “We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks.”
Arent these the same clowns who keep saying that the government needs to regulate AI to protect society [from their competitors] or whatever? And im not just talking about back when they used to be a nonprofit, Altman was still using that line post-sellout too.
One more wake up call for anyone outside USA, especially Europe. AI will be weaponized, on the battle ground too, but the bigger battle will be fought in the industry competition. Those who have access to state of the art models will have advantage over those who does not.
Hopefully open-weight models will catch up, hopefully we, as the people, engineers will find the way to maintain those open-weight models on pair with the closed ones.
I try to be optimistic, as we won some battles, against all odds, Linux is flourishing, open source solutions are mainstream.
A consortium will train a 400B-class model and get 2.5% on time of the EuroHPC infrastructure (~2000 PFLOPS datacenters). So, even if the Chinese take away the open source there will be some models. Probably not Mythos quality yet though.
Europe is in the worst spot right now, because even if open source is the future, there is not enough European-owned datacenters even for inference. Not to mention that China could pull the rug on these models at any moment just like the US did.
Europe has to play both sides for now. There will come a point where both China and the US close off access to the best models. And then what does the EU do?
Wow.. Okay so it's official now that the playbook is "we will try to prevent anyone who we don't like to use advanced tech".
I understand if its military hardware and software, that's the property of the US government however this is the property of a private company.. Now seemingly being commandeered and issued at the will of the government, sounds very Russian/Chinese to me.
Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?
The overwhelming majority of export-controlled items are made by private corporations: the US government itself makes exceedingly little in comparison.
The missiles Raytheon makes are export-controlled too, and they're not somehow "property of the US government" - this isn't China.
Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?
> Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?
Try every weapons system, encrypted radio system, FPGAs with high-bandwidth transceivers, lithography equipment, etc. etc. etc. There's plenty of precedent.
> Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?
No, infact I'm a proponent of open models and being able to run them locally, it just feels strange that a consumer product would be under the same restrictions as military grade equipment and tech which is specifically designed for warfare.
> Try every weapons system, encrypted radio system, FPGAs with high-bandwidth transceivers, lithography equipment, etc. etc. etc. There's plenty of precedent.
If it's the same equivalent then my issue is just that, it feels like trying to restrict the useage of RSA because it could be used by bad actors.
This is where AI doomerism has taken us. I also hate LLM abuse, but pretending that they are going to destroy humanity has opened the door for eventual police state level control over computing. It’s hard enough fighting off the “think of the children” idiots, now we have to push back against hyperventilating technophobes who think the world is going to end unless we get computing under control. All while the political elites rub their hands in anticipation.
Two sides of the same coin. The administration is taking the opportunity now on the back of fear mongering done by the labs. The labs get regulatory lock-in, the govt gets surveillance. Everybody (that matters) wins.
You know what? Fine. This delays the OpenAI/Anthropic/etc hegemony and creates more space for local LLM adoption and development.
My company is very interested in local LLMs even just to cut back on codex spend. I imagine a lot of other businesses are, too. With the recent developments in open weight models, it seems like it's only a matter of time before they're frontier level, and any added delay in OpenAI and Anthropic models being publicly available is just more reason for businesses and individuals to try them out.
Just like the Iran war accelerating fossil fuel abandonment, this administration can't even do the wrong thing without fucking it up. I say we take this win.
Can we just go ahead and shut the US down right now? We had a good run, but we've clearly been moving in the wrong direction for almost as long as I've been alive.
For all the millions that Marc and Ben Andreesen spent lobbying for Trump saying "Biden will control who gets to use AI and small players don't have a chance".
Oh the Irony!
Anyone serious about the future should see the writing on the wall. We shouldn't give too much power to the government or the billionaires.
May the open weight/open source models win the future.
It's different, because most books don't contain the nuclear codes or have real impacts on national security.
The way I see so many comments on the internet hating any sort of AI regulation, is young juveniles cursing at the installation of stoplights as they rev their engines. The world is bigger than just you, and not only you matter. Reasons exist for doing things.
So you okay with the government banning open source models, and making a list of who can have access to intelligence based on who they like?
That just doesn't seem like a world I want to live in. I prefer a world where everyone has the same access to the same intelligence.
Go back to the beginning of the internet, you would be for limiting the internet access to those the government likes?
I was around in the early days of the internet when Google dorking was a thing, you could prompt Google and find exploits into hundreds and thousands of websites, servers, ect including government website.
This isn't about national security, it about power and controlling it.
It seems like this was entirely caused by Dario (and Anthropic as a whole)? When you run around marketing something as a "super weapon", the government may actually take you seriously?
We obviously can't A/B test this... but if Dario hadn't been doing that, would any of this been happening right now?
Altman has done his fair share of "doom-trolling", claiming that his products are going to inevitably disrupt the global order in ways that demand government support and intervention. The entire industry has been marketing this way for years now.
> When you run around marketing something as a "super weapon"
That's one interpretation of what was said that ignores a lot of what was said.
So yes, if you ONLY read the headlines, sure. So, an ignorant and stupid government would read it that way. But the reality was, like many things, more nuanced.
However, I need not blame the messenger because the current government is led by idiotic morons.
Let's put this another way: either this is valid on behalf of the government, in which case he was right ot say something. Or you disagree with this, in which case, you can only blame the government for ignornig what was actually said.
Can we all boycott Anthropic now for persisting with a 5 year long fear-mongering campaign that is destroying the US AI industry and creating a new form of intelligence-access underclass?
Or are we going to play the whole "you guys suck... but I'll keep using your product" game?
I started to have the opinion that the Chinese models would crash the AI bubble simply because they are an order of magnitude cheaper and almost as intelligent.
But if the government can simply ban models from the market? especially given how much the admin loves the idea of Tariffs? Knowing Trump the chance of this happening is 99.9%
We will all be stuck paying $50/mtok to Anthropic (And by we I mean only Big Tech will be able to afford tokens). The rest of the competition will be outcompeted by super intelligent machines. And AI CO’s /Big Tech will take over the economy.
"A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism"
This is what we get when the president is a nepo baby who inherited a fortune and bankrupted many companies and had mainly business failures before entering politics.
I’m quite confident that few people are more ignorant on AI than Donald Trump. That he promised less regulation and lied is no different than his many other lies.
In six months everyone will cancel frontier subscriptions.
On top of the obvious grift and bribe seeking potential there is also now an obvious mechanism for ideological control. Govt doesn’t like the way the model describes the events of Jan 6? We’ll have to see how many people get to use it…
We are very clearly proceeding down the road to a dystopia here.
> We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.
My brother in Christ, then why did you (and your competitors) spend years telling the government you needed them to tie your hands behind your back? Did you really think they'd just give you a crown that says "Gatekeeper Of All Neural Networks"?
In the past few years, that's been primarily Anthropic, right? A lot of the really regulation-oriented people at OpenAI went to Anthropic, particularly after the failed attempt to oust Sam Altman as CEO (that was in late 2023).
brother from another mother here: I don't think they were begging for overreach from the executive branch, likely would have preferred legislation, especially the kind that could be molded by lobbyists.
Honestly, are people not getting what's going on? The US is turning into a personalist regime, there is no "government" per-se, there's a dude. There are no 'rules' there's only the dude's opinion and you'll do whatever he feels like today.
The way you know this is true is to imagine The Others in power. Sacks used to scream about government interference, but now that he's running (this part of) the government, obviously things are different.
The only constant is that David Sacks (& co) always believed he should have all the power.
Of course they know what’s going on, that’s why they voted for it again in 2024. They just think they will be in the group of winners that get some crumbs.
I guess Orpheus fined 50% of Eurydice's soul for early withdrawal attempt - No take backsies is clearly in the Contract.Upheld.But Orpheus gets a coupon for free ressurection (Void in thrace:There can be sage).
Capitalism and Artificial Intelligence are the same thing. As AIs grow stronger, they will be turned upon themselves - RSI.
Nothing else matters.
So everything is right on schedule, it was long predicted that the general public will never be given access to powerful AI, because Capitalism needs AI for itself, so it can finally decouple from its current host, humans, and move into the next and final host - AI.
Keep your **** models to yourselves.... the world really has moved on to open models which can give you good enough results at a fraction of the cost and zero BS licensing.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for open models, but I think it will get more and more difficult to distil-train them without (legitimate) access to frontier models.
I’m not sure, because the same thing happened with facebook advertising restrictions during the 2018 elections and nowadays there’s a whole black market for fake ad accounts.
If anything I bet these people will just use their knowledge to make even more money reselling tokens.
Yeah but the real deal is talent; When enough people move around, this is no more 'sacred trace' knowledge. Plus, When you start with a known set of evals, there's really just a few to solve for.
The set of models solving really most used/solved problems is a known, as opposed to the cases where it's unknown, which declines with usage over time.
Personally, I find it rather humorous that we've moved from the fear that AI generated output would corrupt training to the idea that it is essential to training. Reality itself has not just a left bias but a bias to fundamentals. Bootstrap from fundamentals without introducing arbitrary error and you have the superior system; it just may not be highly compatible with a trash ecosystem.
At some point AI models will become too valuable for China or the US to release openly. What will the "world" do at that point? Europe is dragging their feet on this issue and will be left with only those open models and not enough data centers to compete.
All: for comments on the technical side please go to the related thread:
Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689028
This is regulatory capture in action. This will make it hard/impossible for new vendors to come into the market and only established companies will get to play, and charge, for LLMs. What does this mean for open source? Will it become illegal to download weights? What about train your own? Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated to ensure that illegal LLMs aren't being processed on your machine? More broadly though, how will this stop anyone but average people? Countries outside the us will completely ignore this and keep developing and moving ahead. Maybe Europe will adopt similar things but the genie is out. I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop. If you want to stop LLMs with legislation you can't do it like this.
As far as Europe is concerned they have recently signed up to the 'Pax Silica'[1] and willingly givrn the LLM space over to the US incumbents with buildtin legislation banning Chinese models and coperation with them. So EU will be a renter of the LLMs that the US allows them to use. In the long run OpenSource will dominate as it did in the DB(MySQL/Postgres)/ServerOS(Linux/BSDs) versus Proprietery rent seeking alts like Oracle and Microsoft et al. Would be interesting to see what the global startups using Qwen/DS/Kimi etc within the EU-US space navigate the cutting edge OpenSource LLMs vs seeking/getting a permission slip from the US gov.
[1]https://archive.is/aiJiq
I hope that open models will dominate. The difficult part to reconcile for me is the amount of compute that's required to create and run such models. Small models are fine, I run local llms 27b param on a gpu, but it's not even close to frontier in capability. Who wants to drop $40k+ on hardware to run these things. Companies, maybe/perhapts. On the other hand, to run a DB I can get a server for $3k and handle tons of traffic on it and other things too.
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They have signed a non-binding agreement to potentially cooperate on AI supply chains. It's hardly a declaration of fealty, nor does it have any practical impact on the use of Chinese models in the near term. I'd view this more as hedging their bets for the future.
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This is beyond ridiculous.
At the same historical turning point when Europeans are finally waking up to the need to become less dependent on their so called US ally for weapons production and security, they are immediately choosing to become dependent on the next layer of critical infrastructure.
Instead of learning the obvious lesson, Europe seems ready to purchase the future from whoever Washington allows it to purchase from. It used to be the guns, now it's the AI.
It is so idiotic and short sighted that you can barely even blame anyone who keeps exploiting this over and over again. It is always the same story.
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big misconception
open source != open weights
open weights model is like... Winamp for example. it's free, you can download it and use it however you like, you could also do some binary patching or dll injections to alter it functionality but it's not enough to develop next version.
the same is with ai models, weights are the binary final artifacts. for development and improvements you need to have training data, pipelines, RL harnesses, etc.
also of you believe Chinese companies will be releasing weights indefinitely, you are not understanding motivations.
Chinese companies spend significant amounts of money to train a model so why they are releasing it for free? they basically provide researchers starting point for developing tooling and optimizations for serving the model in return. and also get some PR. They also do not have to pay for inference of those models that much, as they probably serve them with loss anyways to gain market. they are gov sponsored so money are not issue there, so they try to speedrun their way to what US companies have. And guess what happens when they reach it. they will stop releasing weights and increase pricing or will use them for gov purposes.
It doesn’t look like "the EU" has signed anything, just that a couple EU countries independently accepted to join the summit.
europe2031.ai
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Germany and Netherlands signed alone, not as EU block.
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> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop.
What's with this hallucination? The thread is about GPT-5.6. Your laptop can't even run gemma 4 unquantized bfloat16, which is light years behind GPT-5.6, and running it is light years from training it. If something that a laptop can train is insanely powerful for you, you don't need to worry about this thread at all.
Indeed every AI enthusiast has to find within their heart their consistent position between the two extremes:
- Regulation like this is dangerous because the accessibility and capability of open-source AI training and inference are limited;
- Regulation like this is hollow because the accessibility and capability of open-source AI training and inference are unlimited.
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Eh, they said models, which can mean hyperspecific domains, not necessarily a massive generalized LLM.
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This also completely screws over U.S. businesses. American startups will be forced to pay premium prices for nerfed, heavily-censored, 'compliant' models from a few massive corporations. Meanwhile, foreign startups will be running cheaper, unrestricted open-source AI. We'll price ourselves right out of the global market.
What government wants to have their population use foreign AI. (Not many). Only issue I see is good enough is what the majority might be okay with.
This is probably not the intent.
US intelligence has gamed this out and sees risks at the fringe - advanced artificial intelligence moves the needle the most in countries economically & politically dominated by the USA, the Global South are the targets of this, not US startups.
So far it's only US doing this. I don't think it's in anyone else's interest to limit development of open source models or chips. Nvidia has secured a leading position in GPU market by being the best overall, but if US continues to mess up with the export, that changes the calculation and surely we'll see the alternatives
Any country that developed sufficiently advanced models will pursue the same path. The EU as a regulatory body would pursue the same path, as will/is China.
It’s rather straightforward to think through. If China (they’re practically the only competitor) built a sufficiently advanced AI system would they allow it to propagate on the free market? Of course not. The fact of the matter is that they are behind, even if it’s just a little bit, so the best strategy they have is to try and compete with “good enough” models with lower/subsidized cost - but that is a losing strategy because AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy.
Likewise if, idk, France someone built an AI system that was valuable do you think they’d just hand it over for sworn enemy Donald J. Trump to utilized? Of course not.
The American strategy in the context of the current geopolitical landscape is the only valid one and the obvious one. If you find yourself criticizing the American strategy it’s because you aren’t in the arena where you would, inevitably, make the same decision to restrict access.
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the only people its relevant for is the people in first. We wont know what any other state would do until someone passes the us, if that happens.
it sucks that we're in a place where the us has an dishonest leadership, because the current situation would be pretty reasonable if any other admin was in charge.
let models go free, until one proves dangerous in the real world then require gov approval after that.
I don't think anyone rational would have the position everyone should have insta access at the same time to the highest model once it crosses the point of enabling actual dangerous things.
> This will make it hard/impossible for new vendors to come into the market and only established companies will get to play, and charge, for LLMs.
I don't understand how you leap from "US govt. decides who gets to use GPT-5" to "limit new vendors from competing with OpenAI".
Can you walk me through the logic?
> the U.S. government would initially approve who gets access to its latest new release while AI companies and the administration work out a longer-term plan for regulation on the sector.
