Comment by solenoid0937

Right, but is there any evidence of intelligence behind any of these (government) decisions? It’s just regulatory capture + marketing (plus some people living out an imaginary fantasy that they’re in Neuromancer or something), absolutely no reason to think they won’t try and target open models as part of this.

OpenAI and Anthropic are already unable to make SOTA models generally available (and support this, oddly enough).

If huggingface or whatever is forced to take down open source licensed weights, there’s always bittorrent.

Export controls are one thing, but the US doesn’t really have import controls, and there’s no copyright issue, so DMCA, etc don’t come into play.

It’d take the courts years to decide how to contort the law to ban open weight models, and by then, it’ll be too late (and also pointless).

They did the same by banning strong encryption. Never underestimate the stupidity of politicians

It'd be less about "safety" and more "we've spent trillions developing these AI tools only to have the Chinese, once again, copy them and offer them for pennies on the dollar, and no one seems to care about the impact that has on the long-term sustainability of this sector of the American economy as a whole, so we're yanking the models."

And someone will start a competing company in a sane environment.

> since attackers will never feel bound to the law.

But that's the whole point.

Fall out of favor with the admin and you lose access to the good American models, aren't allowed to use Chinese ones, and fall prey to the attackers and behind your competitors.

Technically speaking, Chinese cars have not been banned. They are subject to a 100% tariff. They’d still be price competitive, but the manufacturers haven’t bothered jumping through the regulatory hoops.

I’ll happily pay a 100% tariff on open weight models, and there are no regulatory hurdles for them to jump through (yet).

That's not necessarily a good thing for everyone else, mind.

Yes, you get your free model, but the cost of this is not developing your own capability and tying your fate to a country which may or may not have your best interests as a nation in mind.

This is just the deindustrialization that occurred in my home region (the American Midwest) playing out on a global scale in different sectors. It was originally driven by the Japanese, who, to their credit, acted more as partners than competition. Eventually that desire for larger margins went to China, and now you basically can't build anything of consequence without at least some Chinese parts, because there's "no economic case" for it. This means that you have to play Beijing's game if you want access to any sort of modern market.

You see this happening with Volkswagen's restructuring, next you'll see it with non-American, non-Chinese AI.

They could ban payment processors from processing payments to any hosts of GML 5.2, despite the open weights the vast majority of people will be using cloud providers to get access since it is to heavy to host for 99% of people.

This would be extremely heavy handed and probably end up accelerating the loss of the virtual US monopoly of payment network. The reast of the world isn't going to let the US dictate that only they get the frontier models whether their US made or otherwise

> I’m sceptical they could find the legal framework to do this even if they wanted to

I agree, my only caveat is that the current administration has shown it's willing to go beyond aggressive regulatory interpretations to questionable and outright implausible interpretations. As we've seen recently, the federal courts and SCOTUS are overturning most of these but that can take a year or more to resolve. The one positive light is they seem to push the hardest on certain culture war issues (immigration, voting, districting, etc). AI doesn't seem like a core hot button issue for the White House and there is a strong pro-AI / business faction.

OpenRouter or Huggingface should consider moving to Switzerland

It’d be restrictions on Americans and American companies, and probably also pressure on America’s allies.

While unlikely , it is not without precedent , there are restrictions on ASML a Dutch company to sell EUV machines

They can easily issue an order for any American company to stop hosting/serving the models. If the model was a threat to national security because of its capabilities then a lot of other countries would follow, including China. No nation will allow some vibe coder with a rogue AI to pose a threat to their systems.

The reason GLM-5.2 hasn't been banned is that despite these cherry picked use cases, GLM-5.2 isn't even close to Opus in all use cases. These vibe benchmarks are ran by companies that are not part of the cyber services offered by Anthropic and OpenAI where they can use the models without the safeguards and refusals so their actual cyber capabilities can be utilized.

These guys that wrote the article compared a gimped Opus to GLM-5.2, knew full well it's misleading, and got the clicks regardless. They don't have enough clout to be a part of something like Project Glasswing, GPT Cyber, etc.

How would that even work for an open-weight model?

Turns out toy drones are more useful in war than multi million dollar planes anyway.

the things that empower modern toy drones were export restricted for years before hand.

Countries and businesses that don't want to be sanctioned by the US government or the US financial system care - so all western countries and corporations.