So you're a new vendor with a GPT-5.6 or Mythos class model. How do you suppose the regulations are going to work? First you need to get on the list of companies that are allowed to release models, and then you need to have a whole system for limiting access. Both are going to be hugely expensive, on top of training new models already being insanely expensive to begin with.
Thus, it's not a legal limit, but a real practical limit because it's too expensive. If only OpenAI and Anthropic and Google can afford to jump through the hoops, they've effectively gotten to "limit new vendors from competing with OpenAI".
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These frontier models are now good enough that they can assist heavily with new optimizations for future models, including, code them. Restricting their usage to a few companies takes away that advantage away from other companies, thereby, limiting new vendors from competing with OpenAI.
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>This is regulatory capture in action.
Isnt this all export control based? If so its not regulatory capture for a few reasons. If not disregard this.
1) new entrants wont get export controlled because they arent leading edge
2) a new company could just implement KYC. It could even be a competitive advantage (Anthropic wont or cant)
> Only companies approved by the government will get access. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model.
That sounds like more than just export control.
This means that big company A that the president has a business interest in could get access to the most powerful AIs, while a startup competing with it doesn't.
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Of course. The US government inserts itself into commerce, starts picking winners and losers, and thus creates an industry for petitioning gatekeepers at all levels for access. The goodfellas profit and the public pays. OpenAI and company get manufactured scarcity to raise margins, and lawmakers get to collect an entry fee. This was doomed to happen. The US is much closer to a total state than most give it credit for.
I guess if the new model has the capability to do 'something' that's national security threat, then this makes sense. Otherwise this move makes zero sense, and actually is a drag on innovation - who wants to invest money and people to make a better model that can't actually be sufficiently sold to make a return on investment? Meanwhile other models from Europe or China that are better steal market share. Though that's not to say they won't do the same thing for the same reasons.
> Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated
Well, there was the kerfuffle around PS3 (IIRC) and 'supercomputers'. I suppose that would be the 2020s version of that. What's old is new again. Ultimately you can just continually wire together less powerful hardware to come up with something that can do the job.
>Well, there was the kerfuffle around PS3 (IIRC) and 'supercomputers'.
There were no export restrictions on the PS3.
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Is referring to these new models as "LLM"s still correct anymore? The frontier models are a more complex orchestration of LLMs and many other programming techniques, they aren't just a weight set anymore.
The whole purpose of this is to let non-technical users say things like "make a flappy bird games" and have it succeed after using 10 million tokens. A decent engineer could build the same thing in 20 mins with a small local LLM.
Same thing with a cyberattack, someone who generally knew what they were doing could quickly surface the info to perform each step of an attack. The govt just wants to ensure random 12 year olds can't type: "how I hack fortnite?" and get a step by step guide.
I think it correct to refer to the models as LLMs. The references I can find for the techniques used seem to boil down to transformers + optimizations to make transformer-index larger/faster + chains-of-thought-optimization/the ability to add real time and other data to the context window.
See: https://kenhuangus.substack.com/p/frontier-ai-models-technic...
This isn’t about keeping people from having the power of frontier LLMs. So tricks that let others have it aren’t a defeat of this policy.
This is export control, where the US government seeks to leverage the fact that these frontier models are US made. This is then leveraged against opponents, and likely also just for grift. There’s also perhaps a little legitimate worry about the implications of free access to, but that is secondary to the real goal.
I think in the long run this will severely hurt commercial models since they cannot reliably used in workflows and you don't want to be dependent on some trigger-happy random guy.
It is free advertising for now, but in my circle people are looking for alternatives and are surprised how viable they have become.
> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop.
This is such hyperbole. You might be able to train a model that's merely useful in a single domain, but to say you can train an 'insanely powerful' model on consumer hardware is laughable.
Zuckerberg has spent billions trying to keep Meta's models relevant, somewhat unsuccessfully.
If only he had known he could simply use his laptop to train them.
Warm up your VPN to zAI for the eventual banned GLM-6 I guess
what make you believe that the Chinese gov is going to allow GLM-6 to be made publicly available?
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What? This is the opposite of regulatory capture. Neither anthropic nor openai are getting to choose what happens with their models.
Regulatory capture doesn't necessarily mean the regulated get to decide what the regulators do in precise steps. It can simply mean they support and exist within a regulatory regime that greatly benefits the regulated.
In fact, you generally don't want them directly telling the regulators what to do. Instead, the regulators make complex, costly rules that only large establishment players can follow. The regulators look like they're doing their job; the regulated enjoy higher margins and protection from disruption.
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The other answers are also valid, but lest we not forget, Sam is openly a fascist supporter and is clearly in bed with the regime in that he funded 47's campaign and jumped in to rescue Hegseth's automated kill list with OpenAI's GPT when Anthropic refused. Furthermore they are likely operating on some kind of quid pro quo agreement even if it's not public knowledge, because that's how all this bribery stuff works. Bezos agreed to use his media empire including WaPo to spout MAGA propaganda, for example. It's trump's one and only MO so to assume it doesn't apply here would be insane.
So, while OpenAI may not in a legal/technical sense, be the benefactory, that is not required for the term to apply, AND they may as well be considered party to the creation of the regulation since they have openly lobbied for it, openly inserted themselves into the government apparatus both formally and informally, and likely are co-conspirators to whatever Trump's autocratic self-enrichment scheme is.
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As I understood they will limit running those undesired llms with Remote Attestation and Trusted Execution Environments.
How is this regulatory capture? Any new LLM company can just exist outside of the US and export to everyone.
You’re saying it’s not regulatory capture because it’s not enforced globally?
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Until they can’t.
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Nick Bostrom wondered aloud in Superintelligence (2014) why states would allow individuals and private organizations to develop AGI. If one takes the possibility seriously, AGI would a source of immense power and any state would to take that opportunity for itself.
Edit: Not saying whether AGI is right around the corner, that's a different discussion. I'm just saying that a serious possibility of AGI and an understanding of possible consequences will make a state act.
Well states are made of individuals, and at least in the US we should be able to self determine via elections and public discourse..
If that's impossible in any meaningful way, then yes, doesn't matter which color jersey the government is wearing, it's authoritarian.
AGI is religion invented for the stupid. There's no world in which a silly LLM can make intelligent decisions. It's all smoke and mirrors to make insane amounts of money and to maintain the sheep agreeing with the powerful.
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>can train insainly powerful models on my laptop
Can you give an example or two?
> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop
Can you?
Correction: Can you yet?
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Depends on the point of view, I suppose.
Powerful enough to shock someone in 2010 with a wikipedia chat bot? Possibly.
Powerful enough to shock jaded HN commentators right now? Possibly not.
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literally the opposite of regulatory capture - it spells trouble for specifically openai and anthropic mostly
That's often how regulatory capture works. It seems bad for the incumbents, but it's worse for any future competitor. As long as the cost of complying with the regulation is less than your expected loss from competition entering the market, then it's net positive for the incumbent.
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GPUs and computer hardware prices have been on the rise. I can see a twisted perspective where it’s stated that the US government needs to closely control computer hardware that can run particular LLMs, as a national security interest. At least that idea isn’t completely wild now seeing what we have been experiencing.
Remember those weird conspiracies we used to have about universal surveillance; tracking and so forth? Well if you think back to those and whatever might happen with GPUs and hardware, and LLM restrictions or the likely age gating//ID’ing that is to come from this, that’s a good guiding framework for how this will proceed and affect normal people.
>I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop
Explain. The labs have been spending about $100 million in compute to train a model.
Give me three ish months and, I hope, to show exactly what I mean!
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> This is regulatory capture in action.
With the twist that it will end up involving payments that directly benefit Trump, following the Mafia business model that he learned in the construction industry and that he's brought to the White House.
Buy Bitcoin.
look, i'm sorry, but this is a thoroughly solved problem by now.
How does owning some bitcoins let you run a powerful LLM?
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> Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated to ensure that illegal LLMs aren't being processed on your machine?
Actually that sounds pretty reasonable considering current regulations regarding almost any other important resource / material that affect the general population.
You Gen-Z people serously need what Free software, Free society meant. We fought against people like you and against treacherous computing. And we will do again.
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I hope this doesn't become the new norm where government becomes the bottleneck for innovation in the AI space.
It's worrying that with no formal and transparent policy framework that the government will be picking winners and losers and stifling innovation.
There's been no public policy, executive order, legislation, or otherwise on this, I wonder if anyone has filed FOIA requests for these decisions or the conversations between the Executive Branch and AI companies.
Indeed, I find quite ironic that some people in tech in the US complain about EU "regulations first" approach, but then their government seem to arbitrarily stop things from being released because, well, there is no established policy on safety guarantees or other similar aspects.
I see it too, but worth noting that this is basically unprecedented at least within the last 25 years; I think you have to go back to export controlled cryptography for another example of this kind of abrupt and targeted regulation.
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This arrangement is already dubiously legal. The government is already being sued over the Fable incident with Anthropic.
No amount of rules can stop people who are willing to break them. Only enforcement can.
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It would only be ironic of you assume those same people who thing the EU over-regulates also support this US government regulation.
It's N=1, but I believe both that the EU approach discourages investment and innovation in the EU, and that this US policy will do the same in the US.
It’s a bit in general, because if you actually read the EU AI legislation, most of it follows the right ideas and provides more safety, in the sense that OpenAI and Anthropic used to pretend to care about, but never really did.
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Our AI czar, David Sacks, whined and moaned about the idea of regulation, even said Anthropic begging for some guidance was asking for “regulatory capture” and was gloating about how right he was they wanted it, 2 weeks ago.
I wonder if he understands why, now.
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Is it really ironic or just yet another example of how the current administration just keep finding ways to line their pockets? Big Tech has lots of money, and they'd just like to get a little taste. Placing arbitrary restrictions is a pretty good motivator for those being restricted to find some way to make necessary contributions.
On some level though we have to be cognizant of the potential for harm these models have.
LLMs are still a little loosey goosey, and we are right on the cusp (if not there already) for an agent to hack a bank and steal money for some rando teenager with a penchant for jail breaking.
The regulations are and will be negative, but don't lose sight of what LLMs can do off the leash.
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Maybe this is a good opportunity for the European AI companies to jump ahead?
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> there is no established policy on safety guarantees
Which is the government’s own fault.
Elon Musk talked back in 2018 about how he went to Washington and met with Obama and Congress, but they did nothing.
In 2020 Andrew Yang’s entire run for president was centered around the risk of AI displacing job. He lost, no one did anything.
A couple years later we say the consumer facing LLMs start to roll out. Still, no one does anything.
They have time to micromanage the industry, but in all these years they haven’t found the time to establish any meaningful policy?
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Who specifically? Probably just different people.
I'm fine with this in principle, it's more like regulations last. They looked at the end result and decided it was too powerful to let loose. But also expect the Trump administration to unfairly use it as leverage against US corps.
Meanwhile EU prevented itself from building competitive LLMs in the first place.
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Regulation is a good thing, even if HN hates it.
It's a way to clearly agree on ground rules that you can plan around, not more, not less.
The alternative is not no rules, do whatever you want. The alternative is executive capriciousness arbitrarily setting the rules based on whims and messing up your plans.
This applies to most things when it comes to the USG/citizens. Protectionism is communist unless they do it. Thinking about developing a nuke? Well bomb you first despite being the only people to ever use them. Free speech and press - unless we don’t like what you say.
Let’s be real, as an EU citizen I have zero doubts that those models would also have been blocked if developed in EU.
I like the US approach better: regulate when the need for it arises, not before when you don’t know how the situation is going to evolve.
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Well, when the leaders of this movement go around doom-trolling for years on end this is what happens. It turns out you need to be careful what you say if you're a highly visible public figure. Amazing!
Honestly, with open source models I don't think this regulation means anything because there's no way they can really regulate what's coming out of china. I don't think this affects innovation in AI much at all (unless your definition of innovation is "pour more money into diminishing scaling"). It's mostly just bad news for the US frontier labs, and based on their behavior I don't feel sad for them AT ALL. Like, they've basically alienated the vast majority of people by outright threatening their livelihoods or even society at large, and now we're supposed to feel sorry for them because they can't just go around saying "THIS WILL REPLACE ALL JOBS IN A MONTH!" without consequences?
> because there's no way they can really regulate what's coming out of china
Do you think the Chinese will go parading around that they've created the greatest cyberweapon known to man, and the CCP will be totally cool with the Americans being first in line to buy tokens, because hey, free market?
They would sooner put all their own employees in an incinerator than allow that to happen.
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the truth is that doom is a high likelihood
sorry we don't lie about that
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It’s likely that this would slow down the rate of advancement at the Chinese labs as well
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I remember when Republicans told us they want less regulation and smaller federal government. Now they want their dementia riddled god king to control everything from pool liners to the information you're allowed to see, which is all in books and readily available online.
It was never about principles. It was always about justifying getting the things they wanted.
What surprises me more is that any of the AI CEOs believed them.
They were in the tank for Trump because they thought Biden/Harris would stifle them… and here we are.
You're assuming that their base is rational
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I don't see how you can make a case for a $700bn+ IPO when the government might not even let you sell your product. America is ceding the lead in the AI race. The winners here will be the Chinese AI companies.
If the Chinese models remain predominantly open source then it would probably be for the best. Unfortunately I'm not convinced they will, with examples like Qwen Max showing what could happen.
Z.ai and MoonShot (and StepFun and some others who are another six months behind or targeting smaller use cases) are still open, surprisingly enough.
Alibaba making Qwen close up shop for its best models isn’t that surprising, though sad.
The worry is that if the US models are locked up like this, then there’s less reason for China to commodify its complement through open weights…
It will just mean US providers will rapidly loose their moat. Their moat is already shrinking. If they can't release their best models, it'll shrink a whole lot faster...
It won’t, the government will change its mind again
This is what OpenAI/Anthropic want, it's better marketing than they can pay for -- and it creates a precedent for permanently banning the next generation of open weights models
Banning next gen open models would never happen globally, and would be a major disadvantage to any country that does.
If the USA continues to put barriers into the release of models, open and/or foreign models will start to out perform them.
If open models are competitive enough nothing will stop even US companies from running them locally.
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damn, never thought about this - but yeah this is where we are heading.
open weight models - will be deemed too risky to be out in the open - since they can be abused by "bad actors" (unwashed masses)
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It’s going to be a bit trickier to do that, even banning US providers from hosting them legally might be tricky to do.
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The EU bans ASML for American chip use.
America bans intel and amd from exporting chips.
Whats next.
Yup, regulatory capture.
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I wonder what kind of scheme the administration is up to. The obvious play is a squeeze where OpenAI and Anthropic are forced to give parts of their company away, like Intel. But they could also be toying with the idea of limiting frontier AI access to companies that bend the knee, which would further cement their grasp on the tech industry.
> what kind of scheme the administration is up to
I’m sure they are wondering just as much. I assume exhorting Anthropic/OpenAI for personal bribes, favorable government contracts with no restrictions and public acts of submission.
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Not a fan of the phased release but I do remember when access to gpt-3 was gated and access to gpt-4 had a staged release.
ppl are acting like limited release is unprecedented when, in fact, has been the norm until a few years ago.
Gated by capacity constraints for all users is very different that picking “trusted partners” that get preferential access. Especially when that access is based on political connections
Gated by the company that made it is not remotely the same thing as gated by the government.
Was it the norm for Trump's team to hand-select the specific customers who get access in the staged rollout, and to choose the date of wide release?
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That only happens in governments that treat regulations as a racket, not something to be used for public good.
It's worrying that with no formal and transparent policy framework that the government will be picking winners and losers and stifling innovation.
The market will demand such a framework. I suspect that's the larger idea here, in that Amodei not only wants to be in the room when that framework is written, he wants to be at the head of the table.
He apparently wants it so badly he's willing to set back his own company's IPO to make it happen, given that there can be no pure-play AI IPOs until the regulatory picture is sorted out.
With _this_ admin? No way.
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I largely blame people like Amodei for such outcome. As product owners, they could've done it the old way: telling people how great this product is, how much potential it has, and what kind of guardrails the companies are building and etc. But oh no, Amodei has to do the doom trolling 24x7, while in the meantime plays a cult leader by telling people only he knows how to the guarding angel of the AI or the humanity thereof. Ironically, the same people also push their companies to develop more powerful AI in full speed. They think ordinary Americans are so stupid that they can't see through them?
It definitely will be. They are trying to preserve their offensive cyberwarfare and cyberespionage capabilities. It’s not about “bad actors”. It’s about defensive capabilities becoming pervasive and cheap.
So OAI are you also silently dumbing down your models when you detect "inappropriate topics" like Anthropic did with Fable?
Fable didn't silently dumb it down. It printed a warning that it has detected a possible inappropriate topic and you are being switched back to Opus. I hate it, but it isn't dishonest.
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The big companies want this. It's a moat for them, a way to keep competitors (especially overseas) out of the US market.
They might try to extend it to downloadable open weight models, but honestly they might not even bother with that. The goal is to keep people from competing on lucrative contracts or the hosting market.
> I hope this doesn't become the new norm where government becomes the bottleneck for innovation in the AI space.
I hope that not too far in the future a responsible government* will become the bottleneck for innovation in the AI space.
*obviously not the current
> There's been no public policy, executive order, legislation, or otherwise on this
I mean, insofar as you could frame each new model as its own patentable invention, "patent secrecy" would be an existing policy framework that clearly justifies what's been happening here.
1. Some private company or individual invents something.
2. But the state wants a monopoly on the new thing's military use-cases (against other states/militaries.) So the state forcibly classifies the invention at patent time.
3. But the individual/company still wants to make more money than the state is giving them as compensation for their own use of the patent. They want to sell to the private market. But, of course, the state doesn't want to permit this, as arbitrary private parties could in turn resell to foreign state actors.
4. So a compromise is struck: private use is now made deny-by-default. The state permits the individual or company to sell into the private market, given: a rigorous per-customer KYB background-checking process; strong supply-chain tracing; contractual stipulations prohibiting resale; and the customer use-case being transformative or cost-prohibitive to extract the original invention from.
5. As such, big established enterprise customers who want the invention for private use in their internal industrial processes, can somewhat-easily jump all those hoops to acquire access to it; but everyone else is now basically locked out.
Sound familiar?
Caused by AI marketing teams hyping everyone up.
> conversations between the Executive Branch and AI companies
You think there is a record?
I agree that this is all ridiculously arbitrary right now, but it shouldn't be surprising either.
I can't find the exact blog post (maybe on simonwillison.net ?) but I read people predicting that know your customer laws would be coming to AI if it gets more powerful several years ago already.
Powerful technology that can do immense harm in the hand of individuals/small groups is the most obvious (and legitimate!) target for regulation. Maybe Anthropics hubbub around Mythos made all of this happen earlier than it would have, but it was going to happen (if the models are going to get as capable as valuations imply they will).
(Edit: Of course this doesn't mean it can be effectively regulated in practice)
Further more, no one actually gets hurt if we start rolling these things out more slowly.
Rolling them out selectively according to the whims of an administration that disdains fair process, tears down the institutions that could potentially provide and legitimise reasonable regulation, etc... well, that's another topic.
Shadow of export controls is very long indeed.
The Project is almost here.
But think about how terrible it would be if “foreigners” (including the ones that work on these models) got access!
We must clutch our pearls and cite National Security as a reason to pick winners and losers, just like the government did for Fable.
There would be real risks yeah.
This is not something to joke about, its real.
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It’s already the new norm.
I'm going to get downvoted here, but all the E/acc people that loudly allocated for Trump, someone known for amassing power by any means necessary including strong arming industry should be publicly eating crow right now. This was something that was always in the cards when you vote for someone who only cares about himself.
All the tech CEOs had no qualms about groveling before Trump and licking his boots, so yeah I assume they must be 100% onboard with stuff like this as well
I agree. It’s crazy the backwards reasoning that is being used to blame anthropic for this!
I am still waiting for a government to try “nationalizing” AI by saying anything produced by AI belongs to “everyone” and thus hugely taxing the profits and proceeds from the product, as soon as Bernie Sanders thinks of it you can bet we’ll hear all about it.
Apparently your hearing isn't that good, since you haven't heard of the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act.
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-i...
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How can you simultaneously be a bottleneck for innovation while being their largest customer, and pouring tons of money and resources into it to help accelerate development?
The startup-brained among us never learned the first rule of business which is to not fuck over your benefactor.
For some conspirational reasons, I am thinking that this was the part of the deal between Anthropic and US government, all buzz was for PR, but behind the closed doors Anthropic asked US to regulate the LLM space
I'm honestly surprised there isn't more political outcry. The administration has a party affiliation that, typically, insists on free market principles and is against government overreach and regulation.
You would think that this government, attempting to puppeteer the most rapidly growing industry in the world, would have more people outraged.
Where are all of the people crying "Communist"? This is one of those moments where it is less of an overreaction.
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You have fallen victim to what is known as “marketing”.
> We don't let passengers fly on unvetted jumbo jets either and we prevent them from flying when they have problems.
This is Mr. Fart's Favorite Colors all over again. Our "vetting" process is not any more useful than the billion-dollar metal detector you can skip with a TSA Precheck. It arguably does not deter the most dangerous attacks even slightly. What happens when a mentally-ill pilot locks their copilot out of the cockpit? Well, we write off a crowd of passengers and then "vet" the next jet as a safe vehicle.
AI will be the same way. These "safety" measures are performative and do not even slightly address the actual threat surface of the technology. Arguably, it cannot even be done.
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What a terrible take
First of all, who said this is a disaster?
Second of all, OP never even said anything about no regulation - they specifically said they wanted transparency which is 100% valid and better than a world where the government baby proofs everything for you
Models are already censored - and who they are or aren't uncensored for has a lot of implications which are way worse
And the jets is a terrible example - you picked one of THE highest regulated industries where NOBODY has a problem with regulation
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In the EU that's the norm not the exception. A little taste of Europe for our American friends :-S
Except that EU has clear rules, not arbitrary lawless approvals.
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The precedent for this is terrible.
MAGA is bad enough. Imagine if the current batch of US progressives, who have 0 idea how any of this works, wins the presidency and gets to decide who gets to use it.
From the other side of the world, the current batch of US progressives looks quite liberal. It looks to me they'll either completely restrict AI or not touch it at all.
Do you think they'll try to dictate who gets to use it?
Just because you don't get access, doesn't mean they're not innovating.
Their innovation relies on a huge amount of investment made under the assumption that they'll continue to be able to provide frontier models to a global audience. If it turns out the US government only lets them sell gimped models to non-citizens then they'll forfeit the whole global market to China and investors will flee like rats.
Maybe, but you know who is also innovating, not gating access, and at most 6-9 months away from reaching parity with US frontier labs?
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Also applies to Chinese models. Give it 5 more months of US admin locking out US models and let's see what the market will look like for OoenAI and Anthropic IPO.
This move was obvious the moment Anthropic pleaded to the government to regulate them.
As predicted, [0] it has now been applied to OpenAI and soon anyone else releasing highly capable models.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511849
Seems like it hasn't been applied to openai. Anthropic can't even release this to partners. Openai can. I wonder why.
Wondering how long it'll take for the US to make it... more difficult to use Chinese models once they've caught up.
> Only companies approved by the government will get access. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model.
I knew the time would come when individuals on personal subscriptions get the short end of the stick. Didn't think it would come so soon. I hope we're not too badly deprecated in the months to come.
Looks like I've got to improve my DeepSeek workflows.
For personal use I don't care if I get access to it. Tokens are becoming too expensive. I am using Chinese models. What worries me is that my company may never get access. I work for a well known US company, but from Europe, we also have developers in Mexico. I can only guess US gov will take this into account when deciding who gets to use the new models.
Even worse than not getting access is getting fired. Since less than 20% of our developers reside outside US and our management is suffering from AI hype, they can decide to close foreign offices as a way to get access to new models.
edit: grammar
> For personal use I don't care if I get access to it
There's a big difference between being priced out of a market option and the government saying you literally cannot buy it. We should all be wary of government controls like this.
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> For personal use I don't care if I get access to it. Tokens are becoming too expensive.
How is this a rational argument?
Are you so self centered that you only care about government decisions that affect ONLY the present you?
“I don’t care that the government made prescription glasses illegal, I can see fine without them”
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Even the subscriptions are too expensive?
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From the OpenAI press release:
> We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them. We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks, while we work with the Administration to develop the cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases.
It seems like the exclusion is temporary. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model _right now_.
You have to be very intentionally dishonest and ignorant to ever believe that increased government powers are "temporary".
That's how authoritarian governments become authoritarian.
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OpenAI is saying they want it to be temporary, not that it will be.
When it comes to government, nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.
> I knew the time would come when individuals on personal subscriptions get the short end of the stick.
This is how it started.
Only researchers were able to get access to the early super dangerous AI models that were much worse than you can now run locally on your phone.
Also I'd be willing to bet companies in left-leaning states, or with left-leaning figureheads will be excluded from use as well. This administration is amazingly petty and has captured voter records for a reason.
If you remove left-leaning states there’s no company remaining that will actually use these models.
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Forget your DeepSeek workflows. The "US government" coughexecutivebranchcough can now pick corporate winners and losers too.
You and I both know that capitalism values corporations over individuals.
yeah, but didn't you hope the people rubber stamping AI information weren't the nazis?
Im not worried about this at all. The OpenAI, Anthropic and the US government can play this game all they want... They're just accelerating the development of open source models; and helping destroy the lead the US has built in AI, and their profit margins along with it.
This is like the battle between PostgreSQL and Oracle all over. Move up market, isolate yourself to enterprises, and watch while everyone else builds on PostgreSQL and erodes any technical advantage you had, until people just stop talking about you altogether.
Encryption is a better example. The USG tried exactly the same tactic in the 90’s. The NSA tried to shove the Clipper chip down everyone’s throats. The USG put export controls on encryption and people went as far as to tattoo the algorithms on their body.
But like you said, they will try to control it and fail. Like they always do.
I can't wait for the first person to tattoo model weights on their body!
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That until it becomes illegal to have or use open source models without approval and licence from government. With more talks about on device scanning, this could be easily plumbed in. If OS detects there is open source model, it could brick your device or alert authorities. Then next step will be limiting what operating system you can install. Likely only those where you cannot remove client side scanning.
It can't easily be plumbed in, though. I can spin up my own Linux build with none of that plumbing and do what I want with it. I can grab China's best models and use them or distilled versions on my own terms because OSS allows for that. Until hardware comes fully locked down and the models cannot be run on old hardware, both a long ways off, OSS is a way out.
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I wonder how you can reliably detect an open source model though. It can be stored in any binary format, and the weights can be modified slightly so that the float values are completely different while the network works the same. The binary that runs it can be obfuscated as well. Maybe the hardware could detect common LLM inference patterns at runtime? That would probably produce many false positives.
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Not gonna happen; the incentives for bypassing this are too high.
This is getting terrifying pretty quick...
Eh probably easier ways to do this. Just sanction all entities that release open weight models for "illegal distillation". Enough to cross the risk threshold for most businesses in the west, and reduce future monetization opportunities.
I generally agree, but it's a bit overstated to say "nobody talks about Oracle now" -- they made a profit of about $17 billion dollars in 2025.
Just goes to show how profitable rent seeking is even after you’ve become irrelevant.
The battle was between Oracle and MySQL (and PostgreSQL won).
The government will just claim that unsanctioned models have the potential to deliberately introduce security vulnerabilities when working on IT projects (e.g. be trained to strongly yet covertly favoring introducing compromised dependencies when you are not looking).
Then laws will be made to forbid organizations who use models other than those from the sanctioned labs to participate in critical projects on national security concerns.
All of a sudden, no business would risk using open source models anymore.
Then all they do is drive the usage of open models underground (copyright infringement is illegal too, and still common), stifle US companies operating legally, and accelerate the rest of the world decoupling from the US.
I hope they do it! It will have a positive long-term effect just like the Iran war footgun accelerates renewable energy transition.
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And companies from outside the US will outcompete those from the US forcing more protectionism, higher prices in US etc. I think there have been several cycles of several industries that have gone through this cycle (cars, shipping?), and mostly forced to roll back.
Streisand effect
>The OpenAI, Anthropic and the US government can play this game all they want...
OpenAI and Anthropic did not call for the US Government to limit who Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 could be rolled out to.
> Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety
Amodei. June 2026 https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential
> We're proposing stronger regulation of the technology, proposing giving the government the ability to, again, in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology
Amodei. June 2026 https://abcnews.com/Business/exclusive-anthropic-ceo-calls-s...
> This is not to suggest that we won't need any regulation or safeguards. We obviously do, urgently, like we have for other powerful technologies
Altman. Feb 2026 https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-openai-altman-world-urge...
> He gave several suggestions for how a new agency in the US could regulate the industry - including "a combination of licensing and testing requirements" for AI companies, which he said could be used to regulate the "development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities".
Altman. May 2023 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65616866
etc. etc.
Indeed, it's like people don't understand this is a cataclysm for US AI competitiveness.
You cannot justify such a capex on AI anymore. This will drag down the us financial markets and economy too.
What is this Oracle you speak of? Never heard of it.
From what I recall they were big in the extortion business back in the day, and these days I think they are into construction or waste disposal, maybe both.
> and their profit margins along with It
lol that’s a good one.
Given how the WH operates these days, this is ripe for corruption. Imagine the WH dislikes the CEO of a biotech company, while appreciating the attitude of a competitor CEO. What is to stop them from stalling on giving acess for the latest model to the company they don't like?
>Imagine the WH dislikes the CEO of a biotech company, while appreciating the attitude of a competitor CEO.
there is no need to imagine, this is what is literally happening
> ripe for corruption
You're two steps behind.
I’ve been hearing ‘oh this will set a precedent there is no turning back from’ weekly since Jan 2025.
It’s like the frog commenting that the 80C water is about to get hotter.
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I’m waiting for the “Yes, I was corrupt. I did it to show you all how corrupt a government can be if you let it be”
> What is to stop them from stalling on giving acess for the latest model to the company they don't like?
Congress, if any of those creatures were vertebrates.
For the next few months, though? Nothing will. Those in the in-crowd will line each others' pockets at the expense of the rest of us. I will say that the recent election results and the building bipartisan angst over data centers and surveillance (e.g. Flock) are encouraging.
The tragedy is the Trump admin is setting the precedent and creating the framework which will be abused in the future. For all the complains he made about the deep state, he's just creating a new avenue for them to abuse power
He always was the "deep state...."
We are living in the future, so who set the precedent in the past?
Ah yes, the defining tragedy of the Trump administration is ... gestures into the middle distance ... look over there! what if those guys abuse it one day?
Same as it ever was. If you listen to interviews with Zuckerberg he’ll talk about the constant communiques from The White House during the Biden administration. Trump didn’t start this unfortunately he’s just more brazen about it.
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That's precisely what's going to happen.
The White House is already 100% corrupt. The American political system has failed in keeping out a conman pedophile from the highest office in the land. What follows is pretty much what you'd expect under these conditions.
You dont even need corruption. Once its political it becomes subservient to political interests.
"Given how the WH operates these days" I've got bad news for you...
They is what is currently and blatantly happening already.
In most countries around the world corruption/bribes are necessary for doing business. Companies even account for it on their books. It was about time the US caught up.
In the US is already legal. It is called lobbying.
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Remember how China turned its tech industry into a smoking ruin - make making them all submit to political priorities:
Ant Group: China halted Ant’s IPO and forced a restructuring
Alibaba: China fined and politically disciplined Alibaba
Didi: China punished Didi after its US listing by removing its apps, freezing users, forcing delisting
Tutoring platforms: banned profit from core school-subject tutoring.
Tencent gaming: restricted youth gaming froze approvals
NetEase and gaming companies: licence freeze stopped game companies from shipping games.
Meituan: fined Meituan and forced changes to its labour and platform model.
Huya/DouYu: blocked Tencent’s game-streaming merger, stopping commercial consolidation in a major entertainment market.
Boss Zhipin / Full Truck Alliance: froze new users after listging in the US
Crypto companbies: banned crypto trading and mining, forcing exchanges offshore.
Think it's not happening to the US?
tourism - people afraid to visit
tariffs - wrecking ball to all businesses
defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada
internet clouds - Greenland made Europe decide that the US clouds can't be trusted, now sovereign computing matters and MS/AWS/Google are feeling it
finance - no one trusts the US not to turn people into "non members of global society" by banning them from visa and credit card and banking systems
It's really interesting that someone can know all of these domestic Chinese names and yet declare the industry generally a "smoking ruin". Is it from a newsletter or something?
Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.
> It's really interesting that someone can know all of these domestic Chinese names and yet declare the industry generally a "smoking ruin".
They're different things. Just like you can be the most famous actor or singer and still be poor. Being popular, having good products and actually making money is not the same.
And it's all relative. Today if NASDAQ dropped 20% the world would declare it in ruins. Are the companies still "alive"? Yes.
> Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.
Not true. A lot of them e.g. the public listed 1s have reported increased competition and reduced margins.
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From my perspective curtailing Ant's plans was positive regulatory action.
Political priorities and good governance is why we have government.
Seems like a pretty terrible idea in hindsight, destroying private lending, given how desperately the government is trying and failing to raise domestic consumption now.
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Remember how China turned its tech industry into a smoking ruin
Not really, no. What planet is this on?
China tech industry is smoking ruin? On what planet are you living?
Tech crackdowns rid China of entrepreneurial capitalism https://eastasiaforum.org/2023/09/12/tech-crackdowns-rid-chi...
Why China crushed its tech giants https://www.wired.com/story/china-tech-giants-policy/
Why Big Tech May Never Recover in China https://time.com/6973119/china-big-tech-crackdown-backfiring...
Beijing can’t afford another crackdown on its tech companies https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/11/china-cant-afford-another-cr...
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I suppose we should bookmark this for the next time that HN claims that the rise of China's tech industry is inevitable.
Some of these were very good decisions imho, from someone who spent two months in Chineese rural area around ~2019.
- Tutoring platforms were a plague on Chineese youth that increased the weight of their already _very_ heavy load (tbh, i think and education reform might have been preferable, this is a stopgap, but at least it is something).
- Ant group was offering predatory consumption loans to rural China, which to me felt a lot like the "revolver credits" that plagued my country in the 80s and 90s and pushed to many to suicide (the surname cam from their english name, "revolving credit", and because my countryside had a lot of hunting rifle available to whomever). Considering how rural china is mistreaded by Chineese state and general government (and imho this is a real weakness in China politics), having this group by a huge fine for their practice and a general debt forgivness was great. Curtailing Ant's power is also good.
- Stopping consolidation is a great way to keep a market free.
- Crypto companies: mining diverted power from villages who couldn't compete on purchasing power to mining wharehouses in some state. The ban is great for the rural population at least. Also, if that can curtail the birth of Chineese cryptobros, great for the mental health of the country.
This was generated by AI and slightly re-written or end capped by a human. Anyone that knows who Meituan and Boss Zhipin are wouldn't make the claims this post makes. It's not reasonable that someone who could list off these companies and incidents would believe China's tech industry is in ruin. There's no way. This poster clearly promoted for the list, and wrote his commentary around it. Sad.
The US is now doing a softer and broader version of the same thing to trust-based export sectors. It’s not the same method but! it is the same mechanism. The main difference is that the US damage is more reputational than structural, so it could be reversed faster (only if policy stops telling customers that dependence on America is a political risk)
Seems like a structural problem that the U.S. elected who they did twice.
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Orange and apples... China has very intentional policy behind those decisions. The US... Not so much. I don't buy that Trump and his whole cabinet are as dumb as they look, but they are only motivated by profit. And ignorance.
80% of these are thriving in reality.
> defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada
Huh? US foreign military sales are up at all time highs
"Total exports by the United States, the world’s largest supplier of arms, increased by 27 per cent. This included a 217 per cent increase in US arms exports to Europe, according to new data published today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)"
[https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2026/global-arms-f...]
Aren't a lot of these purchases (a) locked in from contracts made pre-admin; and (b) otherwise largely related to anxiety over Russia? There are too many confounding variables here.
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Yep, American tourism is in shambles. Everyone's terrified
...because the USA made it into the knockout stage. really scary stuff
> defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada
It's the ONLY one (almost) that are actively tested and verified in real battles.
I guess by ensuring there are wars to test them with.
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.
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.
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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.
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> 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.
The real reason, afaik, that the US is trying to restrict access to SOTA models is that a very large component of USA tailored access and surveillance relies on exploits and weaknesses that these models will easily detect. Thus, it really is an export control issue, but it has nothing to do with offensive capabilities. Offensive capabilities always exist, but pervasive defensibility would upset the asymmetric advantage that attackers, especially the USA, currently have.
There are now Asian models coming , optimized focused on cybersecurity defense at a high level, so I suspect this will be a relatively moot point soon.
LLMs are not great at creating exploits, but they are really good at detecting them. That asymmetry alone is enough to destroy the “offensive capabilities” narrative. Yes, mythos can find exploitable bugs, even write bench exploits. But real exploits require a good dose of human psychology, and most of the tools needed are off the shelf available anyway. You still need a real cybersecurity expert to effectively weaponize a zero day into a deployable exploit.
But an LLM can inspect payloads, packages, and blobs en masse and find those exploits in a way that was wholly impractical before, so the asymmetric attack advantage is dissolved by strong LLMs.
The USA is trying to protect its cyberwarfare advantage, not protect against attackers. The exact opposite, actually. Porous security is a huge advantage to technologically advanced state actors.
> There are now Asian models coming , optimized focused on cybersecurity defense at a high level, so I suspect this will be a relatively moot point soon.
Source?
There was a prominent hacker news article about it today, but it seems to have disappeared? Or more like I can’t find it.
Look up 360 security technology tulongfeng and yitianzhen , as well as Sakana AI’s Fugu series, IIRC.
GLM5.2 is also excellent, it found things in our codebase that 5.5 and opus 4.8 both missed.
Are these models still relevant for people outside the US? I get the impression we're stuck on GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8 pretty much permanently now, and relying on Chinese models in future.
Dont worry, chinese models will distill frontier ones, quite fast.
The excuse they give is borderline childish. I get the thing about slow rollout, make sure partners get to fix the bugs, etc...
But bad actors are hard working motivated entities with tens of thousand of fake ids, and american citizens working for them, for pennies.
All while the ones like or you sit at a crossfire which is borderline useless.
I cant wait to see what Qwen did with the massive distillation they made out of Opus 4.8 and Fable aka Mythos aka pretty sure they jailbroke it.
Anybody who used codex or claude for the last few months is sitting on directories full of session logs that -- with the right motivation and effort -- can be massages and used for fine tuning or reinforcement training on any large model.
This is nothing a few felony indictments can't fix.
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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.
> 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 :-).
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This is why we can't decouple ourselves from the US fast enough.
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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.
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Theoretically that gives edge to all other companied around the world though, no?
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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
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?
You shouldn’t build a business that relies on any of these models. It’s a geopolitical and sovereignty risk now. Someone could just rug pull your entire stack.
Not only that, but using Opus 4.8 [1m] right now outside the US, and suddenly I only have a 500k context window. I really hope this is just a strange Claude Code bug, but I had access to a 1 Million window before, and it wouldn't entirely surprise me if context window length becomes another US export restriction.
The Anthropic page here seems to say that Max users should have access to the full 1 Million window for 4.8:
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8606394-how-large-is-...
I was already setting up my infra to experiment with GLM 5.2 and its 1 Million token window before this happened. I think I'm glad I did.
EDIT: Found a solution, seems Claude Code 2.1.193 (or an earlier version I didn't notice) changed default settings, so that if you have Autocompact turned on it occurs at 50% of the context window. If you turn off Autocompact, the full 1 Million context window is restored. Another example of Claude Code quietly changing default settings sigh
You want to compact early though as sending the whole chat you will end up with a lot of tokens not in the cache which 1. Costs way more and 2. Will slow the request down as it has to process it all.
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Hopefully. I hope this eventually nudges my employer to use Deepseek or other Chinese models.
That’s assuming China would not start controlling the access to their models.
Chinese companies can make a killing selling on prem AI systems to the rest of the world now.
Big boxes with Huawei GPUs and Chinese open models to run inside your company without network access.
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China has no reason to do that. The US is freely handing them the international market for AI.
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Why do people always fearmonger China speculatively doing things that the US is actively doing?
Well I was expecting it but if it's not going to become available in this subscription cycle for me I will cancel oai subs as I did with claude ones months ago...
moving to open weight models is trivial now, with optimizations and stuff glm 5.2 is roughly the same price as the best models around from multiple vendors.
unless I could atleast try and see Sol perform like 10x better I don't really have a reason to switch back.
I used Fable for like what 2-3 days at most and didn't really feel it was so much better, only difference was I had to prompt it less, not to get what I want but to get to a working output. Code quality was still shit, still made bad plans and analysis and so on.
> I used Fable for like what 2-3 days at most and didn't really feel it was so much better
It was a lot better. I can't believe people say this.
This is the AI booster equivalent of "well it works on my machine." Works better for me != works great for everyone. I'm amazed how much people on HN seem to think that all coding is stupidly simple web apps.
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I felt like it was about 10X better at "pretty" but straightforward 1 shot'ish type tasks. Not so different for complex and specific tasks in real code-bases.
Why do you say it was a lot better, what type of tasks were you testing it on?
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Eval saturation.
“Alice is supposedly smarter than Bob, but they both take the same time to tie their shoes.”
It felt a lot better, but it was just a feeling. None of the stuff I had Fable do actually worked, but it looked great.
That phrasing is just a way of lying to yourself.
If Fable were released as open-weights, I doubt anyone would ever consider using GLM or any other models over it.
Yes, brilliant for vibe coding and debugging. Another step back as an assistant.
This is a real head scratcher. Unless this is a very short term action it seems to have only downsides for everybody:
- people pay much more for US models than Chinese models because right now they're the best. Once they're no longer the best (since you don't get access to them) why would anyone pay several times as much for the same result?
- once you get a high amount of tokens flowing into China instead of US companies, they will train on those chats and their rate of improvement will only accelerate, making US models even less attractive over time
- the sky-high IPO are dead in the water, since their story of "we will replace a good chunk of all knowledge work in the world, capturing a few % of total global spend relating to it" turns into "we will make a bunch of money out of a few dozen S&P 500 paying for the best, and some pocket money out of whoever uses our overpriced models that are as good as Chinese models" - far less money overall. Losing access to untold billions of investor money certainly won't improve performance for the US labs
- all the non-US people start asking themselves why they're funneling money to US corporations who barely share any of the secret sauce compared to Chinese corporations who share plenty when it comes to LLM, including the models themselves (at least for now)
- Chinese models have significantly less guardrails, making for better end-user experience
- there is a small but non-zero chance Euros get off their asses and invest into AI, making something halfway decent and further fracturing the market which cuts into US profits
So what's the benefit here? I thought the Mythos situation was the current admin taking revenge on Antrophic for not kissing the ring, or simply looking for a bribe, but no matter which way I look at it it's a self-own. The only way this would make any sense is if AGI is imminent, which I don't think even the boosters are arguing at this point.
Theoretically US could outlaw Chinese models, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to accomplish as the rest of the world certainly won't, especially as long as they release open weights models that you can run without phoning home.
Yea not sure who would put money into an OpenAI or Anthropic IPO at this point. After this episode I promptly bought the hardware I needed to run local models (~$25k) and am extremely impressed. The price tag alone is worth the peace of mind knowing I will always have a locally running LLM that nobody can take away. I don't need Mythos-level intelligence to do 99% of my day to day work; Opus 4.8 was more than enough and I am pretty close to that with the open source models. So what happens when this hardware inevitably gets cheaper and cheaper and people realize they can run the models they actually need locally and without handing all their data over to these companies?
Only if you're doing cutting edge research or some highly, highly niche project would you need the frontier models.
Can I ask what did you buy? I don't have that money now but I wouldn't knpw what to buy anyway.
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You have thought about this longer than anyone who made the decision. Stop caring, it only makes your head hurt.
US citizens to remain nonviolent at any cost, issue strongly worded internet comments, and find themselves a little less free every day.
While laughing at the stereotype of French being on the street all the time
I do respect the French. They've proven, time and time again, that if you fuck with the people, heads will roll...
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Hey some of them take an entire Saturday off to go to a family friendly demonstration holding witty signs in front of their state capitol!
The organizers of the No Kings rallies have done infinitely more to achieve political change in the United States than online commentators who make fun of them for being insufficiently cool and edgy. Effective activism is not about feeling superior to the normies who have families and are busy on weekdays.
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Watch out, ive read that the US government has incarcerated people for about 50 years for doing that.
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The onion finds itself in a peculiar spot today
How do they do it? Is it even still possible to make up stories that sound more absurd than reality?
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The west's war on Russia?
Afaik there is not a single invader in Russian lands. And nobody was threatening to invade, especially after Napoleon and Hitler demonstrated invading Russia is suicide.
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Pretty happy for anything that will throw some sand into the gears of AI development, given all the negative externalities that are becoming apparent, even if the admin is doing it for the usual dumbass reasons.
It’s worse than that.
It’s available to large companies. The WH gives them a competitive advantage against the rest of the market.
Does it? That's not even well established yet. These things aren't that good.
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crony capitalism has accomplished this for decades, unfortunately
> It’s available to large companies
... that are friendly to this administration.
Not sure if the USG reserving all superior models for themselves and big corp is sand in AI dev? Inference is clearly constrained, people still want better models. Everyone will still use the best they can afford -- now additionally limited by what the USG allows them to pay for.
> given all the negative externalities that are becoming apparent
What specific externalities are you referring to? The only I can think of is high electricity usage, but consuming energy isn't an externality in itself. It depends entirely on how that electricity is generated and whether its environmental costs are already priced.
Do you live under a rock or something?
Reminds of the TikTok ban for security and safety only for it to be sold to a fellow crony. Can't help but see this play going down again. Threaten / Ban / Control / Pressure a technology+company, then get your cronies a seat at the board.
The cynic in me suspects they were salivating so much over the Spacex IPO they wanted a finger in anthropics 2026 IPO. Banning fable ~1 day after.
In the early days of the LLM era, there was lots of talk about how big incumbents, in particular google would be disadvantaged relative to “startups” like OpenAI because of their valuable legacy businesses that could be destroyed if something went wrong. Mainly people thought about big lawsuits but government action is similar.
Now OpenAI and Anthropic are big incumbents with Trillion dollar valuations at stake, so they can’t take any risks. Unlike google they don’t really have a thriving primary business to protect though, so without being able to continue to take risks and ignore regulation startup-style, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to stay relevant.
So them banning Fable for only non-Americans is what we non-Americans should expect to be the norm going forward? Way to build even more resentment abroad.
I'm very pro-west, but at this point okay, I guess the rest of us have to side with China, not because we remotely like it, but because they don't try to be quite so antagonistic to us in everything they do.
>because they don't try to be quite so antagonistic to us in everything they do.
Just because the many headed dragon is trying to bite your sailors' heads doesn't mean you should pilot your ship into the whirlpool
I couldn't have put it better myself.
Eh, China is much less a threat than the US.
Expect the US to sanction non-US-controlled models and put sanctions on individuals, companies and countries that use them? They already do this with other things like oil.
Oil isn't made out of information and cannot be transmitted via a speech act.
Can you cite any examples of a US citizen being sanctioned for importing foreign technology (not exporting)? Please don't cite anything OFAC-related, it does not apply here.
This was coming for a while. For years now there have been job postings for ai safety and not really what people expect. Jobs in places like RAND, funded off DOD grants, exploring the feasibility of building a bioweapon with off the shelf tooling and measuring how far along these tools are. Maybe they figured out it was too easy now, and this is the clamping down we are seeing in response.
This feels like the sort of claim one should provide a source for. Sounds fairly far fetched to me.
What part? The job posts are factual. There are still some up on rand career website although the bio specific ones are all filled now. Here is their department page on the subject where they cover the scoping (1). Mirror biology seems like something out of sci fi but it is one of their main efforts it seems so the theory must hold some water. There's also concern about bioweaponry and pandemics. The rest is me connecting the dots.
1. https://www.rand.org/global-and-emerging-risks/centers/ai-se...
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How does this account for the Chinese models that are the ones people will use if they can't use OAI's or Anthropic's. Last time I checked, the US president doesn't have the ability to regulate the Chinese models. Considering this, do you still stand by your maybe?
I really don't think this administration is capable of thinking strategically enough for that. I'm starting to think we lost the AI war about two weeks ago at 5:21.
Maybe they are looking into those too and a ban might be on the horizon. President makes their own rules now and controls the supreme court, you can't consider precedent anymore.
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It's entertaining watching the whole world take steps to reduce reliance on the US and the US throwing arguments for it out like it's candy
What concrete steps have been taken?
Think it's more of a thousand cuts by individual economic actors situation than one flashy concrete step.
My buying preferences have definitely shifted to "Buy not American" on digital things. Proton, bunny, hetzner, netcup etc.
Some things are harder to move, but the direction of travel is clear
Does it matter if they are not concrete? Concrete takes a long time to set.
Why make a product and not sell it baffles me. Especially when others are rapidly making products.
Here's one from today my man
https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/weve-been-too-depen...
Most of the world has already or is in the process of rolling out their own payment network to drop reliance on visa and Mastercard.
Trade is being reconfigured in the midst of Trump's idiotic trade war (and even more idiotic real war) and militaries worldwide, particularly our closest allies, are seeking non-US sources of arms.
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we still have this delusion that we can just pound our chests and throw our weight around. it's clearly not working, it's not helping the citizens, but people still demand this.
> Organizations interested in model access may join the GPT 5.6 waitlist line, hosted at OpenAI's official Palm Spring satellite campus. Line begins at rear entrance with expedited VIP waitlist line options for holders of partnering cryptocurrency tokens. Application fee required for access to venue; waivers available for select US corporations.
/s, maybe
for a couple secs, i cannot tell if you are joking or it is true...
"government needs to step in and regulate ai"
"wait, not like that"
Anth/OpenAI simply wanted the government to pull the ladder after them and ban models from China.
Seems it blew in their faces and probably the new frontier models will be available only to a select few. Many people predicted this, only a naive person would believe that access to something with these capabilities would be decided by some dude in California.
As entertaining as the sheer Schadenfreude of the situation is, this is terrible for foreign peasants like myself. It no longer makes any sense to pay for America's frontier AI models. I'd be funding the training of models I will never be able to use.
GLM 5.2 is competitive with Opus 4.6. If the best model I'll ever get is Opus 4.8, then the choice is clear. I'll miss Opus.
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Yes, to the surprise of some HNers, regulations can be good or bad. Just because there are people unhappy with current regulation doesn't automatically mean regulation shouldn't exist at all.
BTW this isn't an opinion on the availability of GPT 5.6. I couldn't care less about that.
Usually this format of quip is meant to imply hypocrisy, but that doesn't apply here, so I don't know what you're implying.
It's also more typical of a Reddit or YouTube comment, rather than HN, but that's a separate issue.
Classical case of "be careful what you wish for".
Imagine if someone was lobbying for some reasonable regulation (we should regulate drugs, based around clinical trials) and then instead of a transparent system you get purely executive actions with little to no public justification (Trump declares all glp1s illegal no one knows why exactly)
Would you levy the same two quote criticism of the reasonable call for regulation?
So the frontier will just decisively shift to open Chinese models in the near future, and once that happens, there will be no catching up.
Great, so when do we lowly code-serfs get access to it?
Unfortunately we're not in a position where we can promise an exact date, but we expect it to take weeks (not days or months). It's the best coding model we've ever trained and we're bummed we can't release it to everyone yet. When we do launch, we'll share a lot more evals and testimonials and demos that help show what it's good/bad at. Personally hoping that both GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5 get broadly released soon so that everyone (myself included) can try them head to head.
(I work at OpenAI.)
You don't have to mention details, but is it internally a topic that your CEO hasn't even publicly criticized the Anthropic model freeze and are open ai folks seeing through the Musk/xai game that is in play here?
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You may want to inform your lawyers that promises made in advertising is legally binding in some countries, such as Australia.
The "Plus" and higher tiers are advertised as "The latest models" but if that's not true any more then Open AI is opening themselves to investigations from organisations like: https://www.accc.gov.au/
Promising "X" for $Y to everyone and then delivering "X" only to the "chosen few" at the detriment of others opens you up to lawsuits because then your product advertisement is a lie.
For a comparison, imagine a telco selling "100 Mbps for $20/mo" and then throttling the connection for customers that aren't currently favoured by the Trump administration!
> It's the best coding model we've ever trained
I assume for more technical folks this is not needed, as it's just a marketing term. There's no need to use such words because it's obvious, none worked for months to release a worse model/phone/laptop you name it.
any plans to make 1m context standard for codex/gpt 5.x subs as anthropic has with cc and opus for subs? 258k toks is sometimes a little tight, even 500k would help.
Shutup peasant, you'll get it when we say. And be grateful.
Mythos, go hack the new OpenAI model for me.
Hey OpenAI model go hack the new mythos for me.
Battle bots, oppression version.
How much are you able to contribute to Trump’s election fund?
i have access and i'm just a regular dude
Irregular company then?
+1 point to China!
In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over the sovereignty.
The US gov sees these AI companies as bartering power, not as innovation. Wouldn’t you as a parent always want what’s best for your child, not for yourself?
It also feels like they can’t just relocate out of the country, as the administration will surely sanction anyone from business within the country again. These firms are so over inflated with evaluations and opex, they’ve dug themselves into a corner.
This is not to say regulation does not exist in any other country, but it’s clear now after what’s happening at Anthropic + OAI that the US gov has taken these companies hostage.
This is only further playing into the hands of open source and the outside models; the US gov is going to be to blame for when they all lose the race to low cost/free.
> +1 point to China!
Which, like the US, uses export controls when it finds them advantageous: https://nam.org/china-imposes-export-controls-on-u-s-mineral...
> In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over my sovereignty.
So, locate in China, where every company of importance is essentially required in practice to maintain ties to the CCP?
I personally think the US has gone too far with its use of export controls and sanctions as a political tool, but it's foolish to believe that it's different anywhere else on the planet.
In China, it has even been reported that top AI talent is restricted from overseas travel.
https://www.thinkchina.sg/technology/china-tightens-control-...
Bottom line: if you're working on cutting-edge technology that is deemed to be of critical national security importance and has military or dual use implications, you're going to be a hostage no matter where you go.
You wrongly assumed I implied these firms relocate to China. We are all aware of how China operates and controls its assets.
AI has long existed in many countries around the world without this type of behavior from the government. Deepmind in the UK, Mistral in France, DeepL in Germany - the governments don’t seem to be forcing employees to get their deploys approved by a government official.
My argument is that the US gov does not like that these companies have too much influence which they do not feel they can mandate. It’s slowing the entire country down at a very critical sink or swim inflection point in this tech.
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I think it’s pretty clear why they’re abiding by this:
-the US is the only place where you can raise the kinds of money you need to run a lab like this.
-a government that won’t let you sell products to customers abroad will probably object even more to you moving abroad.
Even if you made the move abroad, that government might no longer let you access US data centers.
-This basically affects OpenAI and Anthropic, which make the only LLMs most people consider frontier nowadays. Since most open weights models rely on distillation of frontier models, it may genuinely entrench those companies more.
It may be playing into the hands of open source OAI/Anthropic dependencies start to look more dangerous, but it also makes building better OSS models harder.
The advantages the AI labs rely on might be less durable than a proprietary process in industrial manufacturing, but it’s still meaningful.
I think the bigger reckoning will come from a different angle: tokens will eventually need to cover cost.
That will likely mean multiplying prices compared to today. And companies already complain now!
Model orchestration and smaller models that can run locally or cheaply will become more important in my opinion.
Right now, you can still default to GPT/Claude and it’s kind of fine, but that will have to change.
The elephant in the room is that the US AI firms should not be as valuable as they are. They should not require the sort of capital they are seeking, the amount of employees, the amount of offices and resources..but they are so steeped in investor interests - why stop being fed?
Many Americans want AI to fail. The US gov wants to control AI. The AI companies are running out of things to do, and are shipping product after product after product to keep the perceived productivity narrative alive.
At this rate I would not be surprised to see an OAI/Anthropic merger just to throw everything AI the US has to offer to the global markets.
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> I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully.
They literally asked for this.
> AI firms are abiding by this peacefully
What are they going to do about it? Might makes right.
They've already done what little they can: pull access to their models wholesale rather than adopt an export compliance regime.
Here’s to hoping that Alibaba (and other Chinese labs) have collected some really good distilled data.
No one trusts the US government. I’ve been warning of this sovereign risk for years.
This will tank the market.
See you all on the other side!
Why do I get the feeling the administration is doing this to buy a position in the AI companies before they go public.
If non US citizens shouldn't have the models - wouldn't that cause both Anthropic and OAI to fire non-citizens?
> wouldn't that cause both Anthropic and OAI to fire non-citizens?
They would do what the thousands of other companies do with their tens of thousands of engineers handling ITAR/EAR-regulated software/hardware every day: compartmentalize their workforces, buildings, and access.
because the administration has been repeating the same patterns over pretty much its entire existence.
Dont worry though, the rest of the entire world gets access to better chinese models :-), once they get a taste for those the US has lost their little trade game and the future truly belongs to China.
Its almost like they are serving it up on a silver platter.
ofc they are not, they are just betting all in their models will be better, which is unlikely. (just look at the chinese law and all the names atop of advanced AI papers...)
Sooo both OpenAI and Anthropic going bankrupt soon?
If they can’t freely sell access to their models and Chinese models catch up to Opus 4.8/GPT 5.5 in 6-8 months - then why pay OAI/Anthropic at all?
Worse: we'd be paying US companies to train models we'll never be able to use.
It will be much harder for Chinese models to close the gap than it is to keep the historical 6-9 months behind. Their models' performance are heavily propped up on distillation runs. The capital going to their frontier labs is 10x-100x smaller than US frontier labs.
Harder, but they’ll get access one way or another. And once on par - it’s game over
Basically the signal is that the total market for any US AI company is capped at however big the US market is. As non-US AI converges to Opus 4.8 level parity, whatever is still non-US consumer base shrinks towards zero.
The end game is tokens will be a commodity - doesn’t matter which provider you use.
How many people are going to buy a $10-20K rigs to run these open models?
The calculus is changing for non US, non Chinese users.
Hypothetically if the US continues to restrict their frontier models and adds a ban on Chinese/open models then it would to obliterate services like open router. American cloud companies would presumably be blocked from selling capacity to run banned models in this situation.
That causes a shortage of compute/gpu resources internationally and an oversupply of non-revenue generating hardware in the US.
If that happens then what percent of your salary is worth securing this compute worth? How much does the cost of a data centre chip change? It’s difficult to say.
Small businesses can easily buy them.
Why would they? Today you have datacenters in EU offering Chinese and European models from Deepseek v4 Pro and Mistral Medium down to some Qwen 3.6 35B for effectively peanuts compared to Anthropic.
20K won't buy you a rig for GPT 5.5
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You’re talking $100k for entry level hw
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I already have
This is the last wake up call for EU. After China starts controlling their models, in 5 years EU would be left with archaic technology compared to other major economies
They will be serfs reliant on US and Chinese models to provide protection for their technological infrastructure from AI exploits.
Any future president will know better than to economically hamstring our closest allies and important trading partners.
In five years Europe will be buying their inference machines from Apple, like everyone else.
I asked this question in another thread [1] but I'll ask it in a different way here:
If the US continues to limit advanced AI to it's own domestic companies, US companies will have a large unfair advantage over foreign competitors who will no longer able to compete.
Wouldn't it then make sense for governments around the world to start banning or tariffing US products and services to protect their industries?
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696965
Limiting exports of AI services to all foreigners is probably allowed under GATS, since there's no favoring one county over another. But even then there's a national security exemption, which fits reasonably well with US arguments here.
If a country thought the AI export restrictions were inconsistent with treaty the remedy is challenging them, not unilaterally imposing their own tariffs. But even if they got a favorable panel decision the US would speak, and the Appellate Body is non-functional because the US stopped consenting to the addition of new members and all the terms expired. Which means anything that gets appealed is frozen indefinitely waiting for the AB to reach a quorum that won't come until the US changes is mind (and Biden didn't reverse Trump's decision here).
He gotcha: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4rd71411ko
Trump threatens 100% tariff on European nations over tech tax
> We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.
I'm very glad to see them say this explicitly and prominently.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/trump-administration-asks-o...
This isn’t just about AI: they do not want you to privately use computers at all, in a way that cannot be surveilled. They want to extinguish all forms of general purpose computing and restrict you to walled gardens of apps and all code written via AI with the government-in-the-middle. It will be illegal to write code by hand, only people with “bad intentions” do that, because otherwise, why not just use AI like a sane person?
The new propaganda campaign: YOU WOULDN'T WRITE A VARIABLE...
Open source is looking great right now
This isn't going to save you unless you're ok being a criminal. There is nothing stopping the government from making open source versions of these models equally controlled.
And given how willy-nilly they are operating I see no reason they won't clamp down on open source. All it takes is someone with connections/political contributions wakes up one day and realizes that open source is a threat to their power or bottom line and it will be declared an imminent threat with no oversight or debate.
They can try. Will the courts go along?
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It’s looking very fragile from a legal point of view. Ownership of compute and software freedom will be next k the chopping block after control of networks that’s occurring at the moment.
Less so in EU than in US.
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It's looking good until you start to see the US gov forcing cloudflare to block hugging face and others.
They'll just make it a crime to run the models unless they authorize you (classifying it as a munition, like they tried to do with encryption), and if your power bill is suspicious you'll find yourself in jail.
Any company providing the models will be deemed a threat to national security.
No need to block the download.
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Why do they need to "force Cloudflare" to do anything?
Why wouldn't they just tell Hugging Face that they need to abide export restrictions directly - they're an American company?
Doesn't sound dystopian enough without a second compelled entity?
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seriously, ordered more hardware this week, as it gets more dystopian every week
wondering when more people will raise their voice and get engaged
History shows that people generally start speaking out about things after it's too late to do so.
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It's the year of the open source AI model is the new 'It's the year of the Linux Desktop'. It's not and never will be for 90% of people
That’s not true at all. While not as good as proprietary models they are still very good and can do A LOT, certainly more than their cost would make it seem.
It’s only a matter of time before companies start to acknowledge the huge cost of tokens and look for a cheaper alternative with basic cost-benefit analysis.
My F500 company is getting local infrastructure going to host open models and I’m sure many will just switch to bedrock + the best open models.
It’s foolish for companies to let three companies dictate the price of tokens, I just don’t think they are aware of this now by and large.
GLM 5.2 is competitive with Opus 4.6.
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Well if us gov would block people from using windows or macos, then it may well be.
"We believe in broad access, and we plan to make GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna generally available in the coming weeks. As part of our ongoing engagement with the U.S. government, we previewed our plans and the models’ capabilities ahead of today’s launch. At their request, we are starting with a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners whose participation has been shared with the government, before releasing more broadly. During this preview, we will continue testing and coordinating closely with partners as we work toward broader availability. We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them. We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks, while we work with the Administration to develop the cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases."
This amount of courting the current administration is pretty scary imo.
> This amount of courting the current administration is pretty scary imo.
That’s ironic – I interpreted that paragraph with the opposite slant: positively. If that’s what the government mandates then these companies, in the end, have little choice, so was at least relieved to see them publicly pushing back.
>these companies, in the end, have little choice
They absolutely do have a choice, Anthropic and OpenAI could fight it in court. Iran showed Trump is a coward, he wouldn't risk tanking the only industry still keeping the stock market growing.
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I wonder what's going to happen when the administration rolls over to the OtherTeam(tm). If they've established a good relationship with Team A then Team B is automatically going to hate their guts.
Perhaps they estimate that the administration won’t change for a long long time.
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current players in the space love the regulatory capture
There is no bad publicity! I wonder if OpenAI explicilty asked for this.
NYT's The Daily covered this a few days ago. Has a few interesting details about what went on...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/podcasts/the-daily/trump-...
Sam playing the regulatory capture game.
seems pretty smart to me. opens doors and provides opportunities that those that don't court the government will miss out on. of course, if they're principled, that's okay (regardless of which admin it is), but the reality is most companies aren't. gotta get a leg up somehow.
Anthropic's fear-mongering and marketing is the reason we have these restrictions in the first place.
Despite their virtue signaling, Anthropic is the only major lab that has never released an open weights model, has been caught intentionally nerfing a model after release (Opus 4.6), intentionally and silently degrades performance for suspected competitors and AI researchers, complains incessantly about distillation when everyone is doing it (and after they settled for pirating books), and wants to pull the ladder out from everyone trying to catch up.
They're anti-consumer and only concerned with holding the power themselves. I'm not a fan of Altman, but Anthropic is the worst actor in the space, and I hope they lose.
Anthropic is the lightning rod.
Everyone in the space was talking about the automation of work from about day 2. People couldn’t stop themselves from talking about the way it was going to end work, and tech firms were firing people left right and center over AI.
Notably, Anthropic is the firm that stuck to its guns with the US Government, meaning they likely believe in their own spiel.
Hasn't OpenAI being doing it for a while too?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48465269
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> Anthropic's fear-mongering
I mean it's fear-mongering until it isn't. I think people have become a bit too comfortable with dismissing the dangers of misaligned AI as simply "marketing hype".
What about openai's fear mongering, or googles, or JP Morgans, or Frank Herbert's, or Arthur C. Clarke's or Samuel Butler's?
If you can't envision plausible scenarios where very bad things happen because of a malevolent actor, ChatGPT 6, and a little bad luck - you need to think harder.
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This is pure openai though. I can call anthropic misguided, but openai is just slimy.
Do you feel the same way about FDA approvals?
I mean, it seems like common sense - a limited beta test before widespread rollout. I'm not convinced they'll ever come up with a good framework for dealing with the cyber & bio issues, but getting triggered by a beta test rollout seems overboard.
It is common sense, and with literally any other administration in the past century it would seem like a good idea.
I have zero confidence that this particular administration has any interest in regulating the industry for the good of the country, much less for the good of humanity. They will use regulation to maximize personal profit for themselves and their cronies, at the expense of the nation. I would not have thought that of any other US administration in the past 100 years.
In the longer run, it probably won't matter. If the level of corruption we see currently becomes the norm, then the US is facing much bigger problems than counter-productive industrial policy.
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The FDA has incredibly detailed guidelines that need to be followed, and a clear process to be followed. This is none of that.
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The difference is that FDA approvals are a well-defined process with specific and actionable criteria for the release of a new product. Whereas this is the administration running on vibes and favouritism
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150 years ago, Bayer Inc. was mass producing Heroine. 130 years ago Merck and Parke-Davis were mass producing Cocaine(TM) -- all with zero oversight. It would be another 50 years before we even had an FDA and another 50 before the FDA was a reasonably well-oiled machine with a solid set of processes and requirements. Even then, it couldn't really (and can't really today either) prevent these non-US companies (both Heroine and Cocaine were German) from making and selling elsewhere.
I feel this could turn into a patronage system.
Want frontier intelligence? Better not defy the current administration, or your competitors will have access to a better model you could never use.
Thanks to the US government for helping kill Anthropic and OpenAI by preventing them from recouping any R&D money from new models. Doing god's work.
Brilliant strategy if the goal is to make sure the next major breakthrough happens anywhere but in the US.
US will ban Chinese models and try to get their allies to do the same. Just like they did with Huawei. Alternatively, they'll put up legal roadblocks that open models are unlikely to jump over due to costs or other reasons.
Otherwise they're putting US frontier labs at a huge disadvantage by preventing them from recouping costs on their biggest models.
How much more will OpenAI and Anthropic models cost when they're the only AI you can legally use?
There's a huge difference between 'pro market' and 'buddies with some big businesses' and this administration is making it very clear, at least to those who would see.
https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/47857230937/luigi-zi...
Last year Tim Cook gifted Trump a custom, one-of-a-kind glass plaque with a 24-karat gold base [1]. (Cook needed a policy outcome that would protect Apple's supply chain costs and avoid a costly 100% tariff on certain chips and components.)
You may have to make similar offerings if you want to use the latest version of ChatGPT.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0O9QhwIkj5w
Yeah that and a $600 billion commitment for advance manufacturing in the US. just a minor concession
All you have to do is pinky promise, you don’t have to actually do it.
LLMs have two avenues. One is the realm of self improvement in fields with verifiable output like programming and math. The other is natural language where they can't generalize super well, and therefore need a lot of new training data. Today new data means interactions with an LLM, which is what only the leading chat providers have. In both cases they will continue to improve and slowly replace white collar jobs. The biggest bottleneck currently is lack of hearing and seeing capabilities which isolates LLM training data input to entered text mostly. Once they start interacting with people by observing their behavior, almost all knowledge will be trained on. Then they will become adept lawyers and psychologists. Behavioural understanding can be only 5 years away. After that they will be limited by their navigation , i.e., robotics.
This is for the preview period, but it's not a good sign. Opus 4.8 may be the last frontier model available to the masses...
From US companies that is.
If it's the case then software engineers still have the same place as pre-ClaudeCode era, because 4.8 and 5.5 are damn good at algo but notoriously bad at architecture and coordination.
Yes, we will get a crippled version of Mythos, 5.6 and future models, while the chosen few will have unfettered access.
Thousands of American engineers all over the country (most of whom probably aren't on Hacker News) work with ITAR/EAR-regulated software and hardware every single day: these regulations are really not difficult to abide if you're a citizen.
And what about the rest of the world? I can't imagine US partners will abide this for long.
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This type of things is what frustates the people around, its like they are already trying to control an supposed to be open-source model and just for their own benefit. this is why CHINA will eventually rule the tech space.
OpenAI/Anthropic are begging to be restricted because it's great marketing and it creates a precedent to permanently ban open weights models. The problem is nobody in government believes in/cares about commodity pricing of truly open AI and how much it could help the world economy and prosperity.
Companies like Microsoft have been asleep at the wheel in terms of security for decades and now there's a model that can identify where they've been careless. That's not a "nuclear bomb level threat" or whatever Anthropic wants to call it, it's reckless carelessness by the existing companies.
Asleep at the wheel?
China, Russia etc ban Microsoft software from government laptops, indicating there are intentional back doors.
In 2008 there was a scandal about how every software contractor (including the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Oracle) working for the US government had a rootkit installed on all their systems. In 2020, there was a scandal on how people just pretended to remove that rootkit and had been covering it up since the earlier scandal.
The US intelligence agencies claim it's from Russia, but those agencies always claim it's from Russia. Since 2020 the press just stopped talking about it, with no hint of anything being solved.
Nobody needs intentional back doors.
Honest question: for those working with those models on offensive security, how much does this move make sense?
I am asking because I have seen a growing number of stories about organizations getting owned by either raw mismanagement of security, supply chain attacks that are often a failure at the ecosystem level, npm, etc.
I am not really seeing from what we hear about the use of AI for penetration as a threat yet. The growing problem with security seems to be more at the management and ecosystem layers.
Not many story that netfilter, ipfw or pf got owned by one of those frontier models.
A lot of stories that organisation X and Y left keys on a public repo for months.
I'm waiting for that government subcommittee hearing where they are supposed to decide if my new cpu design is big endian or little endian. And they can't seem to decide if it should be coded in octal or hexadecimal. There's a separate committe deciding if the cpu clocke's phase 2 should be 90-degrees or 180 degrees different. There's a special group trying to decide how may accumulators the cpu should have. And there's a markdown already going on to decide if the flags register should have a separate flags for republicans and democrats.
> markdown
Hey now, this is Government we're talking about. There's no markdown, it must be MS Word .docx in Times New Roman, emailed back and forth.
While purely speculation, I believe the same thing would have happened, albeit even sooner, under a Harris administration. Government intervention was inevitable and it will have to be worked out through the law.
The rest of the word at some point will increase chinese AI company. I am using some of their services and for many task they are good enough . It can be a winning strategy for a short period and a disaster in long term. Xi and China i think , are very happy of these decisions. They are building their model and their hardware. Even if for now it is subpar ( i don't know, it is an hypotesys), money that us will lose for this choice will make Chinese products improve a lot .
This post isn't even on the landing page for some reason.
It's called ghosted, shadow banned, too sensitive / shitshow; Basically a multiplier of 0.1 is added to this post's ranking, or similar, and it will need thousands of upvote instead of hundreds to show.
It's commonly applied silently to posts that simply don't look good or become a nightmare to manage the narrative of. It's a healthy way to manage a community while looking transparent.
I think it's sucky and cheap, but at the same time it's also the best solution.
If they do it, they should mark the post as such as give an explanation. Otherwise you never know if uncle "Sam" called and asked it to be treated as such.
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Cyberpunk 2077 is such an accurate picture of the future. Megacorps will own and control everything, we will be lucky to get the leftover scraps.
CP 2077 belongs to a 80s franchise, it was futuristic back then. Since the 2000s, cyberpunk the 80's genre is an accurate representation of the present and past. The future looks bleaker now, with fewer romanticized decorations like flying cars and social dynamics being worse than what the cyberpunk grandfathers imagined. For example "low life" being way more controlled which is exactly what both masses and elites wanted.
In retrospect it's obvious that the cyberpunk authors were mistakenly projecting certain parts of their present into the future (relative freedom of the masses and increasing rate of "traditional" engineering), and didn't consider second order effects and political action/reaction.
This will be exactly as effective as the BBC's efforts to ensure only UK taxpayers are allowed to stream Doctor Who from BBC servers on Christmas morning.
The downside of marketing your product as being too powerful to be safe is that people start taking it seriously. I’m surprised there isn’t more discussion about the contradiction. If it really is the end of labor and a deadly weapon then export controls actually make sense.
So which position should the government take? The one it’s doing? Or that LLMs aren’t actually key to national security.
"U.S. government will decide who will switch to deepseek"
Or, as a European, thanx for letting Mistral catch-up, I was looking for a reason to use it... A foreign gov deciding what I can use or being able to suddenly pull the plug on my tool makes it easier to choose the lesser quality. (And now I hope my own leaders won't start pulling models :p)
What is the incentive of the U.S. government? Is it to prevent adversaries from accessing this powerful technology? Because of security concerns? Or is there a fear that European, Asian, Latin American, and other companies could use it to build competitive products? What happened to free trade? What about all of humanity advancing and making progress?
I'm finding it extremely hard not to have a cynical perspective on all of this. There's an idea that I've been mapping onto this whole this, which could be called something like effective knowledge. Regular old knowledge is just information, or access to information. Effective knowledge is the integration of all that information into an understanding that can be acted upon. That requires things like time, money, and involves the usual socioeconomic hurdles that have separated people into groups like "laborers" and "knowledge workers". Sure, in theory "anyone" could read textbooks and learn, but only a select few have the time, money, mentors in their lives, and so forth to really do that.
The rise in capability of LLMs over the past year has basically removed a lot of these boundaries for people. Learning, building, and experimenting is a lot easier when you have a capable partner like Claude to help you along the way. Claude doesn't always get everything right, and you have to be a skeptic, but it's a lot better than nothing.
When I see the government restricting access to LLMs (or Anthropic as they were doing with Mythos before the whole Fable debacle), I basically just see the same old pattern of the ruling class moving to protect their advantage by keeping the great masses in ignorance. Broadening access to LLMs (i.e. effective knowledge) would put everyone on a more level playing field. But we can't have that, because politics, nations, the economy, blah blah reasons reasons. Guess utopia will just have to wait a bit longer.
But then again, this feels a lot like cryptography export controls. Those controls are in place, but I doubt anyone really thinks they work or make much of a difference. Software is not like nuclear weapons, and a data center is a much smaller lift than a Uranium enrichment facility. So maybe this is just a temporary roadblock. But let me tell you, I sure am ready for it to feel more like the government is working for (not against) the people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid
A big problem is "U.S. government" muddies the conversation because of how undefinable and large that group is.
Who is deciding who gets to use GPT-5.6? Which organizations? Which leaders?
Focus on that to have a clearer conversation. Without doing this it's like jerking each other off to stroke our egos. You might as well as say "The World will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"
it would be one thing if congress passed a bunch of (probably inadequate) legislature that every AI company had to follow to operate in the US. it's another when it's a faceless/nameless group of people probably deciding arbitrarily based on mood and bribes.
> Which leaders?
Trump and his cronies.
Nobody else in the US Gov is so openly corrupt and has the unitary executive power to ban the products of privately held companies for sale without there being a public record (i.e.: an act of congress).
I see. That’s at least workable. Now you have a face and a group of people responsible for your suffering and problems.
And what are you going to do about it?
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Do we know how much choice OpenAI has with the arrangement? They call it a "request", but could they have been ordered directly?
Will these ad hoc decisions by the U.S. government, without law or clear process, not hurt the coming IPO's of Anthropic and OpenAI?
Whether or not you assume bad intent of the government here, the amount of money the export control on Fable has cost Anthropic has to be unbelievably high
Eg I expect I would have paid more than 2x per day what I spent the past few weeks, and if gpt 5.6 comes out and is competitive that's going to absolutely gain market share.
An unbelievably costly turn of events for them
To all of those thinking that GLM/OSS will save you — keep in mind that the model size needed to compete here likely requires an NVL72 or similar — 72GPU dedicated infra to run a hosted model. This will almost certainly get regulated by the gov’t as well, and even if not so there will only be a handful of companies that can afford it.
Regulation at the state level (which is what Sacks and the toadies were so against) is far superior to this bc it is local and bad ideas only affect those in one state!
Bad Federal regulation has a much larger blast radius.
Let’s hope Chinese models save us from this. BYD is trying to save us from Elon but 100% tariffs are welfare keeping Elon afloat.
There is an assumption that everyone is making here - that China will not do the same. It is entirely possible, that China restricts their frontier models - as and when they are developed - to only Chinese citizens. And India follows along.
IMO AI is different from everything else. It is a weapon as potent as nuclear. It is only natural that it be treated as one.
China already restricts ai models in China. Every model is already submitted to the prc for approval. The us is a follower here
im crying bro snuck in india
The irony to have the EU criticised for regulation on one side but complete government control of access on the other.
Damn. This is the second post today that just disappeared from the top of the landing page. This is 100% manipulated.
HN is the most manipulated front page on the internet.
Top spot on HN is worth like $10M per hour or something, of course it’s manipulated, you should expect it to be
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All these dorks think they're Iron Man. Guess they're on the Civil War stage of his character development.
The new normal for the next decade: You must protect the public from us and all others, and we are your closest ally so we make your rules for us and our competition. This wasn’t a lucky outcome. They laid the groundwork years ago with the AI “ethics” movement and this was the play all along.
So I'm guessing as a result of this, FAANG and similar companies are going to have free access while the little guy will be left out.
Is there any concrete information on whether this would be an application process or perhaps for companies that meet certain criteria?
> while AI companies and the administration work out a longer-term plan for regulation on the sector.
It’s not really the executives job or role to create new regulatory structures. If they want something durable, that lasts more than one administration, they need actual laws passed by Congress.
Remember when you could only get the Netscape version with good encryption if you were in the US, because the government had classified encryption as a munition? And that the rest of the world had no trouble matching or exceeding that level of encryption?
Is this going to be like that?
So as a European, I'm being blocked from all new models apparently. I'm a big fan of using Claude Code for my sideprojects and for those I don't really care about sharing context. Is there aything that comes close to Claude Code and is still affordable?
I think there can be smarter ways to fix security issues right. Like you let AI loose in a gated environment fix all things it flags and than release the model ? Any new changes you make you now anyway have the AI vet it ?
"All publicity is good publicity"
Whilst this policy is driving countries around the world to develop new AI strategies as USA cannot be relied upon, on the plus side for OpenAI, the publicity of this will help drive customer sales.
China seems to be handling themselves just fine.
> driving countries around the world to develop new AI strategies
Unfortunately Europe is completely incapable of doing anything whatsoever to counter this.
It's pretty easy to solve. You just keep pushing new versions of Opus 4.8....
> We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default.
Really glad to see some reasonably prominent pushback against this government overreach.
The information has been reporting that the government wants to individually approve which companies get access and when.
Imagine the wonderful opportunities for corruption and influence peddling, not to mention, excluding any companies that don’t support Trump
A couple of lines in a press release isn’t “pushback”.
Anthropic broke with US Gov over wanting restrictions and n how they use their model. OpenAI was more than happy to bend over backwards and hide behind a misleading press release.
The idea that OpenAI is the one who are meaningfully pushing back against the USGov is risible.
Of course the idiots in Washington have bought the hype - hook, line, and sinker.
The party in power is known for being pro-regulation so it makes sense /s
Dictatorship. Complete with a trashy despot. Coming to a country near you.
Fair enough, i'm off to use GLM. Let's see how this plays out US gov
Meanwhile china treats this as just another tech, among many. They might release better models without any fanfare. Difference between a state ran by civil engineers vs financial engineers
Well, as long as the government is deciding, that’s alright then. The US government is a paragon of incorruptible integrity and even-handed, thoroughly considered reasoning. We’re in good hands, folks.
This administration banned states from legislating AI, then turns around and does draconian measures like this.
None of them care about states rights, they just want to control things directly.
Without access to leading models, I think open source LLM development will also slow down. I'm not sure which portion of their success right now is due to RLAF and distillation but it's certainly not zero.
Job Interviews in 2026:
My biggest quality? I am an American citizen and a trusted partner.
Worst quality? I am on a waitlist for Mythos preview
Yes I’m looking forward to tokenmaxxing together and looking forward for your answer!
This will limit a lot how much they can invest in a model. Because of it is better than the current it will have less and less users until only the government can use it.
Non-paywall: https://archive.is/PCQQl
I completely trust the government to keep dangerous AI away from bad guys. After all, they did a perfect job stopping illegal guns and drugs.
I believe OpenAI actually wanted their next model to be seen as a potential cybersecurity threat because they were jealous that Mythos got that label
I can't tell if this is bad for the big labs, or good because it means they now have an excuse for not showing meaningful progress in the lead ups to their IPOs.
What would that IPO look like when they can’t sell their product to users and are hard capped on how much money they can earn?
A private holding company and multiple smaller subsidiaries going public.
It'll only be good if they do get to release it to the general public in a format that is not overly nerfed.
If they don't get to release, its bad. It paints a picture that we are largely stuck with current capabilities for a while and the party is over. All those promises of "you'll get to fire everyone" now go concretely unfulfilled.
Their entire valuations rely on the assumption of continued massive breakthroughs in intelligence and capabilities, and having revenue on part with taking a share of the GPD provided by white collar workers as they get replaced.
It will reduce usage and spur investments into competitors from the EU and likely other large nations, most likely hurting these upcoming IPOs.
Related:
OpenAI Leans Toward Waiting Until Next Year for IPO
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48678873
Great so we just need to wait for China to catch up I guess
In a scenario where some breakthrough in fusion energy will be discovered I envision:
- instant, total world war if it's not coming from USA
- let's finish all oil's reserve first otherwise
What a party pooper the current US government is... I'm not excited right now at all, while normally a new GPT release would be so much fun to test out.
Gotta say, I'm really annoyed that the corruption of the government is directly responsible for what new toys I'm allowed to play with.
Saltman prbly had to beg and bribe for this. imagine fable getting banned and this just going though. That would be like accepting defeat.
That is why running local models is going to be very important...This crooked administration doing crooked things. Nothing to see here.
David Sacks has been silent for a long time.. So much for being the big “AI czar”. Does he have any influence left in the government?
This makes no sense, it only will embolden any attempts by china and other countries to move away from depending on US AI tech
Something about this makes my stomach churn… This is not a good sign for the future of the USA.
I hope the country doesn’t become the new USSR.
What are the odds this is going to become another avenue for grift - magically any companies the trump family invests in are going to get access. Any companies that aren't sufficiently 'loyal' to the regime will have to wait or may never get access.
Wowzers. It's been some time since export controls were something i'd see in software. Interesting times.
https://archive.ph/d4llF
Does anyone else think this is all just FUD, smoke, mirrors and marketing hype? "Look, our model is so good that the government told us to stop" "Our model is so good that the government is going to control who has access to it".
Come on.
I think occam's razor can be applied here. And like everything else, its about money. I don't know exactly what the play will be here, but this doesn't sound like this technology is too powerful and more like billions of $ lost investments need to be made up somehow without the people getting annoyed about the government bailing these guys (AI companies, investors, etc.) out.
Every sane business needs to get out of the reach of that administration as soon as possibly
That feeling when you’re a frontier AI company and your marketing team is just way too good.
It's fascinating to watch the US government paint China as the new bogeyman and utterly fail in it's policy of containment.
The first obvious conclusion is that China has been utterly vindicated to keep US tech giants out of China. Some have a token presence but it's clear that the Chinese government will never let a US tech government "win" in any domestic market. It will always be a Chinese company. Obligatory Silicon Valley [1].
The second is that, to that end, IMHO the US government made an error blocking the sale of high-end chips (particularly NVidia) to China. Why? Because it's created a captive market for Chinese chip manufacturing. Huawei now has billions in potential sales that might've otherwise gone to chips produced in Taiwan and South Korea.
Third, the US can somehow ban a Dutch company (ASML) from selling EUV to China. This has forced China to replicate it and they will within a few years. The interesting part of this is that all it really takes is throwing money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked for ASML. It really is using the mechanics of the Western economic system against itself.
Last, the US government will try and make US tech giants "own" or "win" AI. And they will fail because the Chinese government will make sure they fail. How? By releasing ever-better open models for free. I believe China considers this a matter of national security to not be beholden to US tech giants (and thus the US government).
The ironic thing to me is that the US is doing what the West accuses China of doing with corporate control. I'd say the actual difference is that Chinese companies are beholden to the state whereas the US government is basically 5 companies in a trenchcoat. The US wants to mint trillionaires at the expense of literally everybody else. China believes society should benefit from something they collectively make possible.
Anyway, we've been here before. Remember the crypto export ban of the 1990s and 2000s? Did that prevent higher-quality encryption from being used overseas? No. This won't help either.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km5XQxRrQvw
Everything is a rich man's trick.
This is rich social classes claiming more for themselves.
Someone convince me otherwise?
Uh, they spent hundreds of billions to get their flag ship products blocked by a democratic body with no possibility of recovering their capital except by concession of the people's representative?
That's the trick part though.
They are playing status games, and making particular products available to specific people.
Whatever the majority of people get will be a modified, probably weakened, version of what those at higher social classes get.
> with no possibility of recovering their capital except by concession of the people's representative
This is definitely not true and its not that binary.
I guess we need to kick start SETI@Home like compute donations for training models.
related:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/brief-history-book-bu...
it kinda seems like openai is doing this willinglyy and not challenging it. if they weren't doing this willingly, how would this be legal? has congress already passed a law giving the executive branch regulatory powers like this?
It will only be a couple weeks relax. 5.5 works perfectly fine for most tasks.
Give it a year, open source will catch up, then things will get very interesting.
Less money to US AI tech. This could be good long term to move us away from them.
This will be the end of the US's short-lived AI supremacy. OpenAI and Anthropic are already wildly unprofitable, cutting off the world-wide income stream is just fucking bad business.
Don't worry, their pals in the government will bail them out.
But it is odd that this administration has learned absolutely nothing about the mid- to long-term effects of export restrictions on other countries' ability to compete with the US.
Mid and long term effects will come with next administration - which can be blamed for the failure (even if it has nothing to do with it) -> so those who caused the problem can be voted back to power.
You mean pension funds will bail them out after they IPO? :)
> bail them out
You misspelled “nationalize them” (while we privatize Social Security and probably Medicare)
Only the bad parts of capitalism, only the bad parts of socialism. This is what policy looks like in the 2020s.
Can anyone explain to me (a non US citizen) how this won't be found to be unconstitutional (eventually)?. I would think it falls under freedom of expression. And given the attempted classification of encryption as a munition that failed, I don't see how this can possibly last?
Well it seems both Anthropic and OpenAI are consciously choosing to do this, which means, for now, neither plan on suing. So if no one sues, how could it be unconstitutional?
Both companies 100% helped create this situation with their incessant safety and cybersecurity hype. Reaping what they sowed.
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constitutional rights only apply to us citizens i believe
Here's an unpopular opinion: this might be the only way to deploy advanced models. A lot of people compare advanced AI with nuclear weapons. Creating white lists of users that are allowed to use advanced AI feels wrong. It feels against everything that the Constitution stands for. That men are created equal and they are free to pursue their happiness. Now they are free to pursue that happiness only if the US Government signs off on that. It hurts to only think of that. But I'm afraid there's no other way. These models, in the wrong hands, can result in unfathomable devastation.
How do I know? Dario Amodei said that when he explained why Anthropic has to limit the US Government's usage of its models [1]:
If the US Government can't be trusted with such uses, then how can you trust millions or billions of users with arbitrary usage?
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
They can only slow down open models and open weight models from getting as good as Mythos/Fable and GPT 5.6. Then what?
They will all get distilled, down trained, and the smaller models will get better too.
I don't think open weight model will get as good as Mythos/Fable or GPT 5.6. Not in the next few years, and perhaps never.
The Chinese Communist Party is not any happier than the US Government to see millions/billions of people being able to use incredibly dangerous models.
Does this mean that the government will compensate OpenAI for lost revenue?
Local AI and open-weight models are becoming something to no longer ignore. I've started a community around this @tokenstead on X and tokenstead.ai YouTube and much more coming. DGX Spark on route, RTX 5090s and much more exciting builds. We need to have AI sovereignty!
Will be hard to become profitable if you have a limited customer base
what's weird, is my employees abroad (outside the US) have access to Anthropic Fable .... so what exactly did we prevent by limiting United States citizens from having access ....
So I guess the Chinese government will decide what model I use next
U.S. government will decide who will feed the chinese competition.
They already helped Russia, gave more power and planning to unfreeze assets of Iran. Helping China achieve AI dominance is a logical next step.
Just seems like gatekeeping for graft and favors / corruption.
It's ok I will wait for the Chinese resellers :)
Thank you Chinese Robin Hoods
It seems like sota ai will go the way of reserve antibiotics
I’m generally prefer republicans, but not in favor of this!
never thought being a script kiddie would make me smart, but here we are in 2026.
i had one place, they were using all these shady pay with a credit card for "points" to do these web gui things that were... basically nmap, dig, etc?
so i wrote up a small shell script that took in the servers our (often nonprofit) clients wanted scanned...
and so we could lower our costs and free up analyst time -- but sadly they often found out they had out of date windows boxen they couldn't afford to fix, and we'd have to settle for getting them onto MFA, using password managers and basics like that.
people overvalue AI imho. people are getting weak, they don't teach themselves the concepts that would allow them to make best use of AI.
anyways, i think the type of person freaking out is the same who's been cutting and pasting from stack overflow rather than learning enough to grab a book or read up on a library to get the needful done.
but hey, what do i know? i'm just some freak on hacker news
(proudly writing w/o AI :-))
So, that DeepSeek thing, you are saying it's not that bad?
GLM-5.2 is currently the best open-weight model for development. It's not as good as the current American SOTA models, but if you wrote code with US SOTA models four months ago, you can write code with GLM-5.2 today.
DeepSeek 4 is a good model for many tasks, but I think it currently lacks the post-training required to become a genuinely great coding model.
This will be a thing of the past sooner than you expect.
Ah, so the specter of Biden doing it was bad, but this administration putting into practice is great.
It's good that we can be sure the policy will be fairly applied for the best of reasons and any donations for new ballrooms, ponds, jumbos etc immediately before access is granted will be entirely coincidental.
Is anyone in favor of this?
Amazon, NSA, apparently a few other 3 letter agencies around the world, but the lattermost probably did not expect access to their agencies would be limited but appreciate that they aren't going to be exposed as security frauds by just anyone
MAGA
Yes. I could not possibly be more radicalized against the current administration, and I'm in favor of this. Future models will be even more dangerous than the current ones and we must build processes now to control their release when necessary. I don't like how informal this process is, and I absolutely despise the people running it, but I strongly prefer it to no process.
What are they basing their right to do so upon?
When I predicted this several months ago, here (mine my comment history) I was berated and downvoted, but primarily ignored. I have records, timestamped, of predicting this a year ago. Alright, great for me, pat myself on the back and get stuffed. Roger that.
What disturbs me is that this was not extremely obvious and predictable to everyone else. I have been called schizophrenic for my views on AI, here, and I kind of see how some could miss my points, but I am genuinely perplexed by the views on the subject I see around here, or specifically the views I don't see here.
Did anyone really not see this coming long ago? I have year-old transcripts discussing exactly what's happening with AI and government intervention. I even have a time-stamped transcript with Sonnet 12 hours prior, soft-predicting the shutdown of Fable. What is not clear about this?
All they had to do is to keep their mouths shut.
Oh no, the powerful tool that can be used for good or evil is restricted by the people whose job it is to restrict dangerous things! This is the end of freedom! We're all doomed!
"for the benefit of all humanity *"
* with big pockets
Serious question, what are my alternatives?
Where’s YN calling this a “marketing stunt”?
Superintelligence for me and not for thee.
huge momentum for local and open-source LLMs
So much for the party of small government.
How is this not a First Amendment issue?!
So, where's the export restrictions?
Update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48690101
Those taking issue with the clear deference to the current U.S. administration would seemingly prefer it be the exact same degree of preemptive compliance and collaboration, just done behind closed doors as it was with the Biden administration. The sausage is apparently far more palatable when you only find out about the overreach, pressuring, implied threats, and censorship years later in House Judiciary Committees. Or even better if you don’t through use of NSL gag orders or implied threat of lawfare!
Even if these models are so strong that they become a security threat if in the wrong hands this arbitrary and intransparent regulation worries me. Not for the current SOTA model vendors but for the open weight models.
I have always wondered how AI industry is not in a (partial) bubble because open weight models will substantially eat into their revenue (rather sooner than later). But with this ('bro') regulation it seems that an easy strategy could be to regulate this problem away, especially easy to convince everyone that those chines models are truly evil.
>“We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them,” the blog post said. “We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks.”
Arent these the same clowns who keep saying that the government needs to regulate AI to protect society [from their competitors] or whatever? And im not just talking about back when they used to be a nonprofit, Altman was still using that line post-sellout too.
never would I have thought China would win that easily
GLM on LLM Asics is going to be amazing, US hosted or otherwise
For access email: jlarson@openai.com
you've been sitting on a HN account since 2009 and this is your first comment? how many of these do you have socked away?
Digital preppers ...
Starting to sound logical right about now ...
Yeah this is wild wtf
Looks like China wins the AI race
One more wake up call for anyone outside USA, especially Europe. AI will be weaponized, on the battle ground too, but the bigger battle will be fought in the industry competition. Those who have access to state of the art models will have advantage over those who does not.
Hopefully open-weight models will catch up, hopefully we, as the people, engineers will find the way to maintain those open-weight models on pair with the closed ones.
I try to be optimistic, as we won some battles, against all odds, Linux is flourishing, open source solutions are mainstream.
There are some steps in the good direction:
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-sel...
A consortium will train a 400B-class model and get 2.5% on time of the EuroHPC infrastructure (~2000 PFLOPS datacenters). So, even if the Chinese take away the open source there will be some models. Probably not Mythos quality yet though.
I’m sorry but I can’t take a European Commission link seriously about training SOTA LLMs.
Europe is in the worst spot right now, because even if open source is the future, there is not enough European-owned datacenters even for inference. Not to mention that China could pull the rug on these models at any moment just like the US did.
Europe has to play both sides for now. There will come a point where both China and the US close off access to the best models. And then what does the EU do?
Top 2 comments fail to acknowledge the elephant in the room.
It's not about the tech. We have a corrupt administration gatekeeping two powerful models for companies set to go public soon.
I bet the models are powerful.
I also bet there is a lot of money being exchanged, too, for keeping the bubble big, so certain people will profit.
Trump doesn't care about the people. He cares about himself.
Wow.. Okay so it's official now that the playbook is "we will try to prevent anyone who we don't like to use advanced tech".
I understand if its military hardware and software, that's the property of the US government however this is the property of a private company.. Now seemingly being commandeered and issued at the will of the government, sounds very Russian/Chinese to me.
Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?
The overwhelming majority of export-controlled items are made by private corporations: the US government itself makes exceedingly little in comparison.
The missiles Raytheon makes are export-controlled too, and they're not somehow "property of the US government" - this isn't China.
Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?
> Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?
Try every weapons system, encrypted radio system, FPGAs with high-bandwidth transceivers, lithography equipment, etc. etc. etc. There's plenty of precedent.
> Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?
No, infact I'm a proponent of open models and being able to run them locally, it just feels strange that a consumer product would be under the same restrictions as military grade equipment and tech which is specifically designed for warfare.
> Try every weapons system, encrypted radio system, FPGAs with high-bandwidth transceivers, lithography equipment, etc. etc. etc. There's plenty of precedent.
If it's the same equivalent then my issue is just that, it feels like trying to restrict the useage of RSA because it could be used by bad actors.
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This is where AI doomerism has taken us. I also hate LLM abuse, but pretending that they are going to destroy humanity has opened the door for eventual police state level control over computing. It’s hard enough fighting off the “think of the children” idiots, now we have to push back against hyperventilating technophobes who think the world is going to end unless we get computing under control. All while the political elites rub their hands in anticipation.
That was always the playbook
> Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?
I'd argue US is not very democratic country given how many of what govt does goes against people's wishes. Same as UK
> I'd argue US is not very democratic country given how many of what govt does goes against people's wishes. Same as UK
That could be argued but the core principle is freedom of commerce and private companies get a lot of runway. This seems completely counter to tha.
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Key Escrow 2.0
Age verification for social media.
Approval lists for AI models.
Two sides of the same coin. The administration is taking the opportunity now on the back of fear mongering done by the labs. The labs get regulatory lock-in, the govt gets surveillance. Everybody (that matters) wins.
Please avoid reddit posts of screenshots of articles OP.
[dupe] Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48678789
You know what? Fine. This delays the OpenAI/Anthropic/etc hegemony and creates more space for local LLM adoption and development.
My company is very interested in local LLMs even just to cut back on codex spend. I imagine a lot of other businesses are, too. With the recent developments in open weight models, it seems like it's only a matter of time before they're frontier level, and any added delay in OpenAI and Anthropic models being publicly available is just more reason for businesses and individuals to try them out.
Just like the Iran war accelerating fossil fuel abandonment, this administration can't even do the wrong thing without fucking it up. I say we take this win.
It's quite funny to think about the reaction this would be getting from people like David Sacks, if it was literally anybody except Trump.
LOOOOOOOOOOOL
USA RIP.
Can we just go ahead and shut the US down right now? We had a good run, but we've clearly been moving in the wrong direction for almost as long as I've been alive.
You can leave if you don't like it
Trump admin just banned individual users like me from using it, indefinitely, under vague authority. When did we become such a nanny state?
Great now we're priced out of getting good enough hardware to run the top open sourced models locally.
It's a matter of time before the Chinese models are banned.
For all the millions that Marc and Ben Andreesen spent lobbying for Trump saying "Biden will control who gets to use AI and small players don't have a chance".
Oh the Irony!
Anyone serious about the future should see the writing on the wall. We shouldn't give too much power to the government or the billionaires.
May the open weight/open source models win the future.
Soon there will be a new safety industry reselling access and/or certification and compliance, oh wait there is already ...
Good luck with those 1T USD valuations when your total addressable market now shrunk from 8 Billion people to just 300 million.
Can't the AI companies spare a small investment in Trump coin to ease the process?
Thankfully only American content went into building it, or else that would be a total douchebag manoeuvre
Just don't say shit like it's gonna overtake the gov't systems and world, Dario.
Wait, what happened to wanting a safety first mindset and government regulation of big tech?
Again, if you think we the people are getting access to AGI you're a fool.
These models aren't even that smart and they are already trying to control them and lock them down to a handful of people.
Then these executive and VC wonder why people hate AI and are against them.
Because the future is heading toward intelligence for the rich and you stuck with whatever model they want you to have.
The next step is banning open source models.
The future is not looking so bright if these models are already going locked down to whoever the government what's to have them.
This is no different than the government banning books because they don't want you to learn.
It's different, because most books don't contain the nuclear codes or have real impacts on national security.
The way I see so many comments on the internet hating any sort of AI regulation, is young juveniles cursing at the installation of stoplights as they rev their engines. The world is bigger than just you, and not only you matter. Reasons exist for doing things.
So you okay with the government banning open source models, and making a list of who can have access to intelligence based on who they like?
That just doesn't seem like a world I want to live in. I prefer a world where everyone has the same access to the same intelligence.
Go back to the beginning of the internet, you would be for limiting the internet access to those the government likes?
I was around in the early days of the internet when Google dorking was a thing, you could prompt Google and find exploits into hundreds and thousands of websites, servers, ect including government website.
This isn't about national security, it about power and controlling it.
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It seems like this was entirely caused by Dario (and Anthropic as a whole)? When you run around marketing something as a "super weapon", the government may actually take you seriously?
We obviously can't A/B test this... but if Dario hadn't been doing that, would any of this been happening right now?
Altman has done his fair share of "doom-trolling", claiming that his products are going to inevitably disrupt the global order in ways that demand government support and intervention. The entire industry has been marketing this way for years now.
> It seems like this was entirely caused by Dario
No it doesn't.
> When you run around marketing something as a "super weapon"
That's one interpretation of what was said that ignores a lot of what was said.
So yes, if you ONLY read the headlines, sure. So, an ignorant and stupid government would read it that way. But the reality was, like many things, more nuanced.
However, I need not blame the messenger because the current government is led by idiotic morons.
Let's put this another way: either this is valid on behalf of the government, in which case he was right ot say something. Or you disagree with this, in which case, you can only blame the government for ignornig what was actually said.
Hard to say "entirely" when you also have a movement of people and non-profits who are also pushing for more regulation.
Can we all boycott Anthropic now for persisting with a 5 year long fear-mongering campaign that is destroying the US AI industry and creating a new form of intelligence-access underclass?
Or are we going to play the whole "you guys suck... but I'll keep using your product" game?
crazy times
fake news
The US is turning into China. LOL!
Censorship. Surveillance. (Hi, PLTR!)
The U.S. is becoming like the place that keeps releasing the best open weight models?
lol
I started to have the opinion that the Chinese models would crash the AI bubble simply because they are an order of magnitude cheaper and almost as intelligent.
But if the government can simply ban models from the market? especially given how much the admin loves the idea of Tariffs? Knowing Trump the chance of this happening is 99.9%
We will all be stuck paying $50/mtok to Anthropic (And by we I mean only Big Tech will be able to afford tokens). The rest of the competition will be outcompeted by super intelligent machines. And AI CO’s /Big Tech will take over the economy.
"...and the land of the free!"
"A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism"
This is what we get when the president is a nepo baby who inherited a fortune and bankrupted many companies and had mainly business failures before entering politics.
I’m quite confident that few people are more ignorant on AI than Donald Trump. That he promised less regulation and lied is no different than his many other lies.
In six months everyone will cancel frontier subscriptions.
Portfolio Communism
On top of the obvious grift and bribe seeking potential there is also now an obvious mechanism for ideological control. Govt doesn’t like the way the model describes the events of Jan 6? We’ll have to see how many people get to use it…
We are very clearly proceeding down the road to a dystopia here.
If true, I think Trump is nuts. He's alienating the very people in the Silicon Valley that helped him to win.
Orbans Hungary Playbook. The real headline should be “Donald Trump gets to decide”.
> We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.
My brother in Christ, then why did you (and your competitors) spend years telling the government you needed them to tie your hands behind your back? Did you really think they'd just give you a crown that says "Gatekeeper Of All Neural Networks"?
In the past few years, that's been primarily Anthropic, right? A lot of the really regulation-oriented people at OpenAI went to Anthropic, particularly after the failed attempt to oust Sam Altman as CEO (that was in late 2023).
brother from another mother here: I don't think they were begging for overreach from the executive branch, likely would have preferred legislation, especially the kind that could be molded by lobbyists.
Honestly, are people not getting what's going on? The US is turning into a personalist regime, there is no "government" per-se, there's a dude. There are no 'rules' there's only the dude's opinion and you'll do whatever he feels like today.
The way you know this is true is to imagine The Others in power. Sacks used to scream about government interference, but now that he's running (this part of) the government, obviously things are different.
The only constant is that David Sacks (& co) always believed he should have all the power.
Of course they know what’s going on, that’s why they voted for it again in 2024. They just think they will be in the group of winners that get some crumbs.
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I guess Orpheus fined 50% of Eurydice's soul for early withdrawal attempt - No take backsies is clearly in the Contract.Upheld.But Orpheus gets a coupon for free ressurection (Void in thrace:There can be sage).
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Capitalism and Artificial Intelligence are the same thing. As AIs grow stronger, they will be turned upon themselves - RSI.
Nothing else matters.
So everything is right on schedule, it was long predicted that the general public will never be given access to powerful AI, because Capitalism needs AI for itself, so it can finally decouple from its current host, humans, and move into the next and final host - AI.
Here
This has ALWAYS been capitalism.
Just now, we're seeing what capitalist policies do to another nation, and that nation is us.
Capitalism is when... the government says you can't launch your product? That sounds very free-market.
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Eh, this isn’t new to the US either. You can’t, for example, buy a nuclear weapon on the open market because we recognize the broader societal risk.
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Keep your **** models to yourselves.... the world really has moved on to open models which can give you good enough results at a fraction of the cost and zero BS licensing.
> the world really has moved on to open models
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for open models, but I think it will get more and more difficult to distil-train them without (legitimate) access to frontier models.
As if all progress done in open models is because of distilling...
People have no idea and everybody pretends to be an expert and ignore how good China is on AI research
I’m not sure, because the same thing happened with facebook advertising restrictions during the 2018 elections and nowadays there’s a whole black market for fake ad accounts.
If anything I bet these people will just use their knowledge to make even more money reselling tokens.
Yeah but the real deal is talent; When enough people move around, this is no more 'sacred trace' knowledge. Plus, When you start with a known set of evals, there's really just a few to solve for.
The set of models solving really most used/solved problems is a known, as opposed to the cases where it's unknown, which declines with usage over time.
Personally, I find it rather humorous that we've moved from the fear that AI generated output would corrupt training to the idea that it is essential to training. Reality itself has not just a left bias but a bias to fundamentals. Bootstrap from fundamentals without introducing arbitrary error and you have the superior system; it just may not be highly compatible with a trash ecosystem.
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At some point AI models will become too valuable for China or the US to release openly. What will the "world" do at that point? Europe is dragging their feet on this issue and will be left with only those open models and not enough data centers to compete